Venezuela’s numerous artisanal miners in the country’s El Callao mining region are coming under increasing pressure from the political administration in Caracas which, reportedly, has been ‘cutting’ deals with bigger gold mining operations that allow for a larger share of the returns from those operations to accrue to the government but progressively reduce the earnings of the small miners.
A September 12 Reuters report stated that large numbers of artisanal miners who have long been selling the gold they recovered to the government have, over the past year, had to leave the area on account of their inability to easily secure supplies with which to pursue their gold recovery operations. The difficulty in securing supplies is said to be linked to a wider initiative to ‘squeeze out’ the small miners so that more lucrative deals can be struck to afford the country’s treasury a bigger share of the returns from gold mining operations.
