There is a magnificent landscape in the Canaima National Park. There are giant table-top mountains in the jungle. The undergrowth has dark rivers through it.
Angel Falls, the tallest waterfall in the world, is located in the park, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The view from the air is less attractive. There are bare, brown patches of the land that are tell-tale signs of mining activity. There are dirt tracks through the forest. The west bank of the River Caron is polluted with environmental destruction.
The buffer zone that Unesco demands for World Heritage Sites is located on the edge of the park. In many cases they are inside the park.
Burelli says that Canaima is not the only one under threat. She says that the socialist governments of first Hugo Chvez and now Nicols Maduro have dismantled Venezuela's environmental institutions.
Venezuela has had a number of political, economic and humanitarian crises in recent years. The nation's monumental economic collapse, which has been exacerbated by US sanctions, has been the focus of media coverage.
The Washington Post reported that miners use a high pressure hose to erode river banks in search of gold at the edge of the national park.
The country's ecological problems have been less well-chronicled but they should be of concern to the international community.
As the economy has collapsed and oil revenue has dwindled, the regime has sought cash from other places. It has promoted mining in parts of the Amazon, mostly for gold, but also diamonds, coltan, bauxite, iron Ore and copper.
The country's oil infrastructure is getting old. One of the most biodiverse nations is stained by spills and slicks.
The director of the Center forConservation and Sustainability at the Washington, DC-based Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute described what is happening in southern Venezuela as ecocide.
We have one of the richest places on earth, some fantastic natural resources, we have a whole system of protected areas that was created to protect those resources, and now we have the beginning of a wave of destruction, and there is no indication that things are going to change.
Over the past 20 years, some 3,800 km2 of tree cover in the Venezuela Amazon has been destroyed, which is 1 per cent of the total.
The pace is increasing. In the past five years, half of that area has been lost.
There are scars on the land.
Venezuela has less than 6 per cent of the Amazon rainforest. Even a small share of the Amazon represents a lot of land. Almost all of the area south of the Orinoco river is rainforest. It is larger than California.
The Venezuela forest had largely escaped the destruction wreaked by logging, farming and mining in parts of Brazil and elsewhere. A civil society consortium that uses satellite imagery to monitor the Amazon has found that the majority of the Venezuela part is intact.
The fires are set to clear the land for cattle ranching and agriculture.
That is not the same. The threat of mining has grown. The amount of land used for mining south of the Orinoco has tripled in the past two decades. It increased 20 per cent between 2015 and 2020.
The southern bank of the river is rich in gold, diamonds, coltan and other minerals. It runs from Venezuela's border with Colombia in the west to the eastern frontier with Guyana and covers 12 per cent of national territory.
The government claims that mining in the arcs is well regulated, but many reports suggest a violent free-for-all in which criminal gangs and rebels fight for control of lucrative, illegally plundered resources.
It was described as an experiment in the exploitation of resources, regions and communities by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development last year.
The UN published a report in 2020 based on interviews with locals. There were cases of a miner being beaten in public for stealing a gas cylinder, a young man being shot in both hands for stealing a gram of gold, and a woman being beaten with sticks for stealing a phone.
The land has been impacted by the arcs. The UN report said that open pit mining is the most widely-used technique.
An aerial view of an illegal mine on the edge of the national park.
Environmentalists say open-pit mining can cause harm to the environment.
Environmental groups say that mining is encroaching on national parks and has spread well outside the arcs.
Satellite imagery and aerial photographs have been used to map 27 mining areas on the edge of the park and 32 inside the park. One is close to Angel Falls.
Mercury is used in gold mining and can be found in the water. The second-biggest river in Venezuela and nearly 1,000 km long may be at risk of being contaminated due to the use of mercury in gold mining operations.
In most cases, the tests showed that mercury levels exceeded the limit established by the World Health Organization.
The Pemn are at risk even if they have no connection with the industry because of the high concentrations of children under 18 years of age who do not work in mines.
The work is brutal.
Workers are often exploited in the mining communities.
Tourism used to be one of the main sources of employment in Canaima but that has dried up as Venezuela's economy has slumped in recent years. A Pemn tourist guide who worked in a gold mine on the edge of the park described the conditions to the Financial Times. For fear of reprisal, he did not want to be identified.
They worked in teams of six and slept on bunk beds in basic camps next to the mine. The team got 40 per cent of the gold's proceeds and the mine owners got the rest.
