The Orinoco Delta and its Warao community. Photo: Mr. Online.
By Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert – May 15, 2026
The Warao Indigenous people of Venezuela live mostly in the bayous and watercourses of the Orinoco River. Their origin story has them first living in the sky. One day, someone was hunting and shot an arrow. It got stuck in the clouds. Pulling on the arrow, they discovered the beautiful earth beneath with many rivers, colorful fruits, and birds. Most people descended to live below, but a few remained trapped above. From there, envious of those on earth, they send sickness and pain.
The story captures with remarkable precision the contradictory reality in which many Warao communities live today: between the heaven of a life organized around the pursuit of happiness on their own terms and the hell repeatedly imposed on them by the outside world of the colonizers.
We recently spent a week in the delta, investigating communal organization and resistance to the US blockade.[1] We found that there is something profoundly disorienting about the geography in this region. The landscape often appears untouched, almost excessive in its beauty. The waterways stretch endlessly between walls of green vegetation. Birds cut across the humid air. Houses stand on the banks of the bayous and sometimes on stilts right above the water. Children dive from wooden platforms into the river, leading an almost amphibious life from an early age. The world of the delta seems governed by another temporality: the slow pulse of tides, the moon, which guides the planting seasons, rain, and the occasional sound of an outboard motor.
And yet, beneath the beauty, one quickly encounters signs that not all is well. Fish are scarcer than before. In some places, the water is no longer drinkable. Some communities have been partially or completely vacated through migration. People speak of illness, of difficult journeys to find medicine or fuel, of river channels that no longer flow as they once did.
The more time one spends in the delta, the more one realizes that the difficult and complex situation here is not accidental but historically produced. For centuries, the Warao people have been forced to negotiate pressures and intrusion imposed from outside, along with abandonment by the state. Even waterways that appear remote on a map are deeply entangled with the history of colonialism, capitalist development, and now sanctions.
A Longstanding Blockade
In more than one sense, the Warao people’s experience is remarkably similar to that of a socialist country under blockade. The similarity exists because any nation that attempts to live according to its own rhythms and priorities will sooner or later come under assault by U.S. imperialism. The forms vary—military aggression, sanctions, forced dependency, ecological destruction, economic isolation—but the results are the same as those experienced by Indigenous peoples around the world: lives are shortened, consumption is restricted, migration intensifies, and scarcity becomes chronic.
At the same time, these blockades—whether declared or de facto—also inspire forms of creativity and resistance. Under pressure, people learn to survive within hostile systems without fully surrendering to them. In fact, some concepts being used today to describe Venezuela’s overall response to the recent U.S. attack—“calculated retreat,” “subversive complicity,” “sectoral alignment for survival”—also describe long-standing Indigenous strategies for enduring colonial domination. For centuries, Warao have navigated a world in which powerful external forces are determined to reorganize their territory and way of life according to their own interests—the interests of hotarao (non-Indigenous) people.
As an Indigenous people who have existed under a de facto blockade by the dominant hotarao society for generations, the Warao people occupy a position that has a double character. On the one hand, some effects of the ongoing sanctions imposed by the US appear less disruptive in communities that have long relied on communal labor, fishing, subsistence practices, and have relative autonomy from the market economy. On the other hand, precarious living conditions can amplify the impact of any disruption. The absence of gasoline, motors, or healthcare can rapidly become life-threatening in the delta.
Geography and History
From our base in the Delta Amacuro’s capital city, Tucupita, we visited communities in peri-urban areas and also traveled up the caños (waterways) to speak with people in communities that live deeper in the delta. The journeys themselves revealed much about life there. Distances that appear short on a map can take hours to travel by boat. Fuel is expensive and difficult to obtain.
To understand the present condition of the delta, it is impossible to avoid the genocidal and ecocidal wound left by the closure of Caño Mánamo in 1965. In the name of modernization and development, the CVG—a state corporation then subordinated to imperialist interests—partially blocked one of the principal distributaries of the Orinoco River to facilitate road construction, cattle ranching, and agricultural expansion in the western delta, with the surreptitious aim of allowing for deep water boat traffic in the river’s main channel.
The intervention drastically altered the hydrological balance of the region. Saltwater intrusion increased. Fisheries collapsed in many areas. Ecosystems deteriorated. Communities were displaced. The destruction was not simply environmental. It shattered and reorganized the material basis of much of Warao life.
Raquel Palacios, a Warao leader and craftswoman, told us the story in matter-of-fact sentences but with pain in her voice: “When they closed Caño Mánamo, the fish died. The water became poison, and many people died: children, elders, healthy adults. They passed so quickly that it became difficult to bury them all. Even the birds and the plants died. Thousands had to flee in their curiaras [wooden canoes], leaving behind their homes and the ways of life of their ancestors.”
