Venezuelan authorities said Monday that a group of indigenous people attacked with bows and arrows the installations of a military base in the Cerro Yapacana National Park, in the southwestern Venezuelan state of Amazonas.
The attack, according to the head of the Strategic Operational Command of the Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela (CEOFANB), Domingo Hernández Lárez, occurred after the Venezuelan authorities confiscated “materials for the destruction and depredation of the environment” that would be used by the illegal gold mining.
“After the takeover (…) some young indigenous people from the region, ‘mercenaries’ who work for foreign mining companies as prospectors, pavers, loggers and bodyguards, attacked the base of the Bolivarian Armed Forces,” Domingo Hernández Lárez explained on the web. social Twitter.
According to the head of the CEOFANB, “uprooted indigenous youth are being exploited and used as a strike force by criminal groups to violate the laws of the Republic.”
“National Parks must be protected, it is a duty and a constitutional right,” he stressed.
Domingo Hernández Lárez highlighted, in the same social network, that mining “contributes to the destruction of Venezuelan forest reserves, to water pollution, to soil degradation, to the extinction of the national flora and fauna.”
Last Saturday, after a river and land patrol, the Venezuelan military dismantled two illegal mines (El Limón and La Moya) in the Yapacana National Park, seizing 19 motor pumps, nine hose reels, seven barrels of fuel, and five electric generators.
According to the local press, seven people of Colombian nationality were arrested, who were allegedly in Venezuela irregularly to carry out illegal mining activities.
Source: TSF
