POPULATION-VENEZUELA: The Anu Peoples, Almost Over the Edge

By Humberto Márquez Reprint | | Print |

Humberto Marquez

CARACAS, Jul 11 1996 (IPS) - The Anu indigenous people of northwestern Venezuela — whose settlements gave the nation its name — are in danger of disappearing along with the Sinamaica lake around which they live, according to reports here.

Only 3,500 of their number remain, divided between nine poor communities with little formal education. And their lake, badly contaminated, is threatened by developments which have disrupted the sources from which it is fed, according to researchers.

The Anu have lived in houses erected on stilts in Sinamaica since before the 15th century, when the explorer Alonso de Ojeda landed here and christened the bay Venezuela because the landscape reminded him of Venice.

Later the name was given to the whole province, and then the nation. But the Anu people, who shared frontier lands between Venezuela and Colombia with their Wayuu neighbours, are now restricted to the banks of lake Sinamaica.

Traditionally, the men fish, and are responsible for hunting and building homes. The women bring up the children and weave the local enea plant fibre into textiles to cover roofs and walls.

In recent years, the Anu, known locally as the Paraujano, have also started transporting tourists in boats on visits around the lake. This enables visitors to appreciate the multicoloured houses which rise above the water on poles.

“The whole people is threatened with extinction along with the contaminated lake, where sedimentation caused by environmental deterioration is advancing,” said Wayuu researcher Ali Fernandez, from the local University of Zulia.

Water from the river which serves the Anu have been diverted for other uses. And a dam erected in the area serves Maracaibo (the regional capital) and the petrochemical industry, notes Fernandez. Further, there has been deforestation at the headwaters of the Guasare/Limon rivers.

Originally 65 sq km, the lake is getting smaller, as larger amounts of sediment are released from the Guasare/Limon due to deforestation upstream. Fish are disappearing and contamination from sewage produced by local residents is increasing.

“This nearly fishless water is used by the Anu for cooking, washing, as a playground for the children and for communication between the houses,” he said.

An official from the Environment Ministry, Jesus Moron, said he was aware of the sedimentation and the critical nature of the health situation. Many other factors played a part in reducing the size and affecting the quality of the lake, he said.

“This lake system has two sources of water,” Moron told IPS. “The first is the gulf of Venezuela, where waters seep up through osmosis from the subsoil and the second is the outflow from the lower Limon river.”

The Guasare/Limon rivers begin in Sierra de Perija, on the frontier with Colombia. Twice yearly their waters flood the lower stretches before reaching the Maracaibo lake. Some of the branches of these confluent rivers feed the lake, balancing the mixture of fresh and salt water in the system, said Moron.

Moron notes that more farms have been developed along the banks of the river in recent decades. These are mainly fruit farms which use water from tributaries of Guasare/Limon for irrigation purposes.

When the Guasare meets the Socuy to form the Limon, it has a flow of 2,000 litres per second “enough to supply 500,000 people,” said Moron. After the confluence it has a theorical flow of 3,500 litres per second.

However, when measurements were taken of the river it was actually found to have a flow of barely 900 litres per second, meaning downriver flooding would no longer occur.

The other cause “is that the low waters of the gulf, as in all the Caribbean, come in or go out further in 200 or 300-year periods. We are on the brink of a wane for the end of the century, but this is hard for the living generation to see,” said Moron.

However, Fernandez pointed out that for the Anu this generation “is decisive, as their habitat, their protein source and their economic income, as well as their spiritual food are all being constrained.”

“In the Anu cosmovision, the water is the mother, transmittor of knowledge and life,” said Fernandez. “We do not have to imagine what they feel seeing the Sinamaica turned into a contaminated marsh: the old people say that when the lake dies so will the people.”

This process “is advanced by illness, with the falling apart of education with the abandonment of the two local schools, with the emigration of people who can no longer live by fishing, to the belts of urban poverty,” he added.

The Indian Movement for Cultural Identity, the Paraujano Cultural Movement and the Zulia University want to declare an ecosystem emergency in Sinamaica. They have called for a reforestation programme in the Limon river valley.

A second proposal is to drag the sediment, but Moron warned that “any water programme in the area could worsen the action of the waters encouraging floods in the rainy season: a medicine which is worse than the illness itself.”

Another group of proposals Fernandez mentioned included “developing social programmes prioritising women and children, remodelling the schools and adopting a health plan on the basis of traditional indigenous medicine.”

He proposed the communities be included in garbage collection and sewage treatment systems, that water contamination be looked into along with emissions from the coal mines of Guasare, while extending the economic organisation programmes to the Anu.

Some years ago, UNESCO took steps to protect Sinamaica by declaring it a human heritage area, but as Venezuela never ratified the act it never came into effect.