The closure of Caño Mánamo reproduced an old colonial pattern in a modern technocratic form: people who did not depend on the river for their lives decided how the river should function. The consequences continue to reverberate decades later.
Many people we spoke with referred to the migration triggered by the closure of Caño Mánamo—now overlapping with the broader phenomenon of sanctions-induced migration—almost matter-of-factly. Family members had left for Tucupita, for other Venezuelan cities, or even for Brazil. Some later returned. Others never did. The migration crisis that the mainstream media often presents in isolation has much deeper historical roots in places like the delta.
The Question of the Land
In another community, we spoke with Dialennis Marcano, the newly elected leader of a commune. She is a young woman who spent two years studying medicine at Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), in the Caracas campus, before the economic crisis forced her to return home in 2014. Marcano moves effortlessly between languages, speaking Warao with her family and Spanish with us, sometimes turning mid-sentence to answer a child tugging at her arm before resuming exactly where she left off.
Her central concern is collective control of the land. A newly arrived rancher is sending buffalo into the community’s conucos (diversified subsistence agricultural plots), destroying crops and trampling the soil while claiming to be the owner of the land. Yet the community possesses documents dating back to 1948, far older than the rancher’s own supposed claim. Like many land conflicts across Latin America, in which Indigenous communities are defending collective life against the encroachment of settlers’ private property, this dispute condenses centuries of colonial logic.
Marcano defends not only the Warao right to the land but also ancestral traditions. Many people we met lowered their voices when discussing such matters, accustomed perhaps to foreigners arriving in the delta as missionaries, NGO workers, or anthropologists. Perhaps empowered by her experience as a medical student, Marcano spoke openly and proudly about the wishiratus, the Warao healers. When her son fell gravely ill, seeming close to death, she took him to a wisharatu healer. After one ritual process, the healer assured her that he would begin to recover at midnight. Sure enough, that night she awoke to find him nursing calmly at her breast.
The Revolution as a Turning Point
Despite the destruction and encroachment, reducing the Warao experience to victimhood would be profoundly misleading. Over the past 500 years, they have sought and found ways to survive, resist, and forge their own future. The Bolivarian revolution, however, marked an important turning point. Before the presidency of Hugo Chávez, Indigenous peoples in Venezuela were largely invisible within the political and constitutional order of the republic. The 1999 Constitution changed that, recognizing Indigenous languages, collective rights, territorial claims, political representation, and forms of communal organization. As a result, most Warao communities identify as Chavista.
But beyond these constitutional rights, Indigenous people in the delta have experienced the Bolivarian Process as the first time the state recognized them as political subjects. Healthcare missions, food programs, literacy campaigns, and communal participation have left deep marks, even where institutions have later been weakened under the combined pressures of sanctions, economic crisis, bureaucratic limitations, and infrastructural deterioration. This social assistance continues today. Even though state resources are more limited, the participative budgeting of communal consultations, initiated in 2024, allows for more efficient and meaningful support.[2]
In the communities we visited, criticism and loyalty often coexist without contradiction. People complain openly about shortages, transportation difficulties, abandoned projects, poorly maintained infrastructure, and the hotarao character of institutions. Yet Chávez’s image appears in homes and communal spaces. The theme of the revolution having generated a new, more “dignified” situation comes up frequently in conversations. For many, Chavismo is not understood primarily as a government administration but as an unfinished process of plurinational inclusion that only a radical socialist revolution can offer.
This complexity is often flattened both by liberal “humanitarian” narratives that systematically ratify the status quo and by other simplistic, non-dialectical readings of Venezuela. The delta does not fit easily into external frameworks. Neither romanticization nor cynicism adequately capture the evolving project of the Indigenous people who inhabit it.
A Future in Dispute
The Warao people have faced brutal missionary campaigns, ecological destruction, capitalist penetration, state neglect, racism, disease, forced migration, and now the effects of one of the most aggressive sanctions regimes imposed on any country in the world.
Even in these conditions, Warao life in the delta persists with extraordinary resilience and continues to evolve. What for outsiders has often been seen as simply unused territory awaiting externally driven development, for the Warao people is a fully inhabited world, the result of a complex civilization built around their intimate knowledge of waterways, tides, fishing cycles, forests, and collective forms of life. Repeatedly, Warao people express their desire to create a new future, but on their own terms and under their own direction.
At dusk, traveling back along the caños, the sky and the river often become indistinguishable. The water reflects clouds, birds, fragments of houses, and passing curiaras. For brief moments, it is possible to understand why the Warao origin story begins above the earth, in the sky itself. The delta still possesses that kind of beauty.
But the same waters also carry the memory of interruption: rivers altered by development projects, communities fragmented by displacement, lives constrained by external forces, along with the new but unfinished possibilities opened up by Bolivarian socialism, that continue to shape the horizon of existence there.
Between heaven and hell, the Warao people continue navigating all of it.
