Not all criminal gangs are alike, and understanding the differences in their origins, histories, and interests helps to grasp the complex dynamics of sovereignty that they exercise in the jungle confines of Venezuelan territory.
The 3,718 mining sites and 42 clandestine airstrips identified by satellites from space in Venezuelan Guayana serve the illicit activities of criminal gangs, both foreign and native, that sometimes confederate and other times conflict with each other, imposing their law with almost no state opposition.
Various* / Armando.info (Venezuela) – 10/02/2022
In general, there is a huge contrast between the harsh and precarious reality of the main Venezuelan cities concentrated along the northern coastal axis of the country and the natural exuberance – ecological and geological – of the territory south of the Orinoco River, the mythical Guayana of Walter Raleigh, José Gumilla, and Alejandro de Humboldt. However, they share a common feature: in recent years, organized crime has taken control of increasingly larger areas in both regions; it’s just that, until now, public attention and security forces have mostly focused on the cities.
This is curious, because the southern half of Venezuela has been the subject of specific measures adopted by the governments of the self-styled Bolivarian Revolution that, whether under the pretext of protecting a key natural habitat for the nation or preserving resource exploitation for the state, have pushed for intervention. Mining has been prohibited in the Amazonas state since 1989 due to decree 269 of the then government, led by Carlos Andrés Pérez, but 20 years later, in 2009, Hugo Chávez had to order the militarization of the area to expel hundreds of miners. Another initiative by the revolutionary commander, the creation of the so-called Orinoco Mining Arc, was finally implemented in 2016 by his successor, Nicolás Maduro, in an area of 112,000 square kilometers in the Bolívar state, aiming to promote mineral extraction, albeit intensive, at least orderly, by private ventures in partnership with the state.
The result, in any case, has been different: guerrillas, garimpeiros, and criminal gangs that call themselves unions or syndicates finance their activities by practically unchallenged control of mines, extortion businesses, and the trafficking of minerals, drugs, and weapons. The criminal brotherhood divides, sometimes with internal tensions, an area of 418,000 square kilometers, equivalent to the combined territories of Germany, Costa Rica, and Cyprus.
A database created for this investigation, based on military and media reports issued between January 2018 and September 2021, identified seven armed groups that engage in criminal activities in the area, manifesting in at least 21 types of crimes.
In the Bolívar state, for example, megabands led by leaders known by their nicknames dominate: Toto, Fabio, Juancho, El Viejo, and Run, among others. They have established strongholds in the municipalities of Roscio, El Callao, and Sifontes.
In the Amazonas state, the permeability of the borders with Colombia and Brazil is a fundamental factor. There, the law of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the so-called dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a demobilized guerrilla group following the peace process, has predominates, although a faction decided to take up arms again.
Armed Groups in Amazonas and Bolívar
Hover over each point to see details. The location of each point is approximate; they represent areas or zones of influence of armed groups.
Undesirable Guests in the Green Mansion
The penultimate time G.T. (whose name is omitted for security reasons), an indigenous person from the Baniva ethnic group – a community of just over a thousand people distributed between Venezuela and Brazil – born on a small island in southern Amazonas state, visited his sport fishing camp in the Río Negro municipality, something had changed radically. The area, bathed by a branch of the Casiquiare River – the waterway connecting the basins of the Orinoco and the Amazon – is more than five days of navigation from the state capital, in almost virgin territory. G.T. maintained the site as a service camp and mecca for fishermen, who came from far and wide to catch specimens of pavón or tucunaré (Cichla ocellaris), a much-valued species as a trophy in sport fishing in the waters of the Orinoquía.
That time, in 2011, a group of armed men who identified themselves as members of the FARC, dressed as civilians, approached to talk. G.T., now 47 years old, admits that their treatment was “respectful”. However, he and his family decided not to return to the camp. After all, clients were not going to return under those conditions.
