Lisseth Boon, María Ramírez Cabello and Lorena Meléndez

A pair of dying light bulbs illuminate the rattle of an artisanal mill in the middle of the night. Three men without helmets or gloves operate the machines that process a batch of soil loaded with gold a few meters from Troncal 10, the route that connects the main towns of the Arco Minero del Orinoco (Orinoco Mining Arc), south of Bolívar state in Venezuela. Near the small rustic structure, the towers of an industrial gold cyanidation plant illuminated by powerful reflectors stand out. But between its high silos there is no movement of trucks or workers.

At dawn the colors of mining devastation explode. Along the main road artery of the Arco Minero del Orinoco, on land where there were once trees and grasses, there are now swamps, holes, and puddles. Signboards and walls with signs of unknown companies swarm at the same time as new cyanidation plants and artisanal mills are installed to process gold. The Yuruari and Cuyuní rivers, which surround the mining towns, became channels of clay sediments. Children and teenagers ask passers-by for tips to fix the road that completely lost the asphalt in some of its sections. On the deteriorated route, containers with food from Brazil and trucks transporting tons of auriferous sands to the industrial complexes, leave in the air a thick mist that makes it difficult to breathe.  

Artisanal miners, carrying wooden trays on their backs to sift the golden metal, walk along the roadside to some gully or open-pit mine under the control of criminal gangs known in the region as “sindicatos” (syndicates) or “sistemas” (systems). Rows of shacks made of plastic and fiberboard walls, selling everything from chewy empanadas, gasoline in plastic soda bottles to minutes of satellite internet in a region without connection or local telephone service, are added to the growing makeshift villages that spread across the landscape.

The pandemic did not stop the destruction in the Arco Minero del Orinoco, but rather deepened it. Through a route of 850 kilometers along Troncal 10, which crosses Roscio, El Callao and Sifontes municipalities of the Bolivar state, the team of journalists from Runrun.es and Correo del Caroní verified directly the impact of gold mining activity in the region after 24 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Far from reducing mining exploitation, during a quarantine marked by intermittent mobility restrictions, and an acute fuel shortages in the region, the consequences of the chaotic extractivist policy worsened with respect to the previous coverage registered in January 2020.

The most visible sign of the advancement of the mining megaproject decreed by Nicolás Maduro in 2016 and which occupies 111,846 kilometers, almost 12% of the national territory, is the appearance of companies and industrial plants (public and private) on the roadside, whose productive performance is kept under official secrecy. The facilities, with large walls and signs with their names labeled, began to be erected in the midst of the pandemic.

Of the 41 companies identified in the misleading corporate map of the Arco Minero del Orinoco, the management of the two largest industrial complexes has been linked to the presidential family or public officials; of 75 percent of the total (31 of 41) the public procurement process is unknown: whether they were assigned by hand or were presented in official competitions. Just six are registered and authorized to contract with the State. It is not certain how many of them remain operational and none of them gives a public account of their productive performance.