In 1946, members of the North American based New Tribes Mission, a fundamentalist Protestant sect, entered Venezuela from across the Colombian border. Posing as tourists and “curious explorers,” they settled along the Negro River in the region known as Casiquiare. At the time, the area was used for the exploitation of natural rubber which had not yet been replicated as a synthetic fiber and was, as such, still a vital strategic material. The arriving missionaries were not given a particularly warm welcome by the indigenous peoples living in the immediate area. The Aquencwa Indians, then led by their leader Horacio Acisa, soon began to violently resist their unwelcomed northern visitors.
From 1945 to 1948 a coalition of nationalist military officers allied to the anti-clerical political party, Acción Democrática, ruled the country. Nonetheless, New Tribes continued to reside in Venezuela in spite of the central government’s marked hostility to its members. Following a coup d’etat in 1948, Venezuela came under outright military rule. However, to the consternation of Antonio Justo Silva, the governor of the federal territory of Amazonas, “no one thought to ask why these missionary groups were staying in Amazonas.” But in 1954 their status was officially legalized thanks to a permit issued by the military authorities under the pro-U.S. General Marcos Pérez Jiménez dictatorship.
Curiously, in that same year, the New Tribes missionaries abandoned their villages along the Negro River and settled in the Guayana Shield, where deposits of radioactive minerals had been discovered. What is more, a tantalizing tidbit was provided by muckraking journalists Charlotte Dennett and Gerard Colby: “On Brazil’s border with Venezuela were uranium deposits that the [Brazilian] regime had targeted for the development of nuclear energy and, some feared, nuclear bombs.” They also claimed that the presence of uranium ore was found on the traditional lands of the Yanomami, the largest unacculturated tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. Also present in the adjoining area was the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a New Tribes ally as well as an evangelical missionary organization in its own right, that specialized in translating the Bible into local dialects. Its adherents could be found among the Yanomami in Venezuela, where they were studying the languages of the region from their Porto Velho base in Brazil. Writing to Venezuela’s Minister of Justice, Justo expressed his concerns about the New Tribes. In the course of six years of residence, according to the official, the missionaries had nothing to show for their work and had not accomplished anything for the Indians. Justo was openly suspicious of the evangelicals, who would inexplicably abandon sites and move to other areas. “It makes one suspect,” he wrote, “that they [the New Tribes missionaries] have another objective.”
New Tribes: A State within a State?
New Tribes was fast on the road towards becoming a veritable transnational organization spanning much of Latin America. Operating in remote, far-flung areas, usually distant from the effective reach of the central government, the missionaries could count on every form of communication and transportation equipment, including aircraft. What’s more, New Tribes at the same time was indoctrinating indigenous tribes in other South American countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. In 1959, Acción Democrática returned to power and President Romulo Betancourt authorized the missionaries to operate in Amazonas. Eventually, the missionaries would be active in an immense zone encompassing not only this territory but also the states of Apure, Bolivar, and part of Monagas. In total, New Tribes had access to 30% of Venezuela’s national territory.
To carry on its ambitious work, the organization had a staff of more than 150 including missionaries, linguists, pilots, engineers, technicians and others. It also had its own communication network. By 1980, God’s soldiers had 2 Bible institutes, 6 basic training camps, a linguistic institute, a radio station, a medical center, and a housing complex for retired missionaries. Even more impressive, New Tribes built 29 air strips from which their light aircraft fleet operated. The airstrips and settlements all fell under their exclusive control. According to one investigator, “not even the armed forces can easily use those airports. In fact, the runways are constructed for specially equipped planes that can land on extra short runways.”
It was at this time that two anthropologists dropped a bombshell by charging that New Tribes was trying to create a state within a state by turning the Indians against the Venezuelan military. According to their findings, the missionaries had circulated flyers amongst the Panare Indians, written in the E’napa tongue but edited in the United States. The literature attempted to discredit the National Guard and sought to pit the Indians against its local units.
At the time, New Tribes was working with two aviation companies, Mission Air Force and Wings of Aid. In fact, the president of New Tribes, Jaime Bou, was also president of the latter. One of the principal tasks of the airlines was to transport supplies and missionary staff from Brazil to Venezuela and onwards to the U.S. From Puerto Ayacucho southwards, the Amazonas area was considered a transit zone prohibited to civilian traffic. However, New Tribes missionaries were allowed to circulate freely and the missionaries were not subject in the least to rigorous controls by Venezuelan authorities. In an overview of the New Tribes operations, one writer noted, “this adds up to a colonial enclave in the middle of the Amazon jungle.”
