In between Bible quotes, Florida’s Republican Sen. Marco Rubio has been outspoken on social media in support of efforts to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Rubio, who sits on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweets about Venezuela in support of the opposition nearly every day.
On Saturday, Rubio tweeted a thread about ongoing power outages that began in Venezuela on Thursday and extended into the longest and most widespread power outages in the country’s history, according to The Washington Post.
The outages have affected everything from hospitals to oil refineries to internet coverage. Maduro blamed the U.S. government, an allegation U.S. officials have denied.
The Post reported that Venezuela’s state electricity company said a hydroelectric complex in southern Bolívar state had been sabotaged.
As part of his Twitter thread, Rubio wrote: “Today another transformer explosion at the German Dam in Bolivar State caused another massive blackout. The result? Critically ill patients have died, the #Caracas metro remains out of service & few if any flights have arrived at or departed from Caracas in over 20 hours.”
One problem: The “German Dam” in the tweet isn’t a dam at all, but rather the name of a journalist who is covering the outages, as pointed out by Germán Dam himself.
“Senator @marcorubio, an important transformer exploded in Bolívar and that, in part, again collapsed the Venezuelan Electric System; however it was not in a dam, much less german. My name is Germán Dam, I am one of the journalists who published the information,” he wrote.
Here’s a video of the fire that followed the explosion at a substation in Bolívar:
As of this writing on Sunday afternoon, Rubio still hasn’t deleted the tweet, offering many others the opportunity to comment on it and on Dam’s response.
“Im saddened to hear of your explosion @GEDV86. Here’s to a speedy recovery,” one person commented. “I would like to apologize on behalf of the State of Florida for Marco Rubio,” wrote another.