The Destruction of Venezuela's Amazon Is Going Virtually Unnoticed
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Loading... - Mandy Hill
- 21 Oct 2022
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For good reason, the Amazon is under a global spotlight. But this spotlight, focused on Brazil, Colombia and Bolivia, treats the accelerating destruction of Venezuela’s Amazon as an afterthought. Leading international organizations, environmentalists and scientists tend not to address this vital region in their discussions or programs. If they seek to avoid the dreaded “tipping point” in the Amazon’s destruction, they must acknowledge what is occurring in Venezuela.
Around 60% of Venezuela’s territory—550,000 square kilometers—belongs to the Amazon biome, accounting for 8% of biome’s expanse. Perhaps most significantly, Venezuela accounts for nearly 20% of the Guiana Shield, a globally unique geological formation about 1.7 billion years old. It is heavily forested and is one of the Amazon biome’s gems. But Venezuela has the fastest deforestation rate in the Neotropics (the tropical regions of the Western Hemisphere) and the fifth-fastest rate in the world, with a total of 1.4 million hectares lost between 2016 and 2021.
One of the major drivers of this deforestation is the policy framework surrounding the Arco Minero de Orinoco (AMO), or Orinoco Mining Arc. In 2016, the government of President Nicolás Maduro illegally established the AMO without the approval of the National Assembly, assigning it 12% of the country’s territory—an area larger than Portugal.
The move was designed to lend mining activity an appearance of legitimacy and regulation. However, the AMO has driven mining activities into territory far beyond its supposed boundaries. This includes pristine protected areas, including the Canaima National Park World Heritage Site, home to Angel Falls—the planet’s tallest waterfall—and the ancestral territories of various Indigenous peoples, including the Pemon, Yanomami and Yek’wana, among others.
Now, a chaotic rush of natural resource extraction of gold, diamonds, coltan and rare earths are devastating Venezuela’s Amazon and especially its Guiana Shield region. The AMO has encouraged informal mining, easing permitting and inspection processes and allowing mines to skirt environmental regulations. Under this framework, illegal armed groups allied with the government continue to run especially destructive mining operations, kicking up much of the wealth they extract to senior leaders in the military and government. Civilian and military authorities who respond to Maduro and his clique control access to fuel, mercury, motor pumps and mining areas—and profit handily from this control.
