Slash your way through the dense foliage of Canaima National Park, Venezuela’s top eco-tourist attraction, and sooner or later you will come across an unexpected monster in a clearing: 30 metres tall with four legs and humming menacingly.
It is not a relic from the Jurassic period, nor a Steven Spielberg creation. Rather, it is a high-tension electricity pylon carrying power to energy-strapped Brazil, crackling as it discharges in the tropical forest.
Yesterday, three years behind schedule, with the project dogged by stoppages and Dollars 85m (Pounds 60m) over budget, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil met to switch on the Dollars 400m power line, which stretches 680km from Venezuela’s giant Guri dam to Boa Vista in northern Brazil.
The 200MW power line is a timely, if small, contribution to help ease Brazil’s power shortage, and a step forward in Mr Chavez’s aim of deepening economic integration with Brazil.
But it is also a project that has collided headlong with Venezuela’s indigenous communities and drawn sharp criticism of the Venezuelan government and Edelca, the state-owned power company behind the project, for disregarding indigenous rights and blighting the natural environment.
Now, angered at having been ignored during the project’s execution, some of the indigenous communities are threatening to disrupt the supply to Brazil by pulling down pylons, more than 30 of which were knocked down during construction.
Before he was elected in 1998, Mr Chavez opposed the way in which the power line was being built, and last year appointed a commission to ensure the local communities’ concerns were acknowledged. Local indigenous leaders say none of the government’s pledges have been fulfilled.
“The pylons could be knocked down at any time,” says Silviano Castro, a leader of the Pemon indigenous group. “All of us who are affected can see that the power line we never asked for, or were asked about, is at fault.”
Meanwhile, parts of the Canaima park area have been militarised. To protect the pylons, troops are transported in trucks belonging to the Zurich-based ABB Group, the main contractor in the power line’s construction. Local communities allege ill-treatment by the army. “Militarisation of the area is what we least like,” Mr Castro says.
Survival International, which campaigns to defend the rights of indigenous peoples, has warned that the Venezuelan government must prevent the ancestral lands of the Pemon from being colonised and devastated by mining.
“The Venezuelan government has betrayed the indigenous people,” says Stephen Corry, director-general of Survival International. “Not only has it failed to consult and listen to the Pemon over the building of the electricity line, but it has violated their most fundamental constitutional right by not recognising collective ownership titles to their land.”
The Corporacion Andina de Fomento (CAF), the multilateral bank that funds sustainable development projects, refused to finance the Venezuelan side of the power line on the grounds that the views of the local communities were not taken into account.
Edelca says that although mistakes were made steps were taken to minimise deforestation and limit the visual impact of unsightly pylons, and that the extension of power will benefit the region’s communities.
“We didn’t have experience of construction in areas with an indigenous presence,” says Fidel Perez, planning director of Edelca. “Perhaps if the project was to be started again today, certain things we did late would have been done from the start.”
From the economic point of view, power sector analysts say the electricity tariff agreed under the 20-year contract, at a price of Dollars 26 per MW/hr plus maintenance charges, will be favourable both for the buyer in Brazil, Eletronorte, and for Edelca, allowing it to recoup its investment in an estimated seven years.
But industry observers are also warning that the cause of the power rationing in Brazil – low water levels in its dams – could occur next year in Venezuela, adding an environmental threat to the concerns over a disruption by indigenous groups.
Limited rainfall in the past two years has reduced to record lows the water levels in the Guri system, which supplies 70 per cent of Venezuela’s electricity and is the world’s biggest hydroelectric complex after Itaipu on the Brazil-Paraguay border.
“In principal, Venezuela has sufficient installed thermoelectric generation capacity to cover any deficit in hydroelectric generation from Guri,” says Richard Obuchi, energy specialist at the Iesa business school in Caracas. “But the dams have never been so low, and it’s not been tried in practice.”
Observers fear that under-investment in recent years has left available thermoelectric capacity well below installed capacity. Much of Venezuela was plunged into darkness for two days a year ago this week after a technical fault at Guri shut off supply and no alternative sources were available to supply the national grid.
