Characterised by lawlessness and guerrilla violence, Amazonian mineral mining in Venezuela has attracted the US as it bids to cut off China.
At a discrete location near Venezuela’s mining region, several men handle blueish-black gravel in weathered hands.
The minerals they are transporting come from mines seized in 2023 by National Liberation Army guerrillas from Colombia. “Months later, they even brought in helicopters,” one miner tells researchers from the investigative outlet Amazon Underworld. “Everything was chaos. They were taking the material away.”
Attention following the US capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, on 3 January initially focused on the country’s flagging oil sector. But another potential bonanza lies in the south, where vast mineral reserves lie beneath remote jungle. Control of this area is violently contested between feuding armed groups.
In early March, Maduro’s replacement, Delcy Rodríguez, met with mining executives – including several from the US – and promised to move at “Trump speed” to unlock these riches.
Doing so would require bringing order to an anarchic sector in which industrial mining is almost non-existent and production by state mining company Minerven is largely made up of minerals traded from artisanal mines.
Despite this opaque supply chain, a deal was announced shortly after the meeting that would see Minerven sell one tonne of gold to the commodity trader Trafigura, which has also done major deals in Venezuelan oil since the US intervention.
Flows of gold from southern Venezuela had long been crucial in propping up Maduro’s cash-strapped regime. But in recent years, new commodities have begun to gain ground: critical minerals.
“The gold in this area is already diminishing and there’s little left,” an Indigenous miner told Amazon Underworld, an investigative outlet that visited the region in mid-2025. “Now people are working mostly on these things: black sands, tin, coltan.”
Many of these resources ultimately end up in China, which controls 91% of global rare earth processing. Recent actions by the US under Donald Trump suggests his administration wants this to change. “The US wants to prevent China from accessing these resources, but they also want access themselves,” Bram Ebus, director of Amazon Underworld, tells Dialogue Earth.
Black sands
On the ground in Venezuela, black sands appear to be little more than coarse dirt. They sell for around USD 7.50 per kg. But they contain important traces of rare earth elements, crucial for renewable technologies, as well as advanced electronics and military hardware. They are mined in areas also rich in cassiterite, the source of tin used in the solder for electronic appliances, and coltan, which ends up in semiconductors and mobile phones.
US interest in these resources has so far been understated compared to its vocal promotion of Venezuelan oil. But the spectre of the White House has been present since the early days of the US intervention.
“You have steel, you have minerals – all the critical minerals. They have a great mining history that’s gone rusty,” the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, told journalists the day after Maduro’s capture. “President Trump is going to fix it and bring it back.”
He provided no details about how this would happen in practice.
Industrialising Venezuela’s minerals sector would be a still more daunting task than restoring its dilapidated oil infrastructure.
The reserves cover a vast swathe of territory in the remote southern states of Bolívar and Amazonas. In 2016, Maduro designated 112,000 sq km of this area the “Orinoco mining arc”, and later announced plans to trade minerals with China and other members of the BRICS bloc.
There is still no formal geological mapping of these mineral reserves, however, and commercial mining infrastructure remains all but non-existent. Instead, excavation is carried out by local miners using rudimentary techniques such as dredging rivers from makeshift barges and digging shallow holes. The miners include thousands of Indigenous people, whose marginalised economic position forces them into an economy that poses a severe threat to their ancestral lands and ways of life.
Executions, forced labour and child workers
Aside from a lack of oversight and regulation, miners also work in conditions of chronic insecurity. Many operations take place under the control of armed groups, including Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN).
Amazon Underworld’s research details how mining communities are subjected to systematic human rights abuses, including summary executions, forced labour, child recruitment and sexual violence. Freedom of movement is restricted. Punishments are imposed upon miners accused of theft or insubordination.
“They have a prison there, with barbed wire and everything,” one miner told researchers. “But you can’t do anything about it, because if you do, they’ll throw you in there, too.”
Similarly brutal conditions have long been documented in Venezuela’s illegal gold sector, alongside deforestation and mercury poisoning of rivers. But the rise of critical minerals is creating new dangers, for both the environment and human health.
“We don’t know what disaster is coming, because everyone is searching for these rare earth elements, digging holes everywhere, making it look like a ravaged field,” Venezuelan environmental journalist Fritz Sánchez tells Dialogue Earth.
Indigenous miners have reported adverse health impacts, adds Sánchez: “They have skin burns. They have persistent joint pain, swollen joints and a series of pathologies associated with the radioactivity of the minerals.” Due to the lack of clinics in these remote areas, such claims cannot be medically documented, he says.
