Along the Negro River, the artery that connects Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil in the Amazon, numerous Indigenous peoples and various riverside communities survive between illegal mining and armed groups—two de facto powers that dominate this border.
In the early hours of August 3rd, National Liberation Army (ELN) fighters attacked members of the Acacio Medina Front of the Segunda Marquetalia (SM)—a FARC dissident group—along the Pimichín creek, a tributary of the Negro River near the Venezuelan municipality of Maroa. The ELN launched this assault to eliminate the group’s leadership. The attack left dead and wounded, including commanders, though their exact number remains unconfirmed as of this article’s publication.
Until the day before the attack, both groups had shared territorial control over this Colombian-Venezuelan border region. Nevertheless, their quest for total dominance shattered this alliance—a marriage of convenience built on agreements to divide mines, share drug trafficking routes, and split profits. Now, according to local Indigenous leaders, miners and security force sources, the ELN controls and restricts all access and transit through the area as they remain the sole authority. Locals fear escalating violence and forced displacement of civilians towards Puerto Inírida, the capital of Colombia’s Guainía department. Sources reported troop movements in indigenous territories yesterday, potentially signaling the start of a new wave of regional violence.
News of this attack and uncertainty about its consequences spread quickly to neighboring populations up and down the river—communities whose fate remains tied to the unpredictable fluctuations of armed power.
DEATH IN SEARCH OF RICHESS
Weeks ago, seix boats from the Bolivarian National Guard (GNB), dozens of soldiers, and several drones patrol the Cunucunuma River, in the Venezuelan Amazon, over waters where rocks that the Indigenous Yekuana people consider sacred. We’re talking about granite and other formations—but not gold, a soft metal without value in their culture. Outside the Yekuana community, among mestizo miners, this indifference transforms into a fervor that dodges persecution, extortion, and death in pursuit of the coveted yellow sheen.
Dairo Pertuz*, 41 years old and with 13 years experience in mining, had been hiding for ten days along the banks of the Cunucunuma, where he turned on his phone for only a few minutes to evade the drones. His dredger —a 200 million Colombian peso structure (nearly USD 50,000) that bores into the riverbed—remained buried in pieces. “They say this operation will last 40 days. We have to wait to be able to work,” Dairo said.
The GNB returns to that place from time to time, but the miners are used to it. “We dismantle the dredges, hide the pieces, and move between the river mouths. We change locations every day while those people leave.”
Dairo lives in Inírida, the small capital of Guainía department in Colombia’s far southeast, but spends months in Cunucunuma seeking to tap veins of gold. From his home, he travels three days by boat, and along the way crosses several tolls that Indigenous people levy on those who exploit the jungle. When he reaches the mine on the river, outgoings continue: 25 grams of gold monthly for the José Pérez Carrero Front of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and for the Acacio Medina Front of the Second Marquetalia (SM), a group led by Iván Márquez, the former FARC chief negotiator in the 2016 Peace Agreement who later deserted the accord. Two Colombian guerrilla groups that control the border at gunpoint.
They also have to buy water, food, and plentiful fuel for the dredge engine. Then the profit is divided: 40 percent for the divers and 60 percent for the dredge owner, who must invest in repairs and spare parts. The miners spend fortunes on their operation but achieve good returns at a rate of 400,000 Colombian pesos per gram (about USD 100). “We extract at least 20 or 30 grams of gold in a day, and that’s already profitable. Sometimes we get 200, 400. Once we extracted 930 grams in ten hours of work,” Dairo recounted. It’s a precarious life, but on dry land, options aren’t abundant. According to Colombia’s National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), Guainía suffers 13.6% unemployment, and half of young people neither study nor work.
Dairo escaped that panorama and went to search for gold in the Inírida River, in the Atabapo, where glimmers of gold appear one day and vanish the next.Today up to 12 people work on his dredge, though just a few years ago he had to start over when the Colombian Navy burned down another. “They burn five of ours, but within days ten more appear,” he said confidently.
Several mines have already experienced a surge in production, and surely others will come later. But today Cunucunuma attracts the greatest interest in the Upper Orinoco: up to 200 dredges in permanent production, Dairo estimates. Cunucunuma lies in Venezuela, but its influence travels into Colombia and Brazil, where it irrigates the economies of many communities through a common artery: the extensive and winding Negro River.
