Cancun, Quintana Roo — A new protest over electricity outages erupted Wednesday night in the Villas Otoch Paraíso neighborhood, where more than 50 residents blocked the 20 de Noviembre avenue and set fire to wooden objects placed across the road.
The demonstration began around 9 p.m. at the intersection with Manzana 107, as residents demanded the presence of CFE (Federal Electricity Commission) personnel to repair a faulty transformer. Neighbors said they had been without power since Wednesday morning, though the transformer had been causing intermittent outages for the past 15 days, affecting a long row of homes.
The faulty transformer was installed temporarily last year on the sidewalk after a similar power outage problem occurred in the same area.
Municipal police, firefighters, and army personnel kept watch from a distance, maintaining a cordoned-off area. After more than an hour of protest, no authorities had approached to speak with the demonstrators, and no CFE staff had arrived.
The protest comes a day after residents of the Residencial Turquesa neighborhood in Supermanzana 249 demonstrated over a 24-hour blackout. In that incident, they cornered a CFE inspector, which sped up the resolution of the problem.
