Chile on Tuesday declared a state of emergency and curfew across much of the country, including the capital Santiago, following a massive, rare blackout that left millions without power.
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The worst blackout in the country in well over a decade caused transport chaos in the capital Santiago, where thousands of people were evacuated from the metro and people jostled to board overflowing buses.
The area without power stretches all the way from Arica in the long, narrow South American country’s north to Los Lagos in the south, according to the Senapred disaster response agency – an area home to over 90 per cent of Chile’s population of 20 million people.
More than five hours after the outage began, Interior Minister Carolina Toha announced a curfew from 10pm until 6am.
Toha said the measure was part of a state of emergency declared by President Gabriel Boric which “aimed to guarantee the security of the population faced with the possibility that the outage lasts into the night”.
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