A GHOST SETTLEMENT
In San Carlos de Río Negro, the second-largest town in Venezuelan state of Amazonas, there was once an airport with daily flights; a hospital that served locals and neighbors; two schools for students from here and nearby Indigenous settlements; seven tanks that supplied cheap gasoline to all /three countries; a cultural center where crowds gathered for patron saint festivals; an antenna that provided phone signal even on the Colombian side; a small merchant fleet with large iron dredges; and several stores that sold provisions arriving from the provincial capital, Puerto Ayacucho, via the river route.
San Carlos was once the largest population center in this entire area. Three thousand people lived here in its heyday, but Venezuela’s ruin left only 800 and turned this into a ghost settlement. “Many young people went to the mines, and the rest headed to Brazil,” Daniel Abreu recounted amid the ruins of his bakery business. Where there was once a well-stocked warehouse, today an industrial oven and unused kneading machine deteriorate alongside two display cases exhibiting cookies with Portuguese brand names.
That day there was hardly anyone in San Carlos: two women were selling tickets for a popular and cheap lottery played with drawings of animals, an informal gambling game; a girl was protecting herself from the sun with her umbrella; two men on a motorcycle were selling a butchered pig; five others waited in front of the mayor’s house seeking help; and two National Guard soldiers, who upon passing prompted Daniel’s cautious silence. When they left, the merchant, a mestizo Baré Indigenous man, resumed the conversation and said that the town’s infrastructure had been built during democracy, before Venezuela went adrift.
Despite everything, his shop remains well-located facing Plaza Bolívar, a green patch with large trees in the center of San Carlos. Diagonally across is the dock, where Daniel often arrived with his dredges loaded with food and liquor that he brought on seven-day river journeys. “You had to pay 4% to the ELN, but there was still money left over,” he said. That morning, only the pequepeques were navigating: canoes with small motors that ferry passengers to the town of San Felipe, in Colombia.
Today electricity in San Carlos arrives intermittently, and gasoline stopped flowing from Puerto Ayacucho last year. Now this community imports it expensively from Brazil in 20,000-liter boats. Daniel had a similar one, but today it lies rusted among the weeds next to his house’s yard. He climbed onto the bow as if he were still sailing.
“Of the people I met when I arrived 25 years ago, only my neighbors remain. The rest died or left. Even the dogs are gone: there wasn’t food for people, much less for them”.
Daniel Abreu, 61 years old, merchant.
But Daniel never thought of leaving. “Let those who are young leave,” he said. And quite a few are doing just that. “They go to the mines around these parts: Siapa, Moya, Cunucunuma, Camello, Carioca. Right now several are waiting for a Guard operation to pass so they can leave.”
Although gold wealth flows on Venezuelan soil, its profits aren’t seen in towns like San Carlos because the families who benefit crossed the border long ago. Even the guerrilla left: here the ELN used young people as informants and pack mules. Not anymore. Among the few stragglers, several others want to leave but don’t have the means. For some, as their only way out, only death remains: during recent years there have been several suicides here. In his house’s yard, somewhat discouraged after the tour, Abreu ventures a theory: “To escape reality, to not suffer what’s happening, they kill themselves.”
A FLAG OF THE AMAZON
Navigating for hours and days through these waters requires reconciling the river’s splendor and monotony, the vegetation and open sky on both shores: three horizontal bands that run parallel for hundreds of kilometers. This could be an Amazon flag: below, the dark band of the surface that supports the vessel and enables the journey; above, the green stripe of dense trees; and at the top, the blue strip, illuminated by the sun like a great incombustible lamp.
As we navigated in a heavy iron dredge, Indigenous communities that had been abandoned in recent years appeared along the Venezuelan shore.
130 kilometers from San Carlos and San Felipe, in Puerto Colombia, on March 27 we met indoors to avoid armed men from FARC dissidents who at 7pm roamed freely through the settlement. In a house’s yard, several Curripaco Indigenous people shared fish soup with chili and cassava while chatting busily in their language until they switched to Spanish to express their urgent concerns. First spoke Gilberto Elías*, a shopkeeper: “There’s no security here. The armed groups intend to live in the town. They used to do their business in the mountains; now they patrol here with rifles and put us at risk. Tomorrow others will come and accuse us of being collaborators,” he said with pursed lips.
