The gold rush sweeps the Venezuelan Amazon

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In the north of the Amazon another fire burns for years. Illegal mining has exploded in Venezuela in the last decade and in greater proportion since the signing in 2016 of the decree of the Orinoco Mining Arc, by the Nicolás Maduro regime, which opened the extraction of gold and other minerals with concessions to companies foreigners and nationals, with the intention - fall - of regularizing illegal mining, an endemic evil in the south of the country.
 

85% of the illegal mining points in that lung, which kept the world in suspense since the raging fires in Brazil and Bolivia began, are in the small portion of the Venezuelan Amazon. "The Orinoco Mining Arc, which occupies 12% of the national territory, is our fire in the Amazon," says environmentalist Alejandro Álvarez of the Clima 21 organization. "What was done on a small scale is now large-scale And it is complex to measure it with satellites because you must interpret what is happening in an area where there is cloudiness throughout the year, where 30-meter-high trees cover mining and large excavations around all the Guayana basins and where it is being used mercury to separate gold from other minerals, already present in all rivers. "

The Amazonian Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information (RAISG) has been monitoring for several years the loss of forest cover of this large transboundary ecosystem that covers nine countries. Regional research indicates that by January of this year 1,781 mining points were concentrated in the Venezuelan portion of the Amazon, 345 square kilometers, an area equivalent to twice the city of Madrid. It is an area that has been growing since 2010, says Bibiana Sucre, director of Provita, an organization that together with the NGO Watanibe participates in the monitoring of the RAISG. The maps are available online and show that there is literally a minefield south of the huge Orinoco River.

That is one of the greatest concerns of researchers. Illegal atomized mining and what has been allowed by the Government of Maduro, although there is no public information on the distribution of the deposits or transparency on the volumes of the extraction that, according to journalistic investigations in the area, mostly goes by the green roads and does not reach the coffers of the Central Bank of Venezuela. For Álvarez, the picture has worsened and gone out of control amid the deep political, economic and social crisis that Venezuela is going through.

"20 years ago gold mining was concentrated in the Sifontes municipality of the Bolivar State. Because of the geology of the region there are the most important gold veins and there was a small-scale artisanal mining in which some indigenous communities were involved. What is now related to two effects: the increase in the price of gold in the world - which the trade war between the United States and China stimulates - and the economic debacle of Venezuela, which has driven survival mining with a massive devastation of the environment. and with human rights violations, "says Álvarez.

"It is deforested so that the miners encamp and at the edge of the rivers, by the type of extraction. They are devastated between two and 10 hectares per mining point. Thus it becomes very difficult to make a categorization of the miners, which only in very little quantity they are artisanal. The majority are using machines, motor pumps and mercury with reports of contaminated po[CENSORED]tion through the bioaccumulation of the substance in consumer fish, "says Vilisa Morón, biologist and president of the Venezuelan Society of Ecology. "To have these deforestation numbers and this situation you have to have a lot of people doing mining and that is one of the great shame we have in the south of the Orinoco," he laments.