EL PAÍS offers the América Futura section open for its daily and global informative contribution to sustainable development. If you would like to support our journalism, register here.
Hours of analysis of high-resolution satellite imagery have led environmental organizations in Venezuela to a chilling conclusion. At the tip of the Yapacana Tepuy, in the state of Amazonas, a few kilometers from the border with Colombia, there are traces of illegal mining that seems uncontrollable. Clues have been around since 2018, but in recent months it has come under scrutiny with images analyzed by the NGO Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP). There are around 3,800 machines in the national park, which shows good technical progress despite being illegal. And on top of the Tepuy they identified 86 machines. “There are no similar cases of exploiting the tip of a tepui in other Amazon countries. It’s very unique and serious, especially considering it’s in a national park,” warns researcher Matt Finer, director of the MAAP, via email.
The severe economic crisis in Venezuela is the background for this extractivist fever that lives south of the Orinoco. El Yacapana has attracted between 15,000 and 20,000 miners, including locals and members of indigenous communities, and foreign groups like Colombia’s ELN guerrillas and FARC dissidents, who control some of the business in the region, according to complaints from the United Nations and others. organizations. This area is located in one of the most sparsely populated and poorest and most remote states in Venezuela, more than 700 kilometers from the capital. Despite the distance, buses run three times a week from Caracas to Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of the Amazon, and daily from other regions of Venezuela. Puerto Ayacucho residents also speak out about the pressure on the town’s small airport, which only offers bi-weekly commercial flights, but which regularly receives small planes that are reportedly part of this mobilization around illegal mining. Millions of Venezuelans have fled the country because of the crisis, but an unknown number have also gone to the mines to survive.
“Mining has become a factor that attracts the population, and the presence of armed groups that control the territory and the people has also increased,” says geographer Héctor Escandell of the Human Rights Office of the Apostolic Vicariate of Amazonas. This has recently gotten worse and two pieces of information show it. The first: Finer’s research revealed more than 750 hectares of new deforestation in Yapacana National Park between 2021 and 2022. 17 of these devastated hectares are on the Tepuy. Second, according to the Venezuelan Observatory on Violence, the state of Amazonas has the highest homicide rate (18 per 100,000 people) in the country. A year ago it was ranked 20th. On January 7, the body of a handcuffed indigenous man was found in Yapacana, further evidence of the spiraling violence surrounding illegal mines.
“There has been a conscious attempt to bolster the mining culture as a resource-extracting opportunity, which has led to inter-ethnic conflict and thus the erosion of indigenous peoples,” denounces Escandell, who also emphasizes that none of the peoples of the Amazon state have benefited from this mining. “San Fernando de Atabapo, across from Yapacana, is a city that is not growing, it has neither electricity nor water. On the other hand, on the Colombian side, Puerto Inírida has increased its population by 30 times, there are hospitals, roads, electricity,” he lists.
gold and endemism
In Yapacana, 3,227 hectares are already affected by mining, according to the latest calculation by the environmental organization SOS Orinoco, which has led complaints about human rights violations and environmental degradation in the region. There is more concentrated mining activity in this park, in contrast to other areas in neighboring Bolívar State that have been analyzed using geospatial information systems. “A new mine appears every day,” says Cristina Burelli, director of SOS Orinoco.
Since the 1990s, mining has been banned throughout the state of Amazonas, although historically it has been practiced. The area was not included in the Orinoco Mining Arc, which Nicolás Maduro decreed in 2016 as a strategic area for resource exploitation – encompassing 12% of the national territory – but is experiencing the same devastation. “This decree gave a boost to mining. It is a policy that goes beyond this designated zone and affects all protected areas in southern Venezuela,” Burelli added. Mining has also reached Canaima National Park, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco, where 62 mining sectors have been identified, including those in the immediate vicinity of Auyán-Tepuy and its Santo Angel, the highest waterfall in the world. Mining is taking place in the Caura, in the Alto Orinoco Biosphere Reserve, in Imataca. Illegal mines in Venezuela rank second — more than 900 mine sites — among Amazon countries in terms of number and area they occupy, according to SOS Orinoco.
In Finer’s analysis, it is not possible to determine what type of mining is carried out with these 86 machines on the Yapacana summit. Among the inhabitants of the Amazon, this tepuy is called “the hill of gold”. But it’s unusual for geologists to burrow like a tepui into the top of a mountain composed of some of the oldest rocks on earth and usually devoid of veins of gold. The gold is down in the jungle where the logging patches are certainly the most extensive. But on top there are other riches that are now under threat and are the endemic species documented by science. At least three trees and shrubs are unique to this tepuy: the approximately 10 meter high Tepuianthus yapacanensis, the five meter high Pachira yapacanae and the neotropical Pentamerista shrub. There is also the Navia saxicola, a species of bromeliad found only on the tip of Yapacana. Among the fauna there are also unique species such as the Yapacana red toad (Minyobates stermarki), a bird called the Yapacana anteater (Myrmeciza disjunta) and two species of land snails (Plekocheilus (Eurytus) tepuiensis) collected only in this place and Drymaeus (D. yapacanensis). “The Amazon is an area of great endemism. More research is needed to know if these species still exist or are in danger of extinction, and to find more species, particularly insects, other invertebrates, and plants. But you can’t do research where there are armed groups,” says biologist Bibiana Sucre, director of the organization Provita.
climate fund
In December, a military operation attempted to clear some mines. In the first days of 2023, around 350 agents again entered the mountain to dismantle other areas of work. Machines, hoses, engines were destroyed, but there were no arrests. The city of San Fernando de Atabapo, a neighboring town of Inírida on the Colombian side, is protesting. 20,000 people are at risk of losing their livelihoods due to the cessation of mining activity after the access routes to Cerro Yapacana are closed. Indigenous captains have stood up and demanded permits for artisanal exploitation of the gold, allegedly with less impact on the environment and the mountain, considered sacred in their culture.
The Venezuelan government’s response in recent weeks to years-debated mining has surprised environmentalists, who remain skeptical of the results and true intentions of this military mobilization. Maduro has promoted extractivism in the country to the point that in 2019 he offered every government in the country a gold mine so they could generate revenue for the administration. Now, the activists point out, interests appear to be focused on participating in the distribution of international environmental funds, such as that which Brazil has just received from Germany for the preservation of the Amazon. This explains the Chavista leader’s presence at last November’s COP27, where a “Loss and Damage” fund for vulnerable countries was agreed.
“There are expectations of being able to access climate finance. In many areas, the government has been shut out because they lacked the structure and data to show they care. Last year, a climate change office was set up within the Ministry of Ecosocialism as part of the commitments countries must meet to access the funds.” Olnar Ortiz, a human rights defender in Amazonas state, agrees that the killings and denounced enforced disappearances as a result of the conflict that has led to the uncontrolled exploitation of resources. “So far nothing has been done to stop the mining.” It remains to be seen what commitments Venezuela can fulfill in the Alliance for the Amazon recently proposed by Presidents Gustavo Petro and Lula da Silva.