Caracas – Hundreds of Venezuelan Indians blocked the main highway to Brazil on Tuesday to protest the construction of a power line connecting the two countries through their homelands.
Indigenous leaders said construction of the 430-mile (690 km) link was ruining their livelihood and destroying vast tracts of national parks and Amazonian forest.
“It has been calculated that it will affect about 2,200 hectares (5,500 acres) of forest up to the kilometre 88 area,” about halfway along the planned line, Jose Luis Gonzalez, spokesman for the Indigenous Federation of Bolivar, told Reuters.
About 600 members of the Karina, Arawako, Akawalo and Pemon tribes of the southeastern Bolivar state joined Tuesday’s protest and Gonzalez said they would continue to block the El Dorado-Santa Elena road until government officials agreed to hear their demands.
The power line, with which Venezuela would supply electricity to northeastern Brazil, crosses the ecologically-rich Imataca Forest Reserve and the Canaima National Park – home of the Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall.
Imataca is an area of about 9 million acres (3.6 million hectares) – about the same size as the Netherlands – of diverse tropical forest and is home to an indigenous population of about 10,000.
The United Nations warned last year that Venezuela had not carried out significant studies on the environmental impact of the power line on Canaima which was declared a World Heritage site in 1994.
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Wednesday, July 29, 1998 Published at 10:57 GMT 11:57 UK BBC
Venezuelan Indians protest
Hundreds of Venezuelan Indians have blocked the main road to Brazil to protest against the construction of a power line through their territory which connectsthe two countries.
Indigenous leaders said the construction of the power line was destroying vast areas of national parks and Amazonian forests in the south-eastern state of Bolivar.
A spokesman for a Venezuelan non-governmental environmental agency, Franklin Rojas, told the BBC that the project would have an impact on the ecological system of the region, which was declared a World Heritage site by Unesco in 1994.
From the newsroom of the BBC World Service
