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The main currency in Etheringbang is gold. Around 8pm, reggaeton starts blasting through the wooden dance palaces’ speakers, drowning out the generators growling along the riverbank. The town is not much more than one unpaved street along the Cuyuní, lined with nightclubs, brothels and restaurants as well as humble convenience stores and a few palm trees. Next to our landing spot is an office of Guyana’s Geology and Mines Commission and another building shared by the local police and a single migration officer.Įtheringbang has no mayor.

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These are the scars of gold mining, a major driver of environmental degradation in the Amazon basin.Īfter making a sharp turn above Venezuela, our plane heads for an unpaved airstrip, an ochre scratch in the verdant carpet below.

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Every few minutes, a patch of brown appears in the green vastness, pitted with pools of stagnant water, sometimes stretching along a dried-out riverbed or creek. Some distance to the right of our flight path is the site of Jonestown, where an infamous mass suicide by a fanatical U.S. Throughout the 90-minute flight from Georgetown, our plane never climbs above the clouds, giving us an unrivalled view of the rainforest. The other seven seats are stacked with vegetables and mining equipment. The small aircraft that I take to the outpost carries four other people – a Guyanese miner and two Venezuelan women accompanied by a man. It is hard to overstate the remoteness of Etheringbang or how far it seems from the authorities in Georgetown.

Even absent an intervention, the complex and violent dynamics among the groups sparring to control Venezuela’s mineral wealth are already pushing armed actors over the border into this small Caribbean state with only 3,500 men under arms. Foreign intervention, in the major’s words, could spark the “synchronisation of all Venezuelan criminal elements” as they push into Guyana. On his smartphone the major flips through pictures of armed men he says are now active on the border, taken from social media accounts. They would also include organised crime groups known as sindicatos that feed off the explosion of the illicit economy in Venezuela’s mining regions. These actors would likely include members of the Colombia’s National Liberation Army (ELN), guerilla opponents of the government in Bogotá who have long been in Venezuela, but have expanded their presence in the past three years and aligned with Maduro in the face of the international pressure upon him to step down. An army major tells me about his concern that intervention could push various non-state armed actors now sheltering in Venezuela into Guyana. The latter business is fuelled by the crisis in Venezuela, where government and opposition are slugging it out amid an economic catastrophe that is producing mass emigration, including to Guyana.Įven though Washington has seemingly dialed back its bellicosity toward Caracas, senior military officers in the Guyanan capital Georgetown worry about the possibility of a foreign military intervention to topple the government of President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas.

The river snakes through landscapes filled with lush vegetation but overrun by criminal enterprises, primarily in illegal gold mining and human trafficking. But to the Guyanese authorities, that legal battle is a less immediate concern than their frequent skirmishes with the illicit profit seekers who work along the Cuyuní. Along with an offshore oil field, Essequibo is the subject of a territorial dispute between Guyana and Venezuela, predating the former country’s independence from Britain in 1966 and now pending before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

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It is the first of a series of checkpoints – this one manned by the guerrillas, another by criminal gang members and a third by Venezuelan security forces – where passing boats submit to extortion before reaching the gold mines further along the river.Įtheringbang sits on the western edge of the Essequibo region, 160,000 square kilometres of nearly impenetrable rainforest. I keep a safe distance and watch as a passenger boat putters by and the men in black demand that the captain stop. From my vantage point by the water I cannot discern the camp, but I do see three men dressed in black – one carrying a large-calibre firearm – standing in a small clearing. On the northern side, locals tell me, lies a camp for Colombian guerrillas living some 700km away from their homes, while other armed groups also operate nearby. Just outside Etheringbang, a tiny Guyanese outpost in the jungle on the Venezuelan border, the Cuyuní river that separates Guyana from Venezuela winds through banks thick with undergrowth.