If we take a close look at the chapter on Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the Annual Report (2020) on the Situation of Human Rights in Venezuela,1PROVEA, Situación de los DDHH, Informe Anual 2020, Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas [Situation of Human Rights, 2020 annual report, Rights of Indigenous peoples], 2020. drawn up by PROVEA (Venezuelan Program for Education and Action on Human Rights), we could build an overview of the difficult situation that affects indigenous peoples in Venezuelan territory. It is evident that they suffer from enduring and increasing structural problems: rights to ownership and delineation of land; consultation and free, prior and informed consent; the systemic crisis of models of extractivist development, the lack of public intercultural policies and respect for life and physical integrity.
At present, these circumstances are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the so-called “Complex Humanitarian Emergency” suffered by Venezuelan society in general and indigenous groups in particular. The context is alarming. However, what is truly unsettling is the heightening intensity of the crisis that affects indigenous peoples in Venezuela as a result of Decree 2248 granting the so-called Mining Arc the category of a ZDE (Strategic Development Zone) which has triggered an increase in environmental degradation, an intensification in the forced movement of the inhabitants of the region, an escalation in the forms of violence and a worsening precariousness of the conditions and quality of life
The Venezuelan state has turned the crisis of indigenous peoples into a situation of permanent, invisible and hidden crisis. There are no official reports and no official figures; grassroot organizations are harassed and threatened, blackmailed, kidnapped and repressed in order to guarantee silence and inaction.
What is happening in Venezuela, which particularly affects indigenous peoples, is linked to the crisis in the developmental model based on intensive, extractive exploitation of natural resources.
Oil, the so-called “devil’s excrement”,2Expression used by the Venezuelan politician Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, co-founder of OPEC, to refer to the dilemmas of the exploitation of natural resources in the economy of nations. In 1976 he published Hundiéndonos en el excremento del diablo, in which he claimed: “Oil is not black gold; it is the devil’s excrement”., but also, exacerbated at the current moment by the Mining Arc, gold, diamonds, coltan and bauxite, 3Situación de la Amazonía Venezolana en Tiempos de Pandemia. Informe de diagnóstico y propuestas para la Asamblea Mundial Amazónica [Situation of the Venezuelan Amazon in Times of Pandemic. Report of diagnosis and proposals for the Global Assembly on the Amazon], July 2020./, shape the residual imaginary of a society that is built on a DNA of extraction, misery, depredation and plundering.
Vladimir Aguilar Castro, a researcher at Universidad de Los Andes (ULA) and member of GTAI (Working Group on Indigenous Affairs), sustains that this situation represents a “complex systemic crisis”4CERLAS Foundation (2020, September 1) Webinar, “Situación de la Amazonía venezolana” [Situation of the Venezuelan Amazon], video archive. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_q9bmqGr9k given its structural, historical, cultural and global implications. In this regard, he contends that the model of development based on the extractive exploitation of natural resources is linked to the emergence of political systems with authoritarian features.
Seen in this light, we could imagine, following Aguilar Castro, that Venezuelan society suffers from a dramatic “recurring democratic deficit”.5Ibid. An economy based on the extraction of natural resources as a form of accumulating capital that has been unable to consolidate a democratic culture nor guarantee the promotion of human rights for all its members. We are victims of a democratic void that produces a vulnerable society which has been permanently assaulted throughout its history. This violence destroys us, bleeds us, annuls us, immobilizes us.
The violence produced by the extractivist mentality on the territory, especially that inhabited by indigenous peoples, is a violence that denies environmental and cultural rights. It denies space for living and biological and cultural diversity. It denies us the home we live in. It denies human rights. It denies the possibility of living in democracy. This violence, conceived as a permanent state of emergency, threatens and devours us.
