RAPAPORT... A single-engine, piston-driven biplane, designed in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s yet somehow still flying here, travels over the eerie flat-topped tepuys, or mountains, of Southern Venezuela. It’s an airborne dinosaur, a twenty-first-century technological equivalent of the lumbering brontosaurs and soaring pterodactyls that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, envisioned roaming this land in his novel, The Lost World. Its chore in this part of the world is to fly 50-gallon drums of diesel fuel, eight drums per flight, from a base in La Paragua on the shores of the Guri reservoir to a spot named Chiguao, located deep in the roadless interior where Venezuelan miners dig for diamonds. It’s one of the few places still safe, or so the miners believe, from attack by the Venezuelan army.
The Price of Oil
Blessed with vast reserves, oil-rich Venezuela coddles its citizens with gas prices of just 20 cents per gallon, prices not seen elsewhere since the original Henry ran Ford. Sheltered in this “Land that Gas Prices Forgot,” ancient American behemoths — Cutlasses and Impalas, hulking great Plymouth Furys — roam the streets, while gas-guzzling Soviet Antonovs fill the sky.
But what the authoritarian third-world government giveth, the authoritarian third-world government taketh away. In 2005, the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared it was putting an end to artisanal mining in the Caroni River basin, which covers nearly all of southern Bolivar state. The reason, it said, was environmental.
The Caroni basin covers almost 37,000 square miles, including much of the best diamond territory in South America. The basin also serves as the watershed for the vast, but shallow, Guri reservoir, which in turn spills through the multiple turbines of a 530-foot-high hydroelectric dam that generates more than 10,000 megawatts of electricity. The Guri project is Venezuela’s prime source of electrical power but, because of the heavy silt load in the Caroni River, the reservoir is silting up. Already, some 30 percent of the project’s generating capacity has been lost to siltation, and the government blames the diamond miners.
The MinersThe dominant small-scale mining technology in Venezuela consists of the portable jig, a metal tub just large enough for two people to bathe, filled on the inside with a battery of metal sieves, and attached on the outside to a small gasoline engine that provides vibrating action. The resumidor condenser is fed a diet of liquefied earth and gravel, mixed up by a crew of miners who use high-pressure hoses to blast away at ore-bearing earth. A diesel-driven pump sucks this slurry into the jig, which catches the heavier material — diamonds included — in its sieves, and discharges the rest down a small spillway. It is, without doubt, a technology that causes significant erosion.
There are ways to mitigate the damage. In next-door Guyana, miners are required to build cofferdams of wood and palm fronds to wall off sections of the holes they’ve already excavated, into which the resumidor discharges the discarded water, earth and gravel. In this way, the miners fill back in as they dig forward, and the discharge into rivers, if not minimal, is much reduced.
Venezuelan miners have adopted these techniques to an extent. The Chavez government, however, is not much for namby-pamby mitigation measures. On August 26, 2006, Nora Delgado, the vice minister of the environment, announced that all mining in southern Bolivar state would cease in exactly four days. In the socialism-for-the-21st-century Bolivaran Republic of Venezuela, the miners weren’t to be left high and dry. A multimillion-dollar adjustment package had been put in place for those who wished to resettle in diamond mining areas outside the Caroni River watershed. Those who remained would be offered free retraining programs, plus increased government investment in local infrastructure. More than 80 percent of the funds, the minister announced during a televised press conference, had already been spent in places such as the mining town of Icabaru.
“We sat in the co-op office watching this live, and we looked at each other and said, ‘What money are they talking about?’” recalls Icabaru Pires, a native of the town whose name he also bears, and a leading figure in the Icabaru miners cooperative. “Nothing ever reached us.”
Whether the funds for the resettlement program never actually left the central government’s coffers, or whether the money somehow got diverted on the journey through Venezuela’s less-than-honest and inefficient bureaucracy, is something that has never been determined. Miners in Icabaru only know no money ever reached them.
The ArmyDenied funds for resettlement, the miners refused to resettle and instead carried on mining. The government cut off their supplies of subsidized fuel, so the miners began buying gas and diesel on the black market, at times paying an unheard of $5.80 per gallon. Finally, the government called in the army.
On the morning of September 25, 2006, a pair of helicopters landed on a riverbank near Icabaru next to a small raft-mining jig belonging to Temistocles José Gonzalez, head of the Cooperative Association of Miners of Guasina and Mariba. The jig had been shut down for months, according to Gonzalez, while he waited for resettlement funds to move it elsewhere. Disregarding his protests, the soldiers riddled his barge with machine-gun fire, then seeded the jig with C-4 explosives and blew it sky high.
In the office of his cooperative in Icabaru, Gonzalez lays out photos of his rig, part of a claim he’s putting together for compensation. The snapshots show burned-out machinery, riddled here and there with bullet holes. He thinks the compensation claim is a long shot. In a way, though, he counts himself lucky.
Three days earlier, on September 22, 2006, another helicopter gunship flew over a mining encampment hidden in the hills above the town of La Paragua. Exactly what happened next has never been fully determined, but a few facts are sure. The miners had no guns. The soldiers did. At some point, for some reason, the soldiers opened fire and five miners died in the massacre.
In response, the leaders of Icabaru’s half-dozen mining co-ops took their protest on the road, traveling all the way to the capital of Caracas and winning at least a temporary reprieve on the subsidized fuel quota. Miners close to La Paragua, meanwhile, took to the bush. They isolated themselves in jungle mining sites like Chiguao, a settlement with no police, no laws, no authority. The miners feel safer that way.
The Reality
At a wood table in a makeshift Chiguao restaurant, a group of miners sit discussing the news seen on satellite TV. In the area supposedly designated for resettlement, a mining rig has been blown up by the army. One miner was reportedly shot trying to swim across the river into Guyana.
“See. See,” says a miner named Paulo. “That’s where they want us to go. If they’re going to shoot me, I’m going to stay here and get shot.”
Most of the actual mining in Chiguao is another 12 miles or so farther into the jungle. There are a good 100 jigs running, maybe 500 miners, plus a half-dozen diamond buyers doing a brisk business trading diamonds for the
Venezuelan Bolivar currency.
In one shack, a buyer, louping over a 5-carat stone with the slight yellow tint typical of Southern Venezuelan diamonds, ponders the question of whether the army will arrive one day in force. “Not a chance,” he says laconically. “If they want us out of this place, all they have to do is stop the airplanes” that deliver fuel.
Recent events, however, belied that prediction. Late in 2007, the army moved in to Chiguao in force, clearing out miners and blowing up mining jigs. This time, reportedly, only one miner was killed. In April 2008, the army commander for Bolivar state once again cut off all fuel to the Icabaru cooperatives.
Article from the Rapaport Magazine - September 2008. To subscribe click here.