World News | Venezuela is investigating killing of indigenous leader

Caracas (Venezuela), July 8 (AP) Venezuelan authorities said they were investigating the killing of an indigenous leader who denounced illegal mining in a remote part of the country near the Amazon rainforest.

Virgilio Trujillo was shot in broad daylight on June 30 in Puerto Ayacucho, a border town in the capital of Venezuela’s Amazonas state.

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The country’s investigative police chief, Douglas Rico, said this week that a team of detectives had been dispatched to the area to gather leads and conduct interrogations.

Indigenous leaders may have been killed by an illegal armed group in the region that was smuggling gold, drugs and other contraband along the porous border with Colombia, Rico wrote on Twitter.

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Trujillo, a member of the Uwotujja group, founded an unarmed Environmental Guard group that monitors the activities of illegal miners in indigenous territories.

Indigenous rights group Kape Kape said on its website that Trujillo accompanied Venezuelan troops on patrols during which soldiers seized equipment from illegal miners and destroyed landing strips used by drug dealers.

Indigenous territories in Venezuela are under increasing pressure from illegal gold mining in the Amazon state and a territory along the Orinoco River that the Venezuelan government designated as a special development zone in 2016.

Miners working with rebel groups have also moved into Canaima National Park, which is covered in rainforest and has the world’s tallest waterfall.

Thirty-two environmental and indigenous leaders have been killed in Venezuela since 2013, according to the regional human rights group Observatory for the Defence of Life. (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from the Syndicated News feed, the body of the content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)