At this halfway point 186 kilometers from Inírida by boat, 70 people live in board houses on a high riverbank. This used to be a useful passage for travelers and merchants transporting goods: 30 kilometers through a rough shortcut in Venezuelan territory shortened the journey to Maroa, a town located across from Puerto Colombia on the other side of the river. But the National Guard, say residents on both shores, began extorting and detaining travelers, and transit was interrupted. Now the only option is to travel three days or more, always on Colombian soil, through an area called Huesitos, where cargo wades through streams and muddy terrain on tractors to connect the Inírida River with the Negro.
Silent during the meeting, Mariela*, another Indigenous merchant, finally spoke: “Why do I have to share the fruit of my labor with those people?” The Acacio Medina dissident front charges a protection fee to those who make money in Puerto Colombia. And the ELN combattants, camped at a neighboring farm, do the same. But, as recent events confirm, the dynamics between these armed outfits shift constantly and remain volatile, often erupting into violent conflicts. Caught in the middle, civilians always bear the brunt. “I’m from here and I want to live here. Otherwise, I would have already left,” Mariela said resignedly.
Since 2023, Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office has warned of the risk faced by Indigenous people in this region due to threats from armed groups that feed off gold. “This illegal and violent exploitation has increased the financial capacity of armed groups, enabling them to strengthen their armed structures and impose territorial control. Under this context, the civilian population is exposed to serious violations of their rights,” said the then-ombudsman, Carlos Camargo. The Negro River bed is no longer exploited, but its current serves to transport extracted gold to different destinations in Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil.
The effects of mining’s ripples out from the deposits to the Negro River communities. Although Puerto Colombia showed no significant commercial activity, provisions and fuel are only sold due to gold demand. “Indigenous people are not miners. What happens is that foreigners hire our young people, and they go to the mines,” said Edson Meregildo from one end of the table, a young man who represents 14 communities and nearly 1,800 Indigenous people in Guainía.
Several of his compatriots left months or years ago for Cunucunuma,
and some returned lifeless in freezers connected to power generators, in speedboats that cross the rivers to their home communities, where families received their corpses.
From that same place, without delay, someone else always leaves as a replacement.
That night the conversation extended until late, and Edson, for security reasons, recommended sleeping in a hammock under that same roof. In the morning, dozens of Indigenous children who study and live in Puerto Colombia’s boarding school jumped into the river to bathe and play for a while before class. Then they approached the school kitchen and received a ration of cookies and coffee with milk.
The children were having fun without worries, but an unsettling atmosphere floated over the town: neighbors exchanged looks of suspicion or caution; almost no one spoke. Suddenly, a speedboat appeared with a man standing on the hull, dressed in civilian clothes, wearing a cap and dark glasses. The man jumped down and boarded another boat moored on the shore. When he bent over to start the motor, a pistol showed at his belt. “That was the guerrilla commander, the one who’s in charge of the area,” a boatman said later, when we were speeding away downriver.
GOLD ECONOMY
From Inírida, in a 45-minute flight over the jungle southward, small aircraft transport passengers and light cargo to a dirt runway in San Felipe, the new commercial capital of the Negro River in its Colombian-Venezuelan stretch. What doesn’t fly here arrives through the dark current by the tons: passengers, food, beverages, tools, bricks, cement, gasoline, and countless essential goods that sustain life in surrounding communities. Eighty percent of that cargo continues to the mines. The rest is consumed in this town that barely exceeds a thousand inhabitants.
Juvenal Herrera, owner of a business on the main street, arrived 20 years ago and can’t complain: he bought houses elsewhere and educated his children with money he makes in this place. “I’ve had days of 20 and 30 million. This place is good here,” he said, satisfied in his packed business. “Between December and January I brought in 120 drums of gasoline. By February there was none left.” Each drum—60 gallons—costs 1.2 million Colombian pesos (nearly USD 300) in Inírida and sells for double in San Felipe. If gold here is king, gasoline is queen: it powers the dredges and boat motors, the power generators and sound equipment in shops, the fans in hotels and the lights that illuminate the town each night. Although sometimes, when fuel is delayed, neighbors spend several months in darkness.