Saturna devouring her child
Accordingly, the image that defines us as a society could be seen as a nation that devours its own children. One of the most terrible and harrowing expressions of this destruction is Francisco Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son (1819-1823). And so we could argue: if the Venezuelan state, whose obligations is to protect its citizens, devours them by systematically destroying their living conditions and refusing to recognize the status of humanitarian crisis we are currently facing, then our image as a society, the image of this destruction, is that of Nelson Garrido’s Saturna devorándose a sus hijos (Saturna Devouring Her Children),2015. This figure represents the homeland, the mother that devours her own children, sucking every last drop of vital energy from their bleeding bodies, their violated territories.
In consequence, it should come as no surprise that those who have kidnapped the Venezuelan state and its democratic institutions in the last few decades, have become the faces of monolithic thinking, in the carnivalesque, tropical and misshapen image of the god Saturn, terrified at the possibility of being ousted. They, the bearers of the unquestionable certainties of what never changes, have become the only voice, the only possible colour, the only slogan, the only face. They have defined the nation, the homeland and its territories under the masked face of an ideology whose horizon announces an inert landscape: one that lacks life; they represent the faces and the voices of death.
Under the masks of monolithic thinking, those who exercise violence sustain that they represent the voice of diversity; in their speeches they continually use the expression: Yo soy el pueblo (I am the people), and from this viewpoint they have turned repression of the dissident protests of social movements into the norm, especially any demonstrations that identify with the demands of Venezuelan indigenous groups.
Yo soy el pueblo representa la patente de corso para ignorar, al decretar la Zona de Desarrollo Estratégica Nacional-Arco Minero del Orinoco, Yo soy el pueblo is the tragic embodied expression of the authoritarian and totalitarian language of power in the Venezuelan context. Yo soy el pueblo is the voice of the looting and plundering of natural resources. Yo soy el pueblo is the letter of marque to ignore, by declaring the ZDEN-AMO (National Strategic Development Zone-Mining Arc of Orinoco), “the right to consultation and free, prior and informed consent of indigenous peoples enshrined in article 120 of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, articles 11 and 12 of the Organic Law of Indigenous Peoples and Communities and article 32 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and without the strategic environmental evaluation and the socio-environmental impact studies mandated by the Constitution”.6Situación de la Amazonía Venezolana en Tiempos de Pandemia. Informe de diagnóstico y propuestas para la Asamblea Mundial Amazónica [Situation of the Venezuelan Amazon in Times of Pandemic. Report of diagnosis and proposals for the Global Assembly on the Amazon], July 2020.
Yo soy el pueblo is the voice of an impotent revolution anchored in the past, blind and deaf to the latent image of the future. A future they have sequestered through the monopoly of violence exercised against its citizens, repressing them.
Human life is sacred
The Venezuelan state does not respect life as a right enshrined in the Constitution. It should come as no surprise to learn that on 12 April 2020, Lisbeth González, a 43-year-old Wayuu woman, who lives in the Venezuelan Guajira, had sustained gunshot wounds in the face carried out by members of the GNP (Bolivarian National Guard).7Sailin Fernández: Protesta en la Guajira deja una mujer wayuu herida [Wayuu woman wounded during a protest in Guajira]. Radio Fe y Alegría [online] https://www.radiofeyalegrianoticias.com/protesta-en-la-guajira-deja-una-mujer-wayuu-herida/ Consulted 20-06-2020..
It should come as no surprise that on 18 November 2020, 300 members of the Yukpa ethnic group who had travelled to Caracas to peacefully demand rights to health, education and housing, had been attacked by the GNB, the PNB (Bolivarian National Police) and irregular armed civilians called “collectives”.8Yazmin Antia: ¿Qué trajo a los Yukpas a Caracas? [Who brought the Yukpas to Caracas?]. El Universal [online] https://www.eluniversal.com/politica/85052/que-trajo-a-los-yukpas-a-caracas Consulted 20-06-2020.
Accordingly, given the growing number of aggressions, we shouldn’t be surprised that on 3 January 2021, the Pemón indigenous activist, Salvador Franco, died as a political prisoner of the Venezuelan executive. Franco was arbitrarily arrested, along with 12 members of his people, and imprisoned without due process.
