Kilometer 33, Venezuela – Across Latin America, indigenous groups are locked in power struggles with authorities over large energy projects on their lands, and the twisted metal of a toppled steel pylon in a jungle clearing here is sign of the latest clash.
One recent night, Pemon Indians pulled down the pylon in an act of sabotage against a power line project to northern Brazil that they despise.
“We knocked it down with pleasure,” recalled Pedro Mendoza.
Pemon Indians have toppled at least four steel towers since early September, virtually halting construction of the 470-mile high-voltage line.
It is the latest example of an indigenous group resorting to sabotage or legal action to halt a large energy project. From the Mapuche Indians in Chile, who shut down a $480 million hydroelectric project on the Bio-Bio River, to the Embera Katio Indians in Colombia who halted the huge Urra dam project, the power struggle is on.
The Pemon, the third-largest of Venezuela’s 25 or so separate indigenous groups, say they grew weary of protesting the power project with letters.
“The government has been deaf and blind to us. So we’ve gotten tired of asking,” said Geronimo Daniels, a Pemon who joined fellow Indians in using rope and large tools to unscrew and topple a 40-foot galvanized steel pylon one night in September.
“This power line will not pass by here, now or ever,” Daniels asserted.
Venezuela offered to build the power line to increase trade with the cities of northern Brazil, which are far from the industrialized cities of the south. Venezuela plans to send 400-kilowatts from its Guri Dam hydroelectric plant to Boa Vista, a city in Brazil’s northern Roraima state.
Reasons abound for Venezuelan officials to want to proceed.
The hydroelectric potential of eastern Venezuela’s Upper and Lower Caroni Rivers is enormous – equivalent to 810,000 barrels of crude oil a day.
Authorities decided in 1997 to build the power line, plotting a route through 150 miles of rain forest, then over the Gran Sabana, a primordial tableland dotted with flat-top mesas that is one of the oldest geologic formations on Earth. The region is home to the Pemon Indians, who learned of the project once it was well underway.
“We found out about it when the heavy machinery came in,” said Yaritza Aray, a leader of the Indigenous Federation of Bolivar State.
“They never consulted us,” echoed Jerrick Andre, a Pemon activist. “With the construction of the power line, they threaten to bring in the big mining concessions, the big logging concessions and the tourism.”
Indeed, the power line runs along some of the most resource-rich terrain on Earth – land filled with bauxite, iron ore, gold and diamonds.
Already half-way complete, the project may be too far along for authorities to halt.
“From the point of view of the government, they need to build that power line. They’ve got contracts with Brazil to supply electricity,” said David Rothschild, director of the Amazon Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based coalition of 42 groups.
Even so, U.S. and European activists have become involved, coaching the Pemon on how to issue press releases, demand land titles and stage protests.
“It’s really a fight for the right to say, `yes or no,’ ” said Atossa Soltani of Amazon Watch, a group based in Malibu, Calif.
Until this month, Venezuela had some of the weakest legal protections in the hemisphere for indigenous groups, flatly denying them a voice in development near their homelands or guaranteed legal titles to land.
The combative attitude of the Pemon has led some Venezuelans to contend the group’s leaders are manipulated from abroad.
“I started to count the number of foreign groups meddling in this and I gave up,” said Issam Madi, an ethnologist in favor of the power line.
Questions about the patriotism of the Pemon and other groups arose this month in the Constitutional Assembly, an elected body redrawing Venezuela’s constitution, as it debated whether to enshrine Indian rights in a new charter.
As indigenous leaders packed the gallery, many in face paint and toting drums, retired air force Gen. Francisco Visconti charged that granting land rights to Indians could stir them to secede from Venezuela.
Opposition by Visconti and other former military officers was finally overcome, and if Venezuelans approve the new charter in a vote Dec. 15, indigenous groups will be on the path to greater protections.
But Pemon leaders say that is unlikely to end the struggle over the power project – and their fight for a say in any future mining or timber projects along its route.
The conflict in Venezuela is one of many around the hemisphere in which central governments, wanting to harness hydroelectric power or extract other resources, have come into conflict with indigenous people occupying the land for centuries:
In Colombia, the U’wa Indian tribe has threatened mass suicide if a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. goes ahead with plans to drill for oil near their reservation. The U’wa consider oil the blood of Mother Earth.
Another Colombian tribe, the Embera Katio, won a Supreme Court ruling in 1998 allowing the huge Urra dam on the Sinu River in northwest Colombia to proceed with their consent. The dam threatens to flood much of their land.
In Chile, efforts by the Mapuche Indians to halt a dam on the Bio-Bio River and block commercial timber projects has led to comparisons that the struggle is similar to the Zapatista uprising in Mexico’s southern Chiapas state.
In Ecuador, 400 Shuar and Achuar Indians recently marched in the town of Macas to protest oil drilling by Atlantic Richfield, claiming the company would follow the pattern of Texaco and leave a toxic legacy in the Amazon.
