Hundreds of fishermen in southern Lake Maracaibo, in western Venezuela, stopped casting their nets in the last week of March after observing massive numbers of dead fish and crabs along the lakeshore as a result of an oil spill in one of the lake’s tributaries, the Catatumbo River. “Our boats and nets have been damaged by the oil, the fish and shellfish are fleeing. We have stopped fishing and are helping the people from PDVSA (the Venezuelan state-owned oil company) to remove the oil,” fisherman Jesús Hernández, who normally plies his trade between the villages of Congo Mirador and Ologás, told Tierramérica in a telephone interview.

“But we need the government to acknowledge the damages,” he added.

The Catatumbo River stretches 450 km, half of it through Colombian territory. The river was contaminated with oil as the result of a Colombian guerrilla attack on a pipeline in early March.

But local fishermen, “who know about how the water flows,” according to Francisco Rivero, who is one of them, claim that the contamination of southern Lake Maracaibo “comes from the lake itself, from pipes owned by PDVSA.”