Following his unjust death, various non-governmental associations, led by the Episcopal Conference of Venezuela’s Commission for Justice and Peace, signed a communique called Human Life is Sacred, in which they explicitly set out: “we agree with Amnesty International in pointing out that ‘the 13 people from the Pemón indigenous community have been criminally prosecuted by a court with jurisdiction in terrorism, without conforming to constitutional provisions and standards of human rights which rule on the obligation of states to respect the indigenous systems of justice when the crimes have been committed in an indigenous community, as is the case’.”9Venezuelan Episcopal Conference: La vida humana es sagrada: más de 15 instituciones católicas se pronuncian sobre la muerte del indígena Salvador Franco [Human life is sacred: over 15 Catholic institutions condemn the death of the indigenous leader Salvador Franco]. online] https://conferenciaepiscopalvenezolana.com/la-vida-humana-es-sagrada-mas-de-15-instituciones-se-pronuncian-sobre-la-muerte-del-indigena-salvador-franco Consulted: 25-06-2020.
There is violence against indigenous peoples when medical staff and supplies cannot be found in health centres. There is violence against indigenous peoples and risks to their physical integrity when they are threatened by irregular armed groups in their own territories, exercising spatial and political control. There is violence against indigenous peoples when the highest levels of food insecurity are found in the states of Delta Amacuro and Amazonas, territories in the Venezuelan Amazon where a large number of indigenous ethnic groups live. There is violence against indigenous peoples when their rights are systematically violated.
If there are no guarantees of access to these rights then it is impossible to talk about democratic alternatives. In this regard, there is violence against human rights when there is violence against indigenous peoples and their sources of life: their worldview, their cultural diversity and the biodiversity of the ecosystems in which they live and which make up their territories. Without human rights: political, economic, cultural and social, it is impossible to speak about democracy. Without indigenous rights; which is to say, without the right to free determination and the construction of their own models, without the rights to collective property, without enforcing state obligations as regards activities of extraction and exploitation of natural resources, without rights against ethnic-cultural discrimination and the promotion of a decent life from their own worldview, without each one of these rights, it is impossible to talk about democracy.
Inert Territories: Mining Arc and Bio-lence
When faced with the Dantesque proportions of the environmental disaster unleashed by the plundering of gold and other mineral resources in the states of Bolívar and Amazonas, whose area covers 116,565 hectares of territory, approximately 158,000 football stadiums (an image often used by groups and NGOs to visualize the magnitude of the environmental disaster),10CERLAS Fundación (2020, September 01) Webinar “Situación de la Amazonía venezolana” [Situation of the Venezuelan Amazon], video archive. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_q9bmqGr9k we can understand that we are part of a society whose future is seriously compromised. We could, without any fear, replace The Raft of the Medusa as the reference of our collective tragedy and loss of way with a battered mining raft adrift on one of our Amazonian rivers.
This crisis is basically being fought by indigenous peoples, whose worldviews and ways of life are particularly vulnerable. The declaration of the ZDEN-AMO has unleashed special violence against the ways of life of the inhabitants of the region, particularly indigenous groups. A bio-lence whose wounds transform the biodiversity of the Venezuelan Amazon into contaminated rivers of blood. It is not only Caracas that is bleeding in the spiral of violence, but the whole inert territory gutted by the exploitation and plundering of mining.
The Mining Arc involves the erosion of protected natural areas with a major impact on Amazonian ecosystems. At once, this also affects various water basins through contamination with mercury and the increased sedimentation of rivers. Mercury pollution has a significant impact on the health and food sources of the people who live in the Venezuela Amazon. Mining as “a territorial invasion for indigenous peoples”11Situación de la Amazonía Venezolana en Tiempos de Pandemia. Informe de diagnóstico y propuestas para la Asamblea Mundial Amazónica, [Situation of the Venezuelan Amazon in Times of Pandemic. Report of diagnosis and proposals for the Global Assembly on the Amazon], July 2020. is one of the biggest threats and one of the catalysts for the violation of their rights.