San Felipe doesn’t live unprotected like Puerto Colombia: here the Army and Navy have permanent posts, and soldiers patrol with rifles on their shoulders. But there’s a lot of money and illegal groups also control its flow here. Several merchants, transporters, Indigenous leaders, and even the Ombudsman’s Office confirm they are present, that shops are shaken down and commanders frequent the town dressed as civilians. But fear leads to self-censorship: in San Felipe the subject isn’t discussed easily or spontaneously. In chats between neighbors, among men sitting in front of businesses, anecdotes of past trips are shared, politics, soccer, and women are debated. But the delicate topic remains silent. “That’s not my business,” is the repeated response when one asks about territorial control.
The town consists of two paved streets where a minority of prosperous white merchants live, some of them retired miners, surrounded by three communities with dirt floors where hundreds of Yeral, Puinave, and Curripaco Indigenous people coexist in board houses with palm roofs. The boom enjoyed by the former is suffered by the latter. “It’s expensive here. Many miners come with gold, and everything goes up. This is a mining economy, pure gold. But not all of us have it,” complained Carlos Dos Santos, sitting under a tree on a hot morning on the town’s outskirts.
Dos Santos, a thin 38-year-old, is the highest authority of the August 1st community, where 43 Indigenous families subsist precariously. “We live off our plots, hunting and fishing. There was always fish here, but with mining it has decreased a lot, due to noise and contamination. Now we have to buy chicken and meat, but it’s very expensive,” Dos Santos said, his hands crossed on the table as if in prayer. Isolated in Colombia’s last corner, San Felipe’s inhabitants feel that governments have forgotten them.
“Several people have died here. The last one was two months ago: a pregnant girl died because we couldn’t get her out in time. She died with the child inside”.
Carlos Dos Santos, indigenous authority.
The town has a small health centre, but medicine supplies frequently fail, and those who can afford it pay millions to bring their pills by plane. There’s also a school that receives all children from the area, including those who cross from San Carlos. “Sometimes food takes a month traveling from Inírida. It gets lost on the journey, or arrives wet. But we have to accept it like that, because there’s nothing else. Sometimes food is delayed and teachers have to wait up to two months to start classes,” recounted Dos Santos, whose children also study there.
The captain, who shortly before spoke of gold as something foreign to his culture and assured with conviction that Indigenous people are not miners, later admitted that many men from communities around San Felipe have gone to the Venezuelan jungle in search of the golden dream. “Work for young people is very scarce here; there are no trades. Many go to the mines and don’t return. But we understand that they don’t find things to do here.”
A SHARED HOPELESSNESS
When the last borders of Colombia and Venezuela were left behind, the boat sailed past the immense Cocuy Rock, crossed the Brazilian border, and the current changed: the gentle flow met rocks and bristled among rapids that resembled the back of a furry animal. After 12 hours of downstream navigation, facing São Gabriel da Cachoeira in the Brazilian Amazon, the landscape also changed: buildings emerged from the jungle along with unusual urban bustle. But before disembarking, the wild persisted: on the water, perched like crabs on top of rocks, about fifty Indigenous people lived under tarps, exposed to the current that could sweep them away effortlessly. They came from different communities to collect official subsidies and camped for several days while receiving them. Before leaving, they would roll up their plastic tarps but leave the poles planted for others who would arrive at the same camp.
Here gasoline still rules: at the Padre Cícero port in early April, hundreds of Indigenous people lined up to fill plastic tanks financed by the mayor’s office. The fuel travels in tanker trucks aboard ships from Manaus and disembarks at Camanaos, a major port located 30 kilometers from São Gabriel. The line crawled slowly that morning, and many Indigenous people slept crowded in a barracks while waiting their turn to load.
Alexánder Moura*, a thin Venezuelan of Brazilian origin, watched the scramble by the dock and explained: “They use part of the gasoline for their motors, and sell the rest to miners. A lot of gasoline leaves here for mines in Brazil and Venezuela.” It’s a long back-and-forth across the river: fuel travels north, and south goes the gold extracted with it.
Alexánder was born and raised in Venezuela, but his grandparents are from here, and he decided to emigrate when the crisis worsened in his home country. In São Gabriel he survives with a wife and child, like hundreds of migrants who face xenophobia daily. “We have a chat group and we are many, mostly construction workers and stevedores. Here there are bosses who treat us badly, and pay us less than Brazilians. But we all support each other,” he said with his gaze fixed on the river.
