Jose Vicente Rangel, chief propagandist of President Hugo Chavez, has laid out the regime’s plan to explain the coming collapse of the national electricity sector.

The political opposition is “preparing an electric coup (that will be) more lethal than the petroleum coup seven years ago,” JVR says in Piedra de Tranca, a column he authors under the pseudonym Marciano.

The opposition also plans to assassinate President Chavez, he adds.

During the many years that JVR served Chavez first as foreign minister, then defense minister, and finally as Executive Vice President, he never failed to raise the specter of a “magnicide” at every Cabinet meeting in which he participated.

Over 20 former members of the Chavez regime’s Cabinet (over 100 have been ministers at one time or another) have told Caracas Gringo that at every Cabinet meeting in which these sources were present, JVR always warned Chavez of plots by the opposition, Colombian paramilitaries, the CIA, etc. to kill the president.

And Chavez, who by nature is fearful and paranoid, always took JVR’s warnings very seriously.

Now JVR is doing it again, but is linking his new warnings of presidential murder plots to an alleged plan to launch an electric coup. Of course, as always JVR’s warnings of conspiracies and coups come without any credible evidence to support his allegations.

JVR says in today’s Piedra de Tranca column that an old friend, and apparently a former guerrilla, asked JVR “what’s up” at a recent social gathering.

“Something fat is moving,” JVR replied, and then “le eché el cuento” which, of course, he doesn’t share with the column’s readers.

But JVR says that the “empire” (i.e. USA) and the “opposition” are “desperate” because they know the regime will be victorious in September’s National Assembly elections. The opposition “knows it is going directly to the slaughterhouse,” he adds.

Thus, the only possible option is “magnicide” – to clip the president – even though this implies a “leap into the void” for Venezuela.

But the CIA can’t do it because it’s “too burned,” so an alternative intelligence agency has already been chosen. Colombia’s DAS? Israel’s Mossad? UK’s MI-6 (“the name is Bond…James Bond”)?

However, the “conditions” to clip Chavez must be perfect, and this means there must be more instability and social conflict. How to create these conditions?

Sabotage the electric sector, create more chaos, plunge Venezuela into the dark by destroying the national power grid, Marciano concludes.

JVR’s column today is an explicit official admission that the Chavez regime knows its elaborate dog-and-pony show proclaiming effective “conservation measures” and major new power investments that will end the power crisis by next May amount to zilch.

The lights will go out in Venezuela, for a long time. The power crisis will persist well beyond the 2012 presidential elections even if it rains biblically every day during the coming year.

And Venezuela’s structural power crisis will not be the fault of the Chavez regime, but instead will be the result of sabotage by a disarticulated “opposition” without any resources or leaders which nonetheless never tires of conspiring with the feckless CIA, according to JVR.