Dwelling at home, a single churuata, a single voice
In this context, we need to develop a sensibility that will allow us to imagine a territory which will provide us with a ‘source of life’, a place to be inhabited. We need to make the territory our home, to put a stop to the image of the parasitic extraction of our natural resources. Nobody loots their own home when they live in it and make it part of their lives. It is not just a question of an image for the Mining Arc; it is a metaphor that we should transfer to the whole of the Venezuelan territory and to its inhabitants.
We cannot continue to be conditioned by the atavistic order of beggary and plundering; a mentality based on the intensive exploitation of natural resources. The extractive exploitation of the Mining Arc is the main threat for the territories where the Venezuelan indigenous people and other inhabitants live. We cannot be a society of beggars and plunderers. We cannot continue being a society which ignores diversity and difference. To make a territory, and from the territory, our lives and our home are the true legacy of an artist like Armando Reverón; he is a beacon that allows us to project ourselves from the margins and diversity towards times to come; to inhabit the home is to conceive alternatives.
Against a backdrop of democratic crisis, an intense symbolic battle is being waged. Cultural endeavours are a way of questioning power, of subverting it, of transgressing its forms, of denouncing it, of stimulating active scepticism. This is the place from where I have tried to build a discourse and a practice, not just individually from the image, but also collectively from pedagogy. Citizen protests to reinstate our rights first require a strengthening of the social fabric through the diversity of the territory we live in, in its complexity and totality. To make the territory our home, to inhabit it; to create and to build from the outside is the potential state of images to come. Imagination plays a key role in democratic construction. The artist must transform the violence of those who turn the landscape into an inert void. The First Congress of the Uwottüja indigenous people, held in 1984, proposed the defence of the territory in the sentence: “As a single churuata and with a single voice we defend our ancestral lands.12Declaration of the Uwottüja indigenous people, inhabitants of the sectors of the four rivers: Autana, Cuao, Sipapo, Guayapo, as well as the middle Orinoco sector of the municipality of Autana, Amazonas State, Venezuela. https://watanibasocioambiental.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Pronunciamiento-26.pdf-1.pdf
Today, faced with the new circumstances that challenge us as a society, we must inhabit the home as one single churuata and mobilize ourselves, both locally and globally, to sustain a working agenda that will allow us to actively participate in the promotion of rights: political, economic, cultural and social. Art must inhabit the other side, be the space for those who have no space. The majority is the sum of minorities. The image must recover life, inhabit the home; beauty, in its diversity of alternatives, is intolerable to the imperfect dictatorships of monolithic thinking.
The rights of indigenous peoples and the opposition to the exploitation of the Mining Arc and the pillaging of biodiversity should be part of the political and cultural actions of all social movements which wish to build democratic alternatives.
Nelson Garrido – Biography
Nelson Garrido attended primary and secondary school in Italy, France and Chile. In 1966-67 he studied Photography at the studio of the artist Carlos Cruz-Diez in Paris.
The ONG (Organización Nelson Garrido) Espacios para la Creación is based on his personal experiences and methodology as a photography teacher. A photography school and alternative cultural centre, ONG has become a key reference point for present-day Venezuelan art practice and is increasingly expanding its reach to cover the whole of Latin America. Through his art practice Garrido has created an iconographic vocabulary that fuses religion, sex, humour and popular imagery. His often violent and irreverent work is grounded in ongoing experimentation with means of expression and an in-depth questioning of socially-accepted norms and beliefs. The photographic mise-en-scène is his starting point and the aesthetics of the ugly, an eroticism revisited from the perspective of religious sacrifice, and violence as the trigger of reactions, are constants in his work.
He was the first Venezuelan photographer distinguished with his country’s National Visual Arts Prize (1991) and his work has been seen in countless solo and group exhibitions around the world, the most recent being Mapas Abierto and the Venice Architecture Biennale.
