EDITORIAL & OPINION — ODDS ‘N’ SODS — Many mineros poor but happy

The following is the third in a series of articles in which the author, an exploration geologist based in Delta, B.C., recounts his experiences working in the jungles of Venezuela in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Looking for gold in Venezuela is as simple as looking for mineros. These small-scale miners are human geological anomalies — mapping locations of their work can identify areas of high potential as effectively as soil sampling programs can.

They bore by hand circular shafts down which they chase thin veins, or wash away with tired old pumps layers of alluvium to run through sluices, or simply squat all day by the side of creeks, shoveling down to the pay seam and patiently panning their fortunes in wooden batellas, a gram at a time.

More amused than annoyed by the influx of Canadians, most mineros will gladly show you the thin veta they are mining, or the pan they have worked down to a tail, or the gold they washed out of the riffle mats of crudely constructed sluices in the middle of the jungle. I cannot figure out why, for most of them are working illegally. Any interest shown by mining companies for any of the land they are not-so-surreptitiously working will result in an apocalyptic invasion of Guardia Nacional, which will round up and remove the men who worked so hard to find what we seek.

On more than one descent into a clearing in the jungle, we would glimpse mineros fleeing from their pumps and pans, certain that the jig was up.

We would then stand in the clearing, yelling that we were harmless. The men, sheepishly grinning, returned to shake hands and show us their workings. They offered us lunch, prepared from provisions they had carried on their backs through 20 km of jungle, while we had just flown in from a breakfast of hot arrepas and freshly squeezed pineapple juice in Tumeremo.

Mineros are the friendliest and most hospitable people we meet — and the most apt to suffer at our hands. The merchants, restaurateurs and innkeepers who gladly take our bolivares seem the most xenophobic, the most weary of our motives.

Of course, not all of the mineros are so forgiving of our invasion. To drive through Las Claritas is to feel something bordering on hatred emanating from the corrugated tin shacks housing the thousands displaced from the Cristinas concessions. It is not difficult for them to associate a white face with their current plight. Claritas was built overnight, and overnight it became a slum.

Before, the inhabitants were free to live where they chose. Most of them lived in the jungle, and, while the conditions might not have been much better, they were at least of their own making. There is a collective loss of dignity at Claritas, one that is palpable and one not easily ignored by Canadians, who are more accustomed to providing relief than causing its need.

Claritas poses a difficult social question: the displaced had no legal right to be working where they were, yet they had done so all their lives, as had their fathers before them. The government maintains that the mineros work illegally, don’t pay taxes and don’t follow environmental regulations (mercury amalgamation is commonly used). The mineros argue that they have earned squatters’ rights through generations of mining. It is an issue unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable.

However, most of the mineros I met were the happiest of men. Their lives are simple by any standard. Perhaps it is this simplicity that accounts for their happiness. Few of us would work as hard for so little. Few of us sleep as well at the end of a long day, having won from the earth enough to go on.

Somewhere along the Chicanan River, on an unbearably hot afternoon in May, I met a man panning a small quebrada that spilled into the river. Stumbling out from the bush, I startled him; and he, me. We sat in a clearing for an hour. I spoke Spanish stumblingly, and he replied in impeccable English. He was a graduate of a university in Caracas, a chemist by profession and a minero by choice.

I asked him how long he had been working the creeks around Chicanan.

“I’ve been poor for 10 years, he said. His smile was full of tarnished teeth, and his gaunt face radiated contentment.