Mr Humberto Márquez wrote in IPS News that children and adolescents in a Yanomami community in Parima, on the southern border with Brazil, the area where four indigenous people were shot dead and others injured when they confronted military troops last March. The voracious search for gold in southern Venezuela, practiced by thousands of illegal miners under the protection of various armed groups, represents the greatest threat today to the lives of indigenous peoples, their habitat and their cultures, according to their organizations and human rights defenders. Researcher Aimé Tillet said “In this part of the Amazon jungle, mining, violence, habitat destruction, death from disease and forced migration make up a context that indigenous people are calling a silent genocide.”

At the other end of the country, along the northwest border with Colombia, indigenous people are fighting for the delimitation of their territories, which has led to clashes and deaths in their attempts to recover ancestral lands, while they are often reduced to destitution. There are common features of life in border regions that are home to indigenous peoples, such as neglect by the government, which fails to fulfill its duties in health, education, security, provision of food, fuel and transportation, supplies, communications and consultations with native peoples regarding the use of their land and resources.

The government foments mining activity and in 2016 decreed the “Orinoco Mining Arc” on the right bank of the Orinoco river, an area of 111,844 square kilometers, larger than Bulgaria, Cuba or Portugal. In parallel, it established an armed forces company, Camimpeg, to spearhead the mining of gold, diamonds, coltan and other conventional and rare minerals, in which the country is rich. Opacity is a stain on the management of military companies by the authorities, according to non-governmental organizations such as Citizen Control for Security and Defense.

The local press has reported on the involvement of military and police units in the region in incidents related to mining activity that have sparked protests by indigenous people and human rights activists, ranging from deaths of native people in altercations to massacres in which “unknown groups” have killed dozens of people.

Artisanal and illegal mining, in hundreds of deforested areas and along rivers contaminated with mercury used to extract gold from ore, are often controlled by criminal gangs that call themselves “syndicates” and that traffic in gold and supplies, as well as in people who work in the mines, who are often subjected to forced labor.

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