The municipalities of Atures, Autana, Atabapo, Maroa, and Río Negro form the border belt of the Venezuelan Amazonas state facing the Colombian departments of Guainía and Vichada. These territories in eastern Colombia had traditionally been strongholds of the FARC. The main rivers in the area – Inírida, Guaviare, Vichada, Meta, Orinoco, Atabapo, Guainía, and Negro, including the Venezuelan part – as well as the extensive capillary network of streams and branches, where the Baniva indigenous person used to fish pavón, facilitated the migration of the Colombian guerrilla into Venezuela in a gradual osmosis. The weakening of local leadership and the low institutional presence on the Venezuelan side contributed further. The river corridors were initially key for the provision of supplies and logistics required for guerrilla campaigns; later, they helped create a sort of relief area in Venezuela; finally, they provided an opportunity for seizing illicit activities that provide funding.
A variety of fine streams have given the guerrillas means to initially supply provisions and later develop illegal economies. Photo: Sergio González.
Public denunciations of the presence of the FARC in the Venezuelan Amazonas date back to at least the early s. XXI. However, with the signing of the Peace Agreements in Cartagena in 2016 between the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC, a vacuum was created that the ELN, which had not had much presence in Guainía and Vichada, hurried to fill. The ELN, traditionally more active in the Llanos region, made its first moves in southern Amazonas with the José Daniel Pérez Carrero Front, sources consulted confirmed. Later, the current dissidents of the FARC established themselves in Venezuela under the franchise of the Acacio Medina Front, created in 2012, and led by Géner García Molina or Jhon 40.
As can be seen, the expansion of the Colombian guerrilla in the extreme south of Venezuela began in the least populated area. But today, it extends across the seven municipalities of Amazonas state.
Amazonas is a region with almost no local resources and very limited coverage by the national press. Therefore, journalistic reports from that entity are few in the database. Still, they show that since 2016 – the year of the Peace Agreements in Colombia – there has been an increase in reports against the rise of mining, military abuses, and the incursions of armed groups.
The expansion of the ELN and the dissidents of the FARC is associated not only with interest in mineral extraction but also with control of routes for drug trafficking originating from the Colombian departments of Meta, Guaviare, and the Cumaribo municipality in Vichada, towards Venezuelan territory. They profit by providing security services or allowing transit and presence in the area, confirms a report from March 2021 by the Defender of the People of Colombia.
Defender of the Peop… by ArmandoInfo
For example, in January 2021, a boat sank a little more than expected while navigating the Inírida River, alerting the Colombian Navy. After checking supplies covering the bottom, the military found a stash with 600 kilograms of marijuana presumed to be destined for Venezuela. During the rainy season, they take advantage of the rise of small rivers to move and avoid military controls, reports from the database indicate.
Drugs were seized from a boat with a false bottom navigating the Inírida River. Photo: El Morichal.
Political tensions between Caracas and Bogotá, which led to the diplomatic rupture in 2019, created a “favorable scenario” for the “tactical positioning” of Colombian guerrillas on the border to take advantage of “the geographical and environmental conditions of the territory for the exploitation of illegal economies and the use of this area as a refuge and rear guard”, according to the same report.
The ELN and dissidents seek to coordinate their actions in the Venezuelan Amazonas, including a peaceful approach to indigenous communities. However, this has not prevented the invasion of territories, the construction of certain infrastructures – such as camps or airstrips – and forced recruitment, among other activities, from alienating the locals and forcing the indigenous people to migrate to Colombia and Brazil.
Although the Bolivarian Armed Forces maintains its presence in the area, there are no reasons to believe that it is to expel or even contain the guerrillas. Instead, testimonies abound regarding their dedication to irregular or illicit practices. Military officials have been denounced for robbing those traveling aboard boats in Colombian waters. In mid-2019, for instance, seven Venezuelan soldiers shot at a Colombian boat, which they subsequently intercepted to rob its crew.
In the north of the Amazonas state, where the borders of the Venezuelan states of Apure and Bolívar converge with the Colombian department of Vichada, the guerrilla has gained strategic control over an important river crossroads. In the Atures municipality – named after the famous rapids of the Orinoco River – the ELN shares territory with the Décimo Front of the dissidents of the FARC and they divide tasks from Puerto Carreño – the city that dominates the crossing of Meta and Orinoco – with two other armed groups, successors of paramilitaries: Los Puntilleros Libertadores del Vichada (PLV) and the Colombian Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces (AGC).