According to the last census conducted in Brazil during 2022, more than 50,000 inhabitants live in São Gabriel, 48,000 are Indigenous people from 23 diverse ethnicities: Banivas, Curripacos, Barés, Yanomamis, and a long etcetera. The commercial heart, a few streets with shops competing for customers next to each other, prospers in the upper part; and no gold-selling establishments are visible, as the city is only a stopping point toward the enormous Brazilian market. Below, on the shore, a row of houses and establishments faces an empty beach. It’s the most desirable place in the city, but receives little attention. In front, wide and stormy, the Negro River churns among waterfalls that name this port: the cachoeiras.
The rest of the urban area and beyond belongs to military jurisdiction. Almost all of São Gabriel is under their control, and soldiers abound in cafés, bakeries, and hotels. This predominance dates back to the dictatorship the country experienced from 1964 to 1985, when in 1968 this border zone was declared a national security area. Even so, illicit activity flows: Brazilian legislation prohibits gold exploitation in Indigenous areas or natural reserves, but the city is a key link in trafficking. In 2023, a municipal judge asked the Ministry of Justice to urgently open a Federal Police station. According to him, the city’s location in the corridor coming from Colombia and Venezuela makes it strategic for illegal trafficking. Gold that travels to Itaituba passes through here, where metal of illegal origin enters the economy.
São Gabriel is a hideout: a beach where the disadvantaged take refuge before seeking their livelihood inland. Gasoline sales and the informal economy, which prospers in small stalls on the sidewalks, barely disguise the precariousness, and hopelessness must be common when suicides among Indigenous youth have become a public health problem. Another link that connects this place with San Carlos de Río Negro.
During a tour of the city, Alexánder, the Venezuelan construction worker, explained that agriculture has also declined in the four years he’s been here. Local ethnic groups receive government subsidies and supplement their income with the gasoline trade. Although most don’t participate directly in the gold business, they do get a small share of the profits and survive on those scraps. “They don’t hunt anymore, don’t plant, don’t fish. With that money they buy meat and chicken shipped in from Manaus,” he said.
The next day, at the port of Camanaos, several sweaty Venezuelans and Brazilians were unloading boats full of materials brought from Manaus, where the Negro and Amazon rivers meet. In several of those hulls, Brazil’s Federal Police have seized shipments of illegal gold that would travel via the Tapajós River to Itaituba.
The speedboat zigzagged through the Negro River searching for deeper areas, extending the journey as the afternoon sun began to set in the west. Clouds swirled and lightning threatened with sudden flashes. Cirilo, an Indigenous man with a wrinkled face, slowed down and pointed the bow toward a beach where the hull ran aground with the motor off. “That storm looks bad, too dangerous to continue like this. I’ve seen boats full of people capsize,” he said.
Cirilo climbed a slope and walked among the houses of a community that seemed abandoned. He shouted several times, but no one responded: the Indigenous people who inhabited those huts had fled who knew when and where. “We’ll sleep here. As soon as dawn breaks, we leave,” Cirilo said.
Renny, his son-in-law and helper, another Indigenous man everyone calls Pequeño, set up a shelter in the boat and hung several tarps to protect the space where both would spend the night. Then we sat on the beach to talk about his previous job, barely illuminated by lightning. “Now we’re carrying merchandise to the mines, and they pay us with gold; but I started as a stevedore: loading gasoline, provisions. Then I worked in several land mines, but the most I extracted was 39 little grams. That’s when I got tired and learned to dive. I was in Cunucunuma and others. There I did extract 70, 80 grams. Down there you get excited and stay hooked,” he said contentedly. “I saved myself from several big rocks. In the river’s darkness you can’t see, no matter how much you carry a flashlight. Several companions came out dead. They would tie them at the bottom and pull them out with a crane, dripping water. That’s as far as they got.”.
Pequeño watched the river’s peaceful flow and reflected on his role as provider and vehicle for incalculable wealth. “Gold travels through the river both ways: to Inírida and to Brazil. Same as mercury, which they carry hidden to avoid the law.” Pequeño said that in his brief time as a miner, he became afraid of the violence in the mines and that’s why he left the trade. Sitting on the shore, he remembered fights that were resolved with machete blows and anonymous dead who were buried somewhere in the jungle. Men who left their towns and families to risk their lives in search of elusive gold. “All for gold.”
*Some names in this story were changed for the safety of sources.
