Venezuela’s history has long been shaped by its abundance of strategic natural resources and their exploitation by foreign actors. International attention today is fixed on its oil, but other resources are also being contested. In our investigation The Price of Progress: The Dark Side of Critical Minerals in the Amazon, we identified a target that has Washington’s full attention: black sands.

What is new is both the cast of international actors involved and the range of minerals at stake. Southern Venezuela, whose soil holds vast reserves of these coveted materials, is being extracted under the dominion of Colombian armed groups, principally the National Liberation Army (ELN).

According to testimonies from Indigenous community representatives, local residents, and miners, what is extracted is divided largely among the ELN, the armed forces, and international traffickers whom locals describe as “Chinese.” They report that these individuals arrive by helicopter at the mining sites, escorted by the armed group, to carry away “tons” of material by air.

China not only holds the world’s largest reserves of rare earth elements; it is also the primary destination for Venezuelan critical minerals. While most are exported through state-owned enterprises, a significant portion is first smuggled into Colombia, where it is laundered with fraudulent documentation, benefiting armed groups and corrupt officials. China also controls 91 percent of global processing capacity, granting the country enormous geopolitical leverage: even when other nations extract rare earths, they must send them to China to be processed.

The Trump administration, for its part, has made its appetite for these raw materials explicit. In a corridor of Air Force One, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said of Venezuela: “You have steel, you have minerals, right, all the critical minerals they have a great mining history that’s gone rusty” Energy Secretary Chris Wright, during a recent visit to Caracas, similarly highlighted the country’s “immense” natural resources, with minerals specifically in mind.

Washington has also made public its desire for territorial dominance over Greenland, another country with extensive critical mineral reserves, and has been signing major investments in rare earth refining. Critical minerals, essential to defense and artificial intelligence, would offer the United States a decisive geopolitical edge.

As the competition for critical minerals intensifies, the Amazon faces growing threats. We are talking about biodiversity, security, self-determination, and the right to life. Those who extract the material exist in a form of modern slavery; miners and Indigenous community members in Venezuela describe inhumane conditions, degrading pay, forced labor, sexual exploitation, corporal punishment, restricted movement, prison camps encircled by barbed wire in the middle of the jungle, and summary executions.

Although the ELN has historically been an ally of Chavismo, for acting president Delcy Rodríguez the group could become a thorn in the side of Caracas’s new strategic relationship with the United States. Much of the revenue from mineral extraction comes from areas where the guerrillas share profits informally with state security forces, and significant quantities of these minerals leave the country through unofficial channels.

Across the border, the ELN has become an uncomfortable presence for another leader, Gustavo Petro, whose peace negotiating team failed to achieve results at the dialogue table while hostilities escalated in areas under the group’s control. As rural security in Colombia has deteriorated on his watch, military action against the ELN could allow Bogotá to demonstrate to its citizens that it is willing to use the stick as well as the carrot.

For both countries, military operations targeting the ELN may be welcome, and they are, surprisingly, on Washington’s agenda. Few would believe that Trump genuinely cares about peace-building efforts in Colombia or that he is actively pursuing the ELN, but he could certainly invoke the fight against drug trafficking as a pretext for eliminating this obstacle to his pursuit of critical minerals and the oil infrastructure he is seeking to revive, as reflected in the frequent attacks on Colombian pipelines used as a mode of extortion.

When Petro visited the White House on February 3rd, in an unexpected meeting between two political adversaries, the agenda included combating the ELN under the banner of counter-narcotics operations. A bombing strike against the ELN in Catatumbo took place that same day. Further operations in Catatumbo and Arauca will likely take priority, but the Amazon is also on the agenda, including operations along the border corridor.

For Petro, the meeting is a forceful security statement at the close of his administration and a way to push back against critics who have accused him of distancing Colombia from a major geopolitical ally. For Trump, it represents an opportunity to drive military action against a group he holds responsible for drug trafficking, one that also sits atop significant natural resource reserves.

Any investor, however, will face legal, ethical, and socio-environmental obstacles, as well as serious logistical constraints due to a lack of infrastructure and security risks in areas with the presence of criminal groups and guerrilla movements listed on U.S. sanctions lists.

In other words, if American companies sought to engage in mining directly, national and foreign armed groups would almost certainly attempt to block, extort, or attack them, unleashing a new wave of violence that would inevitably engulf Indigenous communities and their ecosystems, once again trapped in the crossfire of competing power struggles. If instead companies preferred to purchase directly from Venezuelan state enterprises, they would be acquiring minerals from illegal mines where serious human rights violations have been committed for years, while indirectly financing armed groups, including the ELN.

For Indigenous communities mired in crisis, particularly amid Venezuela’s economic collapse, illicit mineral extraction has become an economic lifeline. But alternatives exist. No community invited armed groups, traffickers, or foreign multinationals to occupy their territories. These actors arrived to exploit institutional vacuums, not to respond to local needs.

Listening to the voices of those who live in these territories, and understanding what they seek for their own development, is both urgent and essential. Many communities face pressing needs; some might even consider subsistence mining as a path forward, but under conditions radically different from those imposed by the ELN or transnational criminal networks.

The fundamental problem is that neither Caracas, nor the Colombian guerrillas, nor Washington have shown any real intention of engaging with these communities. As long as the external forces involved continue to treat the Colombian-Venezuelan Amazon as a geopolitical chessboard or a reserve of critical minerals, and as long as they deliberately ignore the agency of its inhabitants, any strategy is doomed to fail.

__

This article was originally published in El País on February 20, 2026.