Violent reprisals are already occurring on the Venezuelan side of the border, albeit they are not yet common. Two incidents investigated by Colombian authorities suggest this: In June 2019, two male corpses were found in Puerto Carreño. Both were young Venezuelans. Ten months later, the bodies of two other men, one Colombian and one Venezuelan, were found with a note attached that read: “For traitors and toads [informers, in colloquial Spanish in Colombia and Venezuela]”. Both cases were attributed to the dissidents of the FARC.
Miners Against Indigenous Peoples
To the south of Amazonas, another invader has just completed 40 years of occupation. They are the garimpeiros, a Portuguese term that refers to illegal miners. As their name suggests, they often come from Brazil and operate mainly in the territory of the Yanomami people, which is binational.
They come for the gold rush and establish themselves with blood and fire when necessary. The massacre of Haximú, a Yanomami community near the sources of the Orinoco River, in Venezuela, is still remembered. In 1993, 16 indigenous people were brutally murdered by garimpeiros. The community was set on fire. And, as if nothing had happened, the garimpeiros continued to operate there, among other reasons due to the laxity of Brazilian justice, which later was responsible for examining the case given the nationality of the accused and its competence to process extraterritorial crimes: only five of the 22 perpetrators of the massacre were convicted.
In fact, the database prepared for this report confirms that press and indigenous organization reports continue to locate the bulk of current activity by garimpeiros not far from Haximú, along the course of the Ocamo River.
The entry corridor to Venezuela for miners passes through Delgado Chalbaud Hill, in the Parima Sierra, even though there is an outpost of Venezuelan military there. From that point, the expeditions are just two days of walking, or less, from Haximú, according to a statement that a Yanomami representation sent in 2020 to Provea, the main human rights organization in Venezuela: “Authorities allowed them to set up about four machines to extract gold and minerals… they are in the same lands that were circulating when the massacre occurred.”
Like the guerrillas, the garimpeiros told the indigenous people that they wanted to make an agreement with them peacefully. Here, fear had the upper hand, just as it did with the guerrillas. “We have no choice but to remain silent because they are armed, and we are afraid,” they indicated in the statement.
But the garimpeiros are also found much further north. One example is the Manapiare municipality, which borders the Bolívar state. Indigenous organizations Kuyunu of the Upper and Middle Ventuari River, Kuyujani of the Caura River, and Kuyujani of the Upper Orinoco reported in August 2021 the presence of 400 garimpeiros with 30 machines. “Indigenous peoples are being subjected to a state of slavery in the most remote and hard-to-reach communities in the Manapiare municipality,” denounced Gumersindo Castro, the Defender of the People of Amazonas state, without finding any response.
Despite this, illegal miners’ activity in the Amazonas state still appears modest compared to the frenzy on the Brazilian side. Brazilian indigenous leader, Dário Vitório Kopenawa, vice president of the Hutukara Yanomami Association, reported – via phone – the presence of 20,000 miners in the ancestral lands of his ethnic group on the Brazilian side. He also stated that among the miners are infiltrated members of the fearsome Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), one of the most powerful and feared criminal organizations in Brazil, as well as other armed groups. As the transference occurs in both directions through the porous border, Brazilian authorities find that dozens of Venezuelans with criminal records, who arrived in the country amid the unstoppable flow of refugees, have joined the ranks of the PCC.
“Invaders are growing, and entrepreneurs are supporting illegal garimpo with air transport, planes, helicopters, and boats,” said Kopenawa.
The Criminal Agenda of the ‘Syndicates’
The indigenous people of western Bolívar state, near the borders of Amazonas state, also suffer the abuses of armed invaders. Among them are guerrillas and also new actors: the syndicates.
Since at least May 2020, during the peak of the first wave of the pandemic, seven events have been reported that confirm the presence of both local armed groups and foreign guerrilla groups in the Sucre municipality of Bolívar state, the heart of the Caura National Park, decreed by the government of Nicolás Maduro in March 2017. The protected area, corresponding to the banks and basin of the Caura River, covers 7.5 million hectares.
