- Venezuela’s economic and political crises have driven away many international donors, leaving conservation groups without enough funding to sustain their operations.
- Widespread corruption and organized crime, as well as government hostility to foreign civil society organizations, has made it too dangerous for many conservation groups to carry out fieldwork in the country.
- Should President Nicolás Maduro win reelection later this month, conservation groups say the already dire situation could deteriorate even further.
Conservation has become a near-impossible task in many parts of Venezuela.
Government funding has dried up, political pressure has scared away international donors, and criminal groups continue to overpower the areas where the worst deforestation is happening. As the country prepares for an election at the end of the month — one that could be rigged in the ruling party’s favor — many environmental groups are quietly wondering how they’re going to survive another six years under President Nicolás Maduro.
“Environmental organizations, as well as Indigenous leaders, are finding it increasingly difficult to do their work,” said Olnar Ortiz, national coordinator for the Indigenous Peoples Penal Forum, a legal aid NGO. “It’s really difficult to go [to Venezuela] yourself because of the security issues and how hard it is to get access.”
In recent years, the Maduro government has become even more hostile to NGOs, intergovernmental groups and nonprofits. In February, a U.N. human rights agency was expelled for alleged dissident behavior. Last year, the head of the Red Cross was removed by the Supreme Court. While environmental groups can sometimes stay out of government crosshairs by doing less controversial work, such as in biodiversity, they still have to be careful, several groups told Mongabay.
On the coast, even trying to clean up oil spills can be a prickly subject for the government. Groups have been blocked from cleanup efforts, presumably because it would expose the true environmental impact of the accidents and shine a light on government negligence. Researchers trying to study the impacts of oil spills have resorted to monitoring satellite images because they can’t do fieldwork.
Under Maduro, Venezuela has spiraled into an economic crisis marked by hyperinflation, food scarcity and the outmigration of more than 7.7 million people. Millions of residents survive on less than $100 a month. Conservation isn’t a priority in the national budget, let alone for state or local governments. Conservation groups have had to shift their expectations away from the public funding that was all but guaranteed in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Back then, the government not only supported a lot of NGOs but also allowed funding from the U.S. that went to species conservation, environmental education and the training of professionals, according to the Tierra Viva Foundation, which carries out biodiversity and sustainability projects in the country. As relations between the two countries has deteriorated, it’s become much harder for NGOs to coordinate with funders based in the U.S.
“It has to do with the tense relationship between the government of both countries more than anything else,” said Alejandro Luy González, general director of the Tierra Viva Foundation. “That’s what led [U.S. funders] to move away.”
USAID, one of the world’s leading development agencies, with programs in more than 100 countries, still has conservation projects in Venezuela but doesn’t share their locations or goals, saying it has to exercise extreme discretion in “non-permissive environments.” Conservationists face serious risks working in the country, a spokesperson told Mongabay.
The Foundation for the Development of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences (FUDECI), a local NGO that prepares crocodiles, turtles and other reptiles for release into the wild, said it had local, state and national funding for the first 20 years of its operations. But today, it doesn’t even have the budget to maintain its staff and research facilities. One biological station in the state of Amazonas was closed due to constant break-ins.
The organization now relies on support abroad, but has to compete with groups in other countries, which often look more appealing to donors because they’re safer, easier to visit and don’t run the risk of government intervention.
“It’s getting much, much more difficult,” said Omar Hernández, managing director of FUDECI. “We now have to compete globally with other countries that, you might say, have a better image. The financiers can visit [other countries] and see the projects, what is being done. Obviously, that has been restricting us a lot.”
For the Sea Turtle Conservation Program, which works on the Paria Peninsula in the Caribbean, the change has been gradual. In 2003, when it was founded, the program relied on the Ministry of Environment to cover all of its costs, including salaries, equipment and trips to isolated nesting areas. But by around 2012, the budget started to shrink. There wasn’t enough money to repair all of its boats.
Inflation rose to more than 60% the following year, and the government cut the program’s budget for travel and employee wages. By 2016, the program was operating with no funding at all. In more than a decade of work, it had managed to reduce turtle nest looting from 80% to 1%, thanks to patrols and community education. But those gains started to slip as the program lost money.
“The looters were having a field day,” founder Clemente Balladares recalled. “They knew we weren’t going to the beach or making the trips that we usually did.”
By 2017, the program team had stopped visiting the most isolated nesting sites, and there were only two team members doing patrols. The program had a moment of respite when the NGO Global Conservation started funding its operations. Balladares said the next several years were some of the program’s most successful, with a consistent payroll and the budget to hire staff, buy uniforms and invest in equipment.
Last year, Global Conservation ended its support for the Sea Turtle Conservation Program, in hopes that the social and political difficulties in Venezuela would improve in the future, Balladares said. Global Conservation didn’t respond to Mongabay’s request for comment.
Global Conservation isn’t alone in that decision. Many influential NGOs have chosen to pull out, or to relocate their work to satellite offices in neighboring Colombia or even Washington, D.C. Some of the most deforested and polluted parts of Venezuela, such as Amazonas and Bolívar states, appear to have no conservation groups present at all, according to Ortiz.
A bill that’s been under consideration for years would require all NGOs and universities to enter a public registry in order to collaborate with foreign organizations. The registry would allow the government to decide which groups it formally recognizes and require them to share the details of their work, putting dissidents and civil society in even more danger, critics say.
Election polls show that Maduro is deeply unpopular in the country, but outside observers have expressed concern that he could fix the election and govern for another six years. If that happens, the situation in Venezuela could deteriorate even further, conservation groups say, leaving the country’s many vulnerable ecosystems exposed to bad actors.
“If [Maduro wins], the situation will be much more serious, not only because of the wave of migration, but because even the few organizations that are working will obviously end up leaving,” Ortiz said. “Even I, as a defender, would have to leave the country.”
Banner image: President Nicolás Maduro. Photo by Eneas De Troya via Flickr. CC BY 2.0
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