The more I read about this situation the more it looks like a political response to placate a few displaced small miners who have organised themselves (or been organised by others) into a militant group to protest their being thrown out of their traditional (but highly environmentally unfriendly) activiities.

By not allowing a smooth transition from the old small scale unregulated mining which was bad for the environment and returned very little to the government coffers, to large scale company run project like the planned Brisas mine, to provide alternative employment, Chavez has created a problem for himself.

Displaced miners get hungry and they need to blame someone, so evidently somebody in the government felt the best thing was to blame the multi-nationals and divert attention from the true culprits, the government's incompetance.

The miners see a fence around their working area with a Crystallex or Gold Reserve sign on top and think that they have been sold out to big business. The reasons why the promised jobs these companies were supposed to bring haven't been delivered is not their concern. They just want to make a living and put food on the table.

There is an election coming up so the best quick fix for Chavez is to make a scapegoat of the multinationals and he has hit at every one of them, even having a go at favoured Rusoro which they seemed to partially deflect.

Ultimately of course the small miners would like access to a few high grade surface pockets at Las Cristinas and really don't want to mine Brisas at all (except for a couple of very small pockets around the "blue whale") because the grades of the majority of both ore bodies simply won't sustain them, but by attacking all the foreign mining companies Chavez and his mob create the immediate impression of "getting tough" in order to regain the local miners lost votes.

The greenies are quite happy to go along with the current anti-mining push as they never wanted any activity in the forest at all, seeming ignoring the fact that much of the gold bearing areas are already ecological disaster zones that would required millions to restore, millions that now will never be spent.