According to Amazon Underworld’s investigations, Venezuelan state forces collaborate with Colombian guerrillas in this shadow economy. Mineral ores must be moved in bulk, with kickbacks paid to local military who permit or facilitate the transport. The Venezuelan government recently refused to comment on allegations of criminal activity in its mining sector.
Amazon Underworld discovered that some of the ores are sold to traders, who move them across the border into Colombia. There, they are processed and exported using fraudulent customs codes. Another portion is sold to collection hubs set up in 2023 by another state mining company, the Venezuelan Mining Corporation (CVM), then shipped. Export documents and testimonies collected by Amazon Underworld indicate that via both routes, most of the minerals ultimately reach China.
Due diligence guidelines issued by the China Chamber of Commerce for Metals, Minerals and Chemicals aim to mitigate human rights and environmental risks linked to mineral supply chains. However, these guidelines are voluntary. And the export documents demonstrate that these minerals from troubled regions like Venezuela can still reach Chinese industrial hubs with relative ease.
Production on the rise?
The lawlessness of the region presents an issue for any companies seeking to invest. That has not prevented the Venezuelan government from pushing for more mining. Two weeks after the US action, Rodríguez announced plans to increase gold production by 30% during 2026, alongside iron, bauxite and critical minerals.
The results can be seen on the ground. “Fuel is flooding to these mining areas, and none of this mining would happen if they didn’t have access to fuel,” Cristina Burelli, director of the NGO SOS Orinoco, tells Dialogue Earth. “When [Rodríguez] says ‘we’re going to increase mining,’ it’s a signal to just keep doing what they’re doing.”
Amazon Underworld’s Ebus says US mining companies are unlikely to rush to invest in a sector fraught with legal and security challenges.
Much of the mining takes place in protected areas, including the Yapacana national park in Amazonas; mining is entirely outlawed in the state. As per Venezuela’s constitution, mining in Bolívar state requires consultation with Indigenous communities – who would likely oppose large-scale extraction on their ancestral lands.
“I think what’s more plausible is that the US will buy from Venezuelan state companies and then refine in the US, and basically pretend they don’t know it’s coming from illegal mines,” Ebus says.
Until recently, US sanctions on Venezuelan gold and mining companies would have complicated such an arrangement. But on 6 March, the US treasury’s office of foreign assets control (Ofac) issued a general licence authorising certain transactions in Venezuelan gold, enabling the sale of Minerven’s gold to Trafigura. This is potentially a signal that the US is open to involvement in Venezuelan minerals.
This is not a surprise to David Soud, head of research and analysis at the consulting firm IR Consilium: “They did it with the oil, where Ofac issues a limited licence in an otherwise heavily sanctioned environment.”
Ebus says: “It’s remarkable that Washington sanctioned Minerven for illegal practices in 2019, watched it fail to change its behaviour, and is now introducing corporate investors to it. Not only corporations interested in direct mining, but also those sourcing Venezuelan gold will be financing the ongoing violence that has been documented over the last decade.”
The guerrilla challenge
The US designation of Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN) as a terrorist organisation complicates matters: any company sourcing minerals from ELN-controlled mines risks being accused of financing terrorism.
Trump has clashed with his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, whom the US accuses of benefitting terrorist groups like the ELN via his peace policies. In February, Trump told reporters the US and Colombia had vowed to fight together against the group. Colombia will hold a presidential election in May and Petro cannot run again, so it is unclear how this apparent commitment will develop.
Even if the ELN were defeated – far from a foregone conclusion – there is still the presence of other armed groups to contend with. Dissidents from the demobilised Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) and Venezuelan gangs, both also present in the area, could seek to capitalise on any power vacuum. The ELN’s battles with rival groups and military forces in Colombia have seen thousands of civilians displaced by the crossfire.
The need for reform
Beyond military action, any genuine attempt to clean up Venezuela’s mining sector would require addressing the needs of vulnerable local communities. They are forced into mining by coercion or poverty.
“There’s no government programmes, no health, no education,” Burelli says. “If you’re really going to tackle illegal mining, you have to provide alternatives to these thousands of impoverished people.”
At present, there is little sign that such holistic solutions are a priority for either Trump or the Rodríguez government. This means scrutiny and reputational risks will remain high for any current or future buyers of Venezuelan minerals.
“Illegal mining in Venezuela is not only devastating Indigenous communities and fragile ecosystems but also eroding the stability of mineral supply chains, which are central to the energy transition,” Emily Iona Stewart, head of policy and advocacy at the NGO Global Witness, tells Dialogue Earth.
“What’s needed now is full supply chain transparency, enforcement of existing sanctions, due diligence laws, and meaningful investment in community-led alternatives to illegal mining.”
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