You are paid in gold. He explained that it is possible to change it into cash at a bad exchange rate. If you want to get it melted down and turned into an ingot, you can take it to Puerto Ordaz. You can sell it for more.
He was sitting on the edge of Lake Canaima, where waterfalls plunge down from the rocks above. One miner was told to keep an eye on the others and make sure they didn't steal. They would say that to us. They would play against each other.
There was so much violence in the camp that the work was brutal. I left as soon as possible.
A Pemn guide said that hundreds of young men had left the area to work in the gold mines. The tourism industry in Venezuela has collapsed because of all the problems. We had no choice.
The impact of mining on the park is hard to measure. It is difficult to get into some of these places and get information.
There is a lot to lose. There are an estimated 500 species of orchid and an extravagant array of plants in Canaima.
The tepuis are among the oldest geological formations in the world and each has its own unique ecology.
There is an extraordinary degree of species richness on the isolated mountaintops. They have some of the highest plant endemism in the world.
It was crude awakening.
Further north on Venezuela's long Caribbean coast, the threat to the Amazon is from oil.
Venezuela has produced trillions of barrels of oil since crude was found on Lake Maracaibo a century ago. The Nissos Amorgos tanker ran aground on the lake in 1997 and spilled 25,000 barrels of oil.
Even though the country is producing less oil, environmentalists say the situation has worsened in recent years.
US and European companies have either left the country or reduced operations, leaving the industry largely in the hands of Venezuela's state-owned and cash- strapped PDVSA, which does not have the resources to maintain its creaking infrastructure. Fires and explosions at refineries are relatively common according to trade unionists.
There were 46,080 oil spills at the company's operations between 2010 and, according to Klaus Essig, the environmental director at the National Institute of Aquatic Spaces, that's big and small.
The tepuis are in the middle of the Canaima National Park and are unique to the park.
There is little to suggest that things have improved since then.
Eduardo Klein, associate professor at the department of environmental studies at the Simn Bolvar University in Venezuela, says there has been an increase in oil spills. The situation is worse even though we are producing less oil.
There were three spills in a few months near the El Palito refinery.
The first one dumped an estimated 22,000 barrels of medium crude into the ocean, some of which washed up in mangrove swamps at the Morrocoy national park.
The mangroves have died from the oil. It would have been a complete disaster if the spill had reached Morrocoy.
There is a problem with oil leaking from underwater on Lake Maracaibo, which is home to Venezuela's oldest oil installations.
Most of them are over 50 years old, and it is like a plate of spaghetti with pipe upon pipe upon pipe.
There is no data.
There is a lack of reliable official information that is one of the biggest challenges for ecologists in Venezuela.
Basic economic data is no longer produced by the government. The environment ministry website is almost a decade old.
The environment ministry, the mining ministry, the head of the national parks service, and the state oil company were asked to comment on the article. None responded.
Klein says that they don't care about the environment.
The environmental degradation has not been stopped by President Nicols Maduro, pictured in 2016 with oil minister Eulogio del Pino and Opec Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo.
The indifference was on display at last year's COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, where most of the world committed to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. The commitment was signed by all of the Amazon nations. Venezuela did not.
Klein and the independent Venezuela Society of Ecology asked for state permission to assess damage from the oil spill, but due to fear of reprisals from the government and miners, they were not allowed to do so.
Klein says we have to rely on citizen science. People in the area were asked to post their photos of the damage on the website.
The first oil spill near El Palito was twice the size of the one in Mauritius, where a Japanese tanker ran aground on a coral reef. Venezuela's spill went largely unrecognized, despite international outrage and a clean-up. The regime never acknowledged it.
A woman takes a picture of a major spill of fuel oil covering Palma Sola beach near the El Palito refinery, west of the capital.
The government takes notice of the despoliation in its natural parks. In one of his rare statements on Canaima, in the year of 2018, he described what was happening there as ecocide, blaming it on armed groups, indigenous people and a rightwing political mafia.
The damage done to the park and the river system is terrible, and the government will crack down on the perpetrators. Four years later, nothing has changed.
The Unesco has asked the government to give a detailed report on the state of the park by December.
Despite the destruction of recent years, environmentalists say there is still time to save the Venezuela Amazon and even reverse it.
They say the government should stop mining in parks and only allow it in the mining arcs. The management policies that are respectful to the indigenous people are advocated by Provita. One answer is to encourage small-scale sustainable agriculture projects that would allow locals to turn their backs on mining.
The Amazon in Venezuela is in a better state than other countries in the region, according to the director of research for Provita.
We have to protect it now.
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