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These two accounts of trips with the Venezuelan Frontiers Commission in the early 70s are significant. I didn’t fully realise it at the time, but I now understand that it was an immense privilege to be there at that time, exploring places few had been, seeing the land before development, before the roads and bridges, the infrastructure and the concrete and all the trappings of modern life.
The Siera Perijá is the final northernmost stretch of the Andean chain that runs all the way up South America. It is a 300-kilometre complex ridge system rising to over 3,500 metres. It separates Venezuela from Colombia and forms the north-western boundary. In the 70’s, this border was still undefined and subject to dispute. In 1972, Roman Rojas, Head of the Commission, asked me to go with Daniel Genoud and four Makiritare Indians on a week-long walk along the ridge. The task was to identify the watershed that would form the international boundary.
The Orinoco trip in 1973 was also promoted by Daniel and the Frontiers Commission. I went with Wilmur Perez and two friends to rescue Jacques Lizot, a French anthropologist who was being harassed by Silesian missionaries. Jacques was living in a Yanomami shabono on the headwaters of the Orinoco. The trip involved driving from Caracas to Puerto Ayacucho with outboard motors and then travelling upriver in a dugout canoe. Where there is a road today, the three-day journey across the Llanos to the Orinoco was on faint tracks.
As well as describing the trips, the journal explores the border issues that afflict Venezuela and their significance for security and resources, pressures on indigenous cultures, and controversies about anthropological research in the Amazon.
