State of Tamaulipas — For preparing and disseminating apocryphal documents, the General Secretariat of the Government of the State of Tamaulipas has filed a formal complaint against the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE).
The complaint was filed after a December 29 joint press conference by heads of the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) and National Center for Energy Control, who together, made a statement with documents that the December 28 mass blackout was due to a grass fire.
The following day, Civil Protection officials from the state of Tamaulipas called them on their press conference, focusing on the documents they claim were falsified.
According to their complaint, on December 29, at a joint press conference with the National Center for Energy Control, the CFE justified the lack of electricity supply to more than 10 million people, which occurred a day before, due to the alleged effects of a fire in pastures to two transmission lines located in the area of the municipality of Padilla, Tamaulipas.
For this, they claim the CFE exhibited an apocryphal document to the media with the purpose of attributing to the State Coordination of Civil Protection, a communication that never existed.
The Tamaulipas Government’s complaint indicates that the falsification of documents is evident for a host of reasons, some of which include the signature of the Director of Coordination with municipalities is different from that of the state official, the format and arrangement of the logos incorporated in the document are different from those used by the State Coordination for Civil Protection and the description of facts is false.
They say Civil Protection had no participation in the aforementioned grassland fire and the logs do not show any calls from CFE on the 911 emergency number.
“Given the evident lack of honesty and the commission of crimes in the preparation and dissemination of apocryphal documents, which was manifested in the press conference led by the CFE, these behaviors must be investigated and the corresponding responsibilities should be defined with the aim that the those responsible are punished,” the state’s compaint says.
In order to clarify the causes that generated a blackout on December 28 in numerous states of Mexico, the parliamentary group of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) in the Senate of the Republic requested the appearance of the Director General of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), Manuel Bartlett.
Through an official statement, the PAN bench said that the official must explain why the CFE obtains and makes use of apocryphal documents, as reported to Mexican society in the press conference led together with the National Center for Energy Control a day after the blackout, which left more than ten million Mexicans without electricity.
They indicated that “the evidence is clear regarding the dishonesty and illegality with which the CFE is conducted,” highlighting the official complaint filed by the Tamaulipas government against the CFE, looking to “investigate the real causes that caused the failure of the electricity supply.”
Manuel Bartlett, head of the CFE, said that on December 28, they intervened due to the imbalance caused by the oscillation of the system and the high percentage of intermittent energies in the network.
Noé Peña Silva, CFE Transmission Director, explained that the failure was caused by a 30-hectare grassland fire registered in the municipality of Padilla, Tamaulipas, which took two transmission lines located between Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas and Linares, Nuevo León.
The incident caused the imbalance in the National Electric System that left 10.3 million users across more than a dozen states in the country without electricity.
