Mine gold or go hungry in Venezuela? Indigenous groups struggle for balance.

In the middle of the jungle in southern Venezuela, a 60-foot-wide hole oozes brown, polluted water. Sandy earth is piled around the perimeter of this abandoned, informal gold mine, a permanent blemish on the once-wild land.

Bolívar state is bursting with biodiversity, breathtaking waterfalls, jungles, and tabletop mountains, known as tepuis. But, mining that can clear and destroy vast swaths of land has become an important source of income among the nearly 200 Indigenous communities that live here, especially since the breakdown of Venezuela’s oil industry accelerated in 2014. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated an already perilous economic situation, when what little remained of tourism and government social services all but evaporated.

Now, sights like large semicircles carved deep into the jungle floor and buzzing with untrained workers are more common. As Venezuela’s economic unraveling eviscerated incomes and social support systems in recent years, Indigenous communities have increasingly turned to a place they’d rather not go – the gold mines. But as the state refuses to take responsibility for the protection of the lands or the people who live there, many perceive mining as the only viable option right now, even as it conflicts with larger principles like environmental stewardship.

“We know that what we’re doing is not good,” says one Indigenous man in charge of a mining community located on a plateau of the Guiana Shield that extends to Brazil and Guyana. He, like many in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the illegal nature of his work.

The gold mining “creates all kinds of destruction,” he says. For “the ecosystem, the water, everything.” But it’s all this community has, he says. “We don’t see any alternative. So we keep mining ... to sustain our families.”

Across Bolívar state there are community leaders, individuals, and families working to pinpoint ways to survive – and thrive – without digging for valuable minerals. For some, that means finding creative ways to generate tourism in a crisis-hit country that has few international visitors. For others, it means leaning into community education and a return to historical practices, such as cultivating cassava or pineapples and bananas for subsistence. Despite the scramble for alternatives, for many, the responsibility of choosing between feeding one’s children and protecting ancestral land shouldn’t fall so heavily on citizens’ shoulders to begin with.

“More than the Indigenous people’s responsibility, it’s the responsibility of the state,” says Armando Obdola, director of Kapé Kapé, an Indigenous rights organization based in the southeastern city of Ciudad Bolívar. The government “doesn’t guarantee the safety of Indigenous lands, nor compliance with the law when it allows mining to take place in areas where it’s prohibited.”

“Let’s do something else”

More than 6 million Venezuelans have fled the country over the past decade due to simultaneous political and economic crises. For years, annual inflation has hit triple digits, and shortages of basic food products and medical supplies have left communities hungry and vulnerable. The government clamped down on freedom of expression and other civil liberties, tying remaining support, like food baskets, to public approval of the administration. Amid the hardship, some Venezuelans have chosen to migrate internally, coming to the mines in search of opportunity.

Sitting in a dilapidated local community center, one Indigenous leader says she feels herself tugged in opposing directions over the mining debate. Although she’s an outspoken advocate for ending the practice, her own partner has made it his profession.

For her, it’s about contaminated drinking water, polluted by toxic chemicals used to extract gold, and poor working conditions in which often-untrained neighbors toil long hours using dangerous tools, like high-pressure water jets. She has witnessed too many tragedies, she says, such as landslides suffocating workers.

She has spent the past roughly five years fighting to keep people out of the mines, encouraging community members to find alternative sources of income like agriculture. “Let’s do something else. Let’s open a shop. Let’s farm. Let’s fish,” she says, acknowledging that part of the challenge is the very lack of alternatives in the first place.

But her activism hasn’t been enough to sway even her family. Her partner grew up watching his parents mine and has trouble imagining anything else. “I cannot be radical about it, because then we’ll clash,” she says of her efforts to convince him to find something – anything – else. She tries leaning into their shared Indigenous heritage: “We’re destroying a nature that is so beautiful, our very own land,” she says she’ll tell him. He doesn’t disagree, she says. Although he’s eager to see her campaign for change succeed – brainstorming alternatives like building infrastructure – he still heads to the mines himself, motivated to help feed the family and keep them clothed.

Doing away with environmental protections

Back in the late 1970s, Venezuela was one of the first Latin American countries to create a ministry of environment, enacting comprehensive laws to protect land and Indigenous people. But starting in 2011, the government censored environmental and scientific data. In 2014, it eliminated the Ministry of Environment and the following year launched the Ministry of Eco-socialism. In 2016, the Ministry of Ecological Mining Development was created. These steps intensified and justified mining activities in the south, observers say.

“Venezuelan authorities have failed to protect Indigenous people from violence, forced labor, sexual exploitation ... and they fail to stop deforestation and pollution,” says Tamara Taraciuk, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Latin America.

In 2016 Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, in search of alternative revenue sources amid a growing economic crisis, designated an area larger than the size of Cuba for the strategic development of gold and other precious minerals. The move legitimized mining activities, which quickly scaled up. At the same time, artisanal mining – using rudimentary methods to extract and process minerals and metals – and large-scale mining operations continued to develop outside the designated zone, reaching into areas that were, at least on paper, protected from such activity.

As of January, thousands of mining locations have already eaten away the equivalent of 40,000 soccer fields of forest in the states of Bolívar and Amazonas alone.

Despite efforts to identify alternatives, many here say what’s needed at this point is outside intervention, whether formal job creation or, more contentiously, cash transfers. “If the government offers us something better, with great pleasure, we’ll accept it,” says one miner.

“Mother Nature is sacred,” says Ángel Paez, a member of the Taurepán Indigenous Territorial Guard in the Gran Sabana municipality, a grassroots effort that polices protected land to stave off outsiders. “Our ancestors taught us to respect her. She’s a living thing that gives us fruits, nutrients, produces vegetation and oxygen for us,” he says. “She gives us life.”

“We cannot let our family die”

More than 160 miles away in the western part of Canaima National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the situation looks a bit different. Community members, largely part of the Pemón Indigenous group, have also felt pressured by personal responsibilities to dig for gold amid Venezuela’s economic tailspin. But unlike other parts of Bolívar state, these communities have had alternatives in the past, surviving on tourism for decades.

That all changed when the park, best known for Angel Falls, the world’s tallest uninterrupted waterfall, closed for nearly a year due to the pandemic. Mining was already underway, but the stigma around it ­– and the option to work in tourism – meant it wasn’t flaunted. When the tourists disappeared, local disdain for mining did too.

“We cannot let our family die at home,” one woman says, tearing up as she explains why she spent nearly a year working in the mines during the pandemic. She would wake up each morning and look at the vast mountains surrounding her, she says, taking in the few remaining trees still standing at the mine. “I was filled with sadness” over what I was doing to my land, she says. Now that the park is open again, she’s returned to a job at a nature lodge that the community has worked to promote as a vacation spot for the Venezuelan elite, since foreign tourists remain scarce.

“This park is still very sacred for us,” she says. She doesn’t want to go back to mining, but the pandemic gave her a better understanding of why and how it’s become so rampant.

“We are what we’ve been protecting,” she says. We are “the lungs of the world.”