In mid-July 2020, a platoon of 70 men in olive green uniforms took over a tourist camp on the banks of the Caura River. They were armed. Witnesses of the incursion reported that they hung their hammocks and remained in the area for at least three weeks. They identified themselves as dissidents of the FARC. That same month, the indigenous community of El Playón, in the Bajo Caura, reported the arrival of “armed Colombian groups” and, three months later, in the Las Pavas community, the account repeated: an “irregular group from Colombia” entered the indigenous territory and settled. Community leaders from the ye’kwana and sanemá ethnicities, living by the banks of the Caura, reported to the Kapé-Kapé Indigenous Observatory that these armed groups intimidated the community to take control of mining zones. The irregulars imposed restrictions on mobility. They could no longer fish or hunt freely.
For five months there was relative peace, but in March 2021, other irregular groups launched an attack in the El Kino mine in the Bajo Caura. A teacher and her husband were murdered. The first versions from indigenous spokespersons indicated that the armed group, which did not identify itself, asked them to evacuate the lands adjacent to the illegal deposit. As the response was negative, violence erupted.
Just a month later, another attack at the El Silencio mine resulted in the murder of four people, including the indigenous chief – leader or caudillo – of the La Felicidad community, Nelson Pérez, 30 years old. Three years earlier, a predecessor in the leadership, Misael Ramírez, was killed alongside his 18-year-old son in the same spot. The execution was attributed to an armed group that allied with indigenous sanemá to take over the area. Both Pérez and Ramírez were from the jivi ethnicity, which, along with members of the ye’kwana, forms the population of La Felicidad.
These actions are perpetrated by the so-called syndicates, which are actually gangs formed around pranes or criminal leaders. The sum of numerous testimonies enables us to assert that these groups dominated the deposits in Caura until July 2020. However, after that date, things changed. The aforementioned takeover of the tourist camp in Las Trincheras, as well as incursions into the communities of El Playón and Las Pavas, were actually vanguards of the dissidents of the FARC, who succeeded in displacing them. The four largest mines in Caura – Yuruani, La Bullita, Fijiriña, and San Pablo – are now in the hands of the dissidents of the FARC and the ELN, who, according to consulted leaders, benefit from payments in gold that mining machine owners must deliver. “They guarantee the security of miners and those who circulate in the area and charge a toll to each machine owner,” explained an indigenous leader.
When the government of Nicolás Maduro decreed the creation of the Caura National Park, the aim was to enhance the protection of the biodiversity reservoir and the refuge for indigenous peoples. However, the park sits adjacent to the so-called block 2 of the Orinoco Mining Arc, which exacerbates pressures in an area already affected by mining.
“These groups maintain the population of the basin under systematic threats and terror throughout the area. There is a structural situation of violence exercised by these irregulars against communities existing in the Caura and Ventuari rivers. If the deterioration of rights continues, the negative consequences driven by extractive activities will deepen,” warned the Wataniba NGO at the peak of the violence.
Violence in El Callao, Roscio, and Sifontes positions Bolívar as the third state with the highest rate of violent deaths in Venezuela. Photo: María Ramírez Cabello.
The Law of the Jungle
But for the so-called syndicates to suffer a defeat in the Caura basin does not mean they have been extinguished. In other areas of Bolívar state, they thrive.
This is evident, for example, in the dusty streets of the town of El Callao, the capital of the homonymous municipality. Founded in the mid-19th century on the banks of the Yuruani River, it is the most traditional gold vein in Venezuela. At one time it attracted foreign capital and a flood of workers from the English-speaking Caribbean, who brought with them all their cultural baggage. It is no coincidence that it has been a place of adaptation and development for local versions of the patois language and calypso, as well as for flavors reminiscent of the Antilles found in dishes like calalú, domplín, and yinyabié. In 2016, its Carnival festivities were recognized by UNESCO as World Heritage.
Violence has now been added to its traditions.
Oriannys Yánez learned this on the morning of November 11, when she saw her one-year-old baby arrive, covered in blood, at the emergency room of the Juan Germán Roscio hospital in El Callao.
Minutes earlier, a shootout had awakened the neighbors in the center of town. In that sector, Oriannys’s mother lived with the baby, her grandson, after deciding to move him from the nearby El Perú area on the outskirts of El Callao due to violence.
