Environmentalists in the western Venezuelan state of Zulia denounced on Thursday that several marine animals were found dead and covered in oil in Lake Maracaibo — highly polluted by the constant oil spills that the socialist regime causes.
Lake Maracaibo is Venezuela’s largest lake and one of the oldest in the world, home to the Catatumbo lightning, a unique atmospheric phenomenon over the mouth of the Catatumbo River where it empties into Lake Maracaibo that causes a near-perpetual lightning storm in the lake.
The constant oil and chemical spills that the socialist regime has caused — which leftist activists and/or environmentalist organizations often fail to report and condemn — have heavily polluted the lake, leaving 70 percent of its roughly 5,200-square-mile-wide surface contaminated with oil, chemicals, and a highly toxic, foul-smelling, and potential carcinogenic bacteria locally referred to as verdín (“greenery”).
Venezuela’s Union Radio reported on Thursday that locals found a dolphin, a sea turtle, and a manatee dead and covered in oil in the vicinity of the Vereda del Lago, a park in Zulia’s capital city Maracaibo.
“We had never seen this scenario. The putrid smell that spreads throughout the city, the degraded scenery of Lake Maracaibo, the oil spills, the dead animals of … incredible biodiversity,” environmental biologist Adelso Pineda said. “We are talking about a manatee, a species that is on the verge of extinction.”
The heavily polluted state of Lake Maracaibo has dramatically affected the local fishermen, who depend on their trade to sustain themselves and their families. Union Radio reported that cleanup works in Lake Maracaibo have been “paralyzed” for two months.
“We cannot go out because the oil damages our nets, and there is no one to compensate us because this is a problem for everyone, for the oil company that is not aware of this and does not pick it up, as in previous times,” Edinson Araujo, a local fisherman, told Union Radio.
Araujo further asserted to the local outlet Caraota Digital that the Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA “is not concerned” about the situation and does not seek to deal with oil spills in the lake, stating that “they do not clean it [oil], as in previous times.”
The Maduro regime has not publicly commented on the discovery of the dead and oil-covered animals at press time. Instead, officials from the Institute for the Control and Conservation of Lake Maracaibo Basin (ICLAM) — an entity under the Maduro regime’s “Ecosocialism” Ministry — announced on Thursday that they held an “environmental monitoring day” at the lake and allegedly collected samples to be used on “physical-chemical analyses to determine the amount of nutrients in the water.”
The Maduro regime’s oil spills have affected not only Lake Maracaibo but other areas of the country where the nation’s oil refineries, left in a derelict state for more than two decades under socialist mismanagement, continue to cause severe environmental damage.
In late August, an oil spill three times the size of Paris, France, was detected by Venezuelan environmentalists and residents in the waters of the northwestern state of Carabobo, home to the El Palito oil refinery complex — a facility allegedly “repaired” by Iran in 2022 where the rogue Islamic regime refines some of its oil overseas.
On Wednesday, Venezuelan environmentalist researcher Eduardo Klein denounced that the August spill remains uncontrolled and is on track to reach the Morrocoy National Park — previously ravaged by another massive oil spill in 2020.
Klein denounced at the start of September that, according to satellite imagery, at least eight different oil leaks were present in the eastern and central coast of Lake Maracaibo as of August 25.
The Venezuelan Political Ecology Observatory (OEP), a non-government organization, denounced in January that it had registered 86 oil spills in Venezuela during 2023, 40 of which occurred in Zulia.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
