The destruction of national parks and the environmental crisis have worsened in the last 20 years in Venezuela. This is how he warns Financial Times in a report published this Sunday.
The work emphasizes the case of the Canaima National Park composed of landscapes of tepuyes, jungles, rivers and snakes. However, they highlight that this wonder has another perspective from the air, since the ground is dotted with “bare and brown” patches of land, revealing signs of mining activity. Dirt roads through the forest to makeshift camps.
Cristina Burelli, founder of SOS Orinoco, spoke in an interview with the British newspaper and revealed the existence of these mining activities in the area.
“The mines are right on the edge of the park, within the buffer zone required by UNESCO for World Heritage sites. In many cases, they are even inside the park.”
She added that “the revolutionary socialist governments of first Hugo Chávez, and now Nicolás Maduro, have presided over what she calls the systematic dismantling of Venezuela’s environmental institutions.”
Deforestation
The document clarifies that although deforestation did not begin at the time of Chavez and Maduro’s mandate, in the last 20 years Some 3,800 km2 of tree cover have been destroyed in the Venezuelan Amazon. This represents 1% of the total or an area larger than Rhode Island. In an accelerated way, half of that area has been lost in the last five years.
Financial Times highlights that between 2015 and 2020 the amount of land used for mining south of the Orinoco has tripled in the last two decades and increased 20%. This fact notoriously affects the Amazon rainforest in Venezuela, which had managed to largely escape the destruction caused by logging, agriculture in its neighboring Brazil.
mineral spills
Environmentalists from SOS Orinoco highlighted the presence of mercury among the Pemona indigenous community. Also, of oil spills.
“The highest concentrations were found in samples from children under 18 who do not work in the mines,” the NGO noted. At the same time they reported that the tribe is at risk even if they have no connection to the industry.
“According to PDVSA’s own statistics, there were 46,080 oil spills, large and small, in the company’s operations between 2010 and 2016, an average of 18 a day,” said Klaus Essig, a Venezuelan oceanologist and former environmental director of the National Institute of Aquatic Spaces.