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Much of Venezuela remains without electricity as a new power outage spread across the country in what many fear will be a repeat of the chaos almost two weeks ago during the nation's largest-ever blackout.

The outage began around midday Monday and appeared to have affected most of Venezuela's 23 states. While the lights did flicker back after officials declared service would be restored within hours in the late evening the power went out again in much of the country.

As with the previous outage, the government of President Nicolas Maduro blamed U.S.-backed opponents, accusing them of sabotaging the Guri dam, which supplies the bulk of Venezuela's electricity. Opposition leader Juan Guaido said the outage lays bare the socialist government's incompetence and promised actions to end Maduro's rule.