As the shooting subsided, the grandmother opened the door to the room where the baby and his nine-year-old brother were sleeping. She found the older child with the baby in his arms: “My brother is going to die, he’s going to die!”, he shouted. A stray bullet had pierced part of his abdomen and exited without causing severe damage to his organs.
It wasn’t an isolated incident. For over a decade, the triad composed of Roscio, El Callao, and Sifontes municipalities, in the southeast of Bolívar state, near the border with Guyana, has been a dangerous stretch under the control of armed groups. In 2016, 17 miners were found in a mass grave after their families reported them missing, in what became known as the Tumeremo massacre. In 2018, another seven miners were murdered and left along a dusty road leading to gold deposits. Over the past three years, dismembered bodies have been found. The most recent case occurred in September 2021, when passersby in El Callao discovered two human heads in a bag in the town’s center.
The 2021 assessment by the Venezuelan Violence Observatory found that the worsening socio-economic conditions in the country had a paradoxically positive effect: violent crime decreased: “Massive impoverishment, hardship, and loss of purchasing power… significantly reduced opportunities for crime.” However, when focusing the diagnosis on that area of Bolívar state, a contrary trend is found. Murders and disappearances have increased.
El Callao stands out with a rate of 511 violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. It is the most violent municipality in the country and records a rate 11 times higher than the average of violent deaths across Venezuela.
Despite the horrifying statistics of violence, this is not always the preferred tool of the syndicates, who derive their name from the structure of workers in the construction industry, from which many of their leaders originally came, as well as from the informal chain of command that reigns within Venezuelan prisons.
In the municipalities of Bolívar state where they operate, the syndicates impose clear rules and have become benefactors through foundations. In specific situations where persuasion does not produce results, they resort to aggression, intimidation, and punishment.
The arrival of these groups at the gold deposits starting in 2006 was a direct consequence of the militarization strategy implemented during the so-called mining reconversion of president Hugo Chávez, which aimed to replace illegal artisanal mining with state control. But that policy sank in September 2006, when six miners were shot dead by military personnel in the La Paragua area, in western Bolívar state. Four of the victims showed gunshot wounds to the back. The massacre triggered a strong and organized response from miners and an international media scandal. The military force retreated, but power brokers encouraged the installation of armed groups to maintain control over strategically important mining areas by force.
At one end of El Callao, in the area known as El Perú, residents agree that until eight years ago they lived relatively peacefully. Everything changed when a community man, nicknamed Toto, allied with others to commit crimes. His family had moved to El Callao during one of the many gold rush explosions. They started with armed robberies and extortion charging tolls to miners. In 2013, their actions escalated.
Today, his group dominates all the mines in El Perú, a vast area rich in gold. Some of the deposits under his authority include Cuatro Esquinas, La Laguna, Panamá, and La 45. They live in the mountains and only come down to the mining areas to collect their tithes: 30% of the products from miners, from millers, and from the purchase of gold sand processed by formal companies.
Alejandro Rafael Ochoa Sequea, Toto, is one of the ten most wanted criminals by the Judicial Police in Bolívar state. Two others on the same wanted poster are members of his gang: Picoro, arrested in 2020 while hiding in a bunker, and Zacarías, one of the many migrants from the former center of Venezuela’s heavy industry, Ciudad Guayana, who have been reconverted into criminals in the mining areas.
According to what is verified in the records of the database, between June 2020 and June 2021, state security forces arrested 72 alleged members of Toto‘s gang, killed another 26, and seized 28 weapons and over 800 rounds of ammunition from the gang, who also had drugs, gold, military uniforms, and even a notebook with an inventory of their arsenal and the “accounting” of the extortions from miners.
Keeping records of their weapons must be essential for this gang with militia aspirations: for instance, they have been seized with an AT4 rocket launcher, of Swedish manufacture, one of the most widely used anti-tank weapons in the world. In 2009, its manufacturer, Saab Bofors Dynamics, requested explanations from the Venezuelan government, its client, regarding the seizure of three such weapons in the possession of the Colombian FARC.
