This extract is from a statement by the Commission of Venezuelan Indigenous peoples in Defense of the Land.

Translated by the indigenous solidarity working group of Rising Tide North America, a climate action group.

The statement raises issues of the inherent contradictions of OIL, -funding good social programs in the Bolivarian Revolution, but having serious environmental and social implications.

Addiction to oil must be addressed if social justice and environmental sustainability is to prevail.

We Are Native Venezuelans,
And We Want To Continue Existing As We Are.

Our words summoning Help with our independent struggle to Defend our Land,
to realize our Right for self-determination,
to Unmask and Defeat the neo-liberal, genocidal energy policies of the "Bolivarian Revolution."

Written by Wayuú (native Venezuelan) professor Jose Angel Quintero with the Commission of Venezuelan Indigenous Peoples in Defense of the Land, representing Wayuú, Barí, Yukpa, Pumé, and Pemón indigenous Venezuelan nations

The loneliness of our struggle becomes big and heavy, because we have to fight against the imposed silence of our words and protests in the mainstream news networks. We've had to fight against the campaigns of defamation on the part of the mining and oil companies that try to discredit us and our leaders, and try and take our land by way of concessions given out by the government of the fifth republic. We fight against the ignorance of those who merely do not know- but at other times we must clearly confront the accomplices, the intellectual sectors, the social movements, and even brother and sister natives, indigenous blood, in other countries, who have not been able to understand how it's possible that a government whose main reputation is its popular discourse against Bush and imperialism, and at the same time, internally, yields to the appetites and impositions of imperial multi-national corporations, including those that the Bush family has stock and interest in; capital. And if that wasn't enough bitter ironies, all this comes at the detriment of us, the indigenous- us who Hugo Chavez publicly says he is "defending." full article here.