Venezuela has a long history of environmental protection. National parks, reserves, and monuments cover some 28% of its territory and there are limits on development spanning more than half the country. But corruption, negligence and economic collapse over the past two decades now threaten its southern jungles and pollute its rivers and coastlines.

Green groups say environmental agencies have been hollowed out as political operatives replaced experts and budgets dried up. Environmental laws are routinely ignored. The government provides no statistics, requiring local and international NGOs to assess problems like illegal mining and deforestation on their own.

“There is an environmental disaster in all of Venezuela,” says Cristina Burelli, the founder of SOS Orinoco, a green group that tracks environmental degradation and human rights violations in Venezuela’s Amazon region.

The environment was not the main concern of voters who cast ballots on July 28 in Venezuela’s closely watched presidential election. Weighing more heavily was the economic disintegration and authoritarian rule under President Nicolás Maduro.

Green groups were hopeful that his defeat after 11 years in office would mark a first step toward rebuilding environmental expertise and institutions. But the outcome is in dispute: Maduro claims victory, but opponents have posted tally sheets they say prove he lost.

Of the many environmental problems plaguing Venezuela, the most visible is the spread of small-scale illegal mining for gold and other minerals across the region south of the Orinoco River, an area that encompasses over half the country’s territory. In 2011, then-President Hugo Chávez nationalized the mining industry. But rather than improving state oversight of mining practices, it created a vacuum in areas where gold mining is carried out.

Five years later, his successor, Maduro, created the Orinoco Mining Arc (AMO), an area of 112,000 square kilometers (43,000 sq. miles) across the southern states of Bolívar and Amazonas, hoping to attract major international mining investment. The plan ignored an earlier ban on mining in Amazonas, and criminal and guerrilla networks established in the region quickly drove off potential investors.

In 2021, an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study found AMO was “widely regarded as the center of an uncontrolled and often violent experiment in the exploitation of resources, regions and communities.” SOS Orinoco estimates mining now covers some 66,000 hectares (163,000 acres) in Amazonas and Bolívar, extending far beyond AMO’s ostensible limits.

Internal migration

As their economy has collapsed, many Venezuelans have migrated to the region in hopes of becoming small-scale gold miners. Colombian guerrilla groups and security forces control protection rackets in the region, and miners pay off these rackets with gold they refine by making illegal use of mercury, the OECD study says.

Much of the mercury finds its way into the soil and rivers, where it contaminates fish, the primary source of protein for local Indigenous and river communities, says Vilisa Morón-Zambrano, president of the Venezuelan Ecology Society. Studies to gauge the extent of the problem, Morón-Zambrano notes, have not been conducted, however, due to a lack of government permission to take samples and to the region’s poor security.

Analysis and mapping of satellite imagery by SOS Orinoco and Amazon Conservation, a U.S. nonprofit, have revealed mining camps in national parks and monuments. In 2022, satellite images showed 425 sites where illegal mining camps and machinery occupied a sacred table-top mountain, known as a tepui, in the heart of Yapacana National Park. After the photos were publicized, the military removed the camps. New images captured this January showed that the tepui was still clear, but that illegal mining continues in and around the park.

Illegal mining also continues in and near Canaima National Park, a three-million-hectare (7.4-million-acre) Unesco Heritage Site in Bolívar state. SOS Orinoco has detected 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) of mining activity in the park and another 1,350 hectares (3,300 acres) in its buffer zone. The group has also spotted illegal mining dredges operating on the Caroní River, the park’s western boundary.

Mining sets off a cascade of deforestation, not just to accommodate camps but also to raise cattle and grow crops to feed the miners. “You’ll have many focal points of small-scale cultivation,” says Morón-Zambrano. These, she adds, lead to “the transformation of the landscape.”

Tourism project questioned

Other protected areas also face threats. The government is expanding a landing strip at Los Roques Archipelago National Park, a Caribbean marine reserve. The Venezuelan Ecology Society says this work and new infrastructure intended to expand tourism will destroy mangroves and a beach in the park that is a nesting site for the critically endangered hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata).

Biodiversity “is being destroyed without the least mercy,” says forestry engineer Elides Sulbarán, a former official with Inparques, Venezuela’s park authority. “It appears public policy is to exploit resources without following any environmental rules.”

Joaquín Benítez Maal, director of sustainability at Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, notes forest fires and other uncontrolled burns were especially intense this past dry season. He says they stemmed from fires set deliberately to clear land or burn trash. Trash is a problem of its own, he adds, pointing out just 70% of Venezuela’s trash is collected. The rest is thrown into rivers and ravines. And just a quarter of collected waste makes it to a managed landfill; the rest goes to informal dumps.

Experts say a growing number of oil spills by Venezuela’s crumbling national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), affect Lake Maracaibo and coastal areas. Fertilizers, sewage and other runoff into the lake is contributing to eutrophication. “Three groups of problems are intermingled,” says Benítez Maal. “Venezuela is a polluted country. It’s a country that doesn’t protect its ecosystems or its ecosystem services, and there is institutional weakness.”

Sulbarán cites a fourth—lack of accountability: “What we’ve had is absolutely opaque management because the government doesn’t feel it is required to respond to the population.”