With this arsenal, there has been no incentive for a truce. Criminals often feel and are better equipped than security forces. Among the death toll attributed to Toto‘s gang are the murders of former councilor Mara Valdez, artist Carlos Clark, and agents of the police, military intelligence, and the National Guard. The violence used by Toto and other local gangs, such as those of El Chingo and Nacupay, has caused many locals to prefer to sell their homes and migrate.
“Here what is normal is abnormal; people have lost respect for life,” says a 61-year-old man who asked to remain unnamed for fear of reprisals.
The criminal influence of Toto extends into the neighboring Roscio municipality, where the Tren de Guayana and the gang of Ronny Colomé Cruz, alias Ronny Matón, also operate, an heir to deposits previously controlled by two criminals who were killed: Capitán and Gordo Bayón. The latter was shot in 2014 as he left the presidential palace of Miraflores in Caracas, the seat of the government of Nicolás Maduro, after participating in a discussion of the collective contract of the state-owned Orinoco Steelworks (Sidor).
The House of Paper
In the Sifontes municipality, since 2018, another criminal gang has emerged. It’s known as Run after its leader, Eduardo José Natera, alias El Run or El Pelón. Its area of control includes the municipal capital, Tumeremo, which it took over after advancing from more rural or jungle areas on the periphery. They call their headquarters The House of Paper, referring to the Spanish Netflix series.
It is characterized by its boldness and violence. It is attributed with the murder in April 2020 of the commander of the Army barracks in Tumeremo, lieutenant colonel León Ernesto Solís Mares. But its level of control over the area has led it to act, quite brazenly, through a philanthropic organization, RRR or 3R, with which it advances community activities such as repairing roads and electrical installations, as well as donating food and medicine. The names RRR or 3R were also given to the gang, but now it is commonly referred to as OR, precisely to differentiate it from the social foundation that was born under its cover.
In the area of action of this criminal organization, very close to the border with the Esequibo Territory, the presence of guerrillas has also been reported since 2018. A confrontation around that time between the gang of Josué Zurita, El Coporo, and alleged guerrillas from the ELN seemed to confirm not only this version but also that there were new disputes over territorial dominance.
Deforested patches month by month see more improvised camps, built with felled tree trunks and black plastic roofs. Photo: María Ramírez Cabello.
Further south, in the localities of Las Claritas and Kilómetro 88, at the entrance of the Gran Sabana and on the route to Brazil, the clan of Juan Gabriel Rivas Núñez, known as Juancho, dominates, who operates alongside Humbertico, son of the pran Humberto Martes, alias El Viejo, and Darwin Guevara, linked to Johan Petrica, one of the leaders of the so-called Tren de Aragua, probably the most powerful gang in Venezuela, with international connections. In the nearby town of El Dorado, it is the syndicate of Fabio Enrique González Isaza, Negro Fabio, that rules.
The criminals have established a sort of informal governance in the area, funded by what they collect through extortion from miners and anyone engaged in productive activity in the vicinity. “They exercise a power that is higher than that of police and military authorities,” says a resident of Las Claritas, who considers the town “an open prison.”
In Las Claritas, both the command and the business are clear to anyone seeking either to prosper or merely survive. Below the ground lies the country’s largest gold reserve. That is precisely where the government of Nicolás Maduro has been eager to promote a project to industrialize the production of gold, copper, and silver, along with Canadian company Gold Reserve. However, the apparent chaos and the underlying regime of the syndicates have so far prevented the construction of the two planned plants.
Within the Gran Sabana, mining is running at a frantic pace in the community of Ikabarú. There, the government legalized a block for gold exploitation in which indigenous communities participate. This should serve as a deterrent against the syndicates.
However, in December 2019, the massacre of six people in Ikabarú set off alarm bells. Men dressed in black entered the town and fired on a group of men in the center of the community. Among the victims was an indigenous person. Since then, increasingly persistent rumors have circulated about the incursion of the syndicate of El Ciego, who controls, along with El Sapito, the deposits of La Paragua, much further west, in Angostura municipality.
Criminals take advantage of the deteriorated road from Amazonas to the municipalities north and south of Bolívar for drug trafficking. Photo: Sergio González.
