Heritage, precarity and migration in the context of the Venezuelan crisis: discourses, ideologies and tensions

Abstract (English)

The environmental component of the Venezuelan crisis often goes unnoticed in the face of its economic, political and migratory dimensions. However, the environment is often sacrificed in a context in which the development model that has marked the country's recent history has imploded. Pollution caused by the extractivist model, increasing dependence on wage labour, poor health care and the loss of ancestral knowledge, among other factors, has also driven the migration of young indigenous people to neighbouring countries. At the same time, those who remain in their traditional territories have had to (re)think their survival strategies in the midst of an increasingly hostile context, in which the borders of the extractivist eco-regime are shifting further south. These processes often have the so-called ‘special protection areas’ at the centre of the dispute. The aim of this research is to identify the discursive strategies employed by the actors in the conflict generated by the disagreement over land management and to determine the differences in their relationship to the disputed territory. Similarly, one of the objectives of this paper is to understand the role that these specific areas of the national geography continue to play in the reinvention of national identity among migrants, indigenous migrants and political-partisan actors. While the Venezuelan state has historically used these ‘landscapes’ to define the country's identity, the recently recorded waves of emigration promote a mutation of identity myths that cannot go unnoticed by the social sciences because of its repercussions on the country's future evolution.