Natalie Garci'a
Photo William Urdaneta

Although the illegal mining causes great ecological problems the miners reproach the treatment who receive from the authorities

The information was presented in press conference in the Club Caronoco de Ferrominera last Friday, in which it restricted happens to the equipment of Mail of the Caroní.

The encounter beyond providing the data of until now realised by the Bolivarianas Armed Forces and other Atmosphere ministries and Interior and Justice, also was propitious to retake the joint operations with the Interior of the state Bolivar and the mayorships of the affected sites.

The illegal mining causes great environmental devastations, especially in the adjacent areas to the river basins of the rivers Caroní, Paragua and Caura. In the case of both first its waters they are spilled in the lake of Guri, whose hydroelectric potential is profiteer by the dam Simon Bolivar (before Raul Leoni) generating of the 70 percent of the energy of the country.

To guarantee justice
Deputy Manuel Briceño, of the National Assembly, headed the commission that came to the organization to review so much the effects against the environment as the denunciations of carried out violations of human rights by those who have been victims of evacuations.

The parliamentarian said who Bolivar “is an extremely strategic state for the country not only by the immense amount of natural resources that she owns, but by its geographic location, since when being in the border with Brazil she abre the doors to the foreign trade”.

In view of those potentials, Briceño he limited that he leaves from the objective of the eradication of the illegal mining is that “the region becomes one of great the revitalising ones of the national economy”.

To review
Carmen Villarroel, homeless of the Claritas, commented that “that was horrible, the soldiers hurled the food, gave pain us… shot against the refrigerators, as soon as they left if us the position and to the women put the finger to them in the parts to see if there were something hidden, I I was not left did it to me”, talking about to the treatment received by the military.

By commentaries like this one and other that reveal presumed “excesses” from the civil servants, it is that an is in the zone with disposition to move to the sites of the affected ones to pick up their impressions and to guarantee the defense to him to their human rights.

In relation to this point, and in view of which Mail of the Caroní could not attend the encounter to disable him the entrance, they have not been possible to obtain the official versions of the Army and other organisms that are accused “presumably to have abused” in their functions.

“The being mining does not clear the condition to us human beings”, are some of the arguments used by the affected ones by the evacuations. Besides this exposition reproaches to the national Government by the little generation of use exist that is the one that forces the migration from the populations to the mines.

“Many of which here we are éramos carpenters, bricklayers, workers, everything less miners, but the necessity has taken to this, is why we demanded the Government who offers an alternative to us of worthy work to maintain to us”, therefore he expressed days Edgar Fuenmayor in the middle of the manifestation back who closed main the 19 during three days, which was dissolved with tear gases and pellets.

The trauma of the reconversion

A group of the homeless miners of the mines take refook in the 2006 in the decree of mining reconversion, that offered to the families a change of life through development of activities nonrelated to the operation of deposits.

Although it was an idea that many adopted, the plan finished being a problem that generated the impoverishment of many populations, like the Paragua and the unemployment of thousands of people who although they did not work in the mines, depended on these.

Due to the worries of this experience many of the miners hope that the national Government looks for the mechanisms to reactivate the local economy, and thus to avoid that thousands of people must lie down to the forest in search of the “gilded dream” not to have how to feed their family.