Other Traffics
It’s hard to believe that along the winding, mostly dirt road connecting Amazonas with Bolívar, any business could thrive. There are no services, and the State is absent. The buildings along the route are just empty shells, and amid the heat, there’s not a spot to cool off. Only the enormous rocks, as if placed on the land by a giant, distract the gaze.
But yes, a business does manage to thrive in that barren stretch, albeit illegally: the database clearly shows a drug trafficking corridor via the land route. More than half of the military operations conducted in the Cedeño municipality, one of the 11 in Bolívar state and adjacent to Amazonas state, are linked to drug seizures.
In April 2019, Elvin Bolívar and Marlon Yeison were detained at a military checkpoint of the National Guard, five hours from the capital of Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of Amazonas. They were traveling in a van where they hid 19 kilograms of marijuana, of the crispy type – cultivated in greenhouses and more potent – inside the doors, in the dashboard, and in the roof, according to the military report. One of the men had a Colombian identity document. Authorities reported that the drugs originated from Colombia.
In another four military reports from the database, whose seizures total 78 kilograms of drugs, those detained were traveling from Puerto Ayacucho to Ciudad Bolívar or Puerto Ordaz, both cities in Bolívar state, on the banks of the Orinoco. They hid marijuana or cocaine in different compartments. The route then continues to Tumeremo, Las Claritas, and Santa Elena de Uairén, on the border with Brazil.
Elis Lugo usurped military functions to transport 376 kilograms of marijuana. Photo: GNB CZ N°62 Bolívar.
In January 2020, dressed in military uniform, Elis Lugo was traveling from Puerto Ayacucho to Ciudad Bolívar with 376 kilograms of marijuana with him. The 47-year-old man carried an identification as a supposed Brigadier General of the Army. Additionally, he was traveling in a white Toyota Land Cruiser without plates, resembling those of the military fleet.
This had allowed him to progress unimpeded for over 400 kilometers along the road. At the Maripa checkpoint, near the confluence of the Caura River and the Orinoco, according to the later report of the Public Ministry, Lugo refused to exit the vehicle and demanded that military officials notify his superior of the situation. When realized, he fled. The National Guard personnel shot the rear tires of the vehicle and managed to catch up with him a kilometer and a half away. The 5th Prosecutor of Ciudad Bolívar charged the false general for illicit trafficking of narcotic and psychotropic substances and five other crimes.
In 2021, despite the pandemic lockdown, three quarters of a million dollars circulated through Bolívar’s roads but did not reach their end.
The mobilization of large amounts of cash is another finding revealed by the data and shows how the booty from gold is still being exploited in southern Venezuela. In 2021, even with the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, three-quarters of a million dollars in cash were seized.
The largest seizure occurred in June. José Alberto Reyes Chueco was arrested in San Félix, the eastern section of Ciudad Guayana, with 650,000 dollars in cash. The National Guard reported that Reyes Chueco was part of the criminal organization El Dorado, dedicated to “the marketing of war weapons in mining areas of the state.” From his phone, screenshots of conversations on WhatsApp with images of weapons and ammunition were extracted.
The second-largest seizure, amounting to 74,550 dollars, is also connected with El Dorado, but the population of that name, in the Sifontes municipality, one of the mining areas controlled by armed groups. The bounty was in the hands of Yolbill José Gámez, an officer of the Bolívar state Police.
Gold, drugs, mining supplies and equipment, weapons, other minerals, smuggled goods: the Guayana area, once a promise of progress and wild discoveries, is now a highway for organized crime’s illicit businesses.
(*) María de los Ángeles Ramírez, Joseph Poliszuk, and María Antonieta Segovia.
This is the second installment of a series investigated and published simultaneously by Armando.info and El País, with the support of the Tropical Forests Research Network of the Pulitzer Center and the Norwegian organization EarthRise Media.
In the design, programming, and assembly of the algorithm, map, research, and editing, participated Jorge Luis Cortés, Cristian Hernández, Javier Lafuente, Ewald Scharfenberg, Guiomar del Ser, Fernando Hernández, Ana Fernández, Eliezer Budasoff, Alejandro Gallardo, Luis Sevillano, Ignacio Catalán, Vanessa Pan, Yeilys Márquez, and Pablo Rodríguez.
Article published in Armando.info on 03/02/2022