Evangelicals in Venezuela: Robertson Only the Latest Controversy
The Evangelical Connection: The Arrival of The New Tribes Mission
One strand of the often unsavory and arcane history of U.S. evangelicals in Venezuela goes back decades. 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.
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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 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 have another objective.”
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The Plot Thickens: New Tribes Accused of Espionage
Though New Tribes had come under fire from leftist university professors and the capital’s intellectual elite, criticism would shortly come from yet another, but unexpected quarter: the military. In 1976, Tomas Antonio Mariño Blanco, a navy captain and commander of the Federal Territory of Amazonas military garrison, ordered the detention of two American engineers bearing identification cards from Westinghouse, a leading U.S. defense contractor, and General Dynamics, which produces military jet aircraft. The engineers were carrying out mineral prospecting and were in the company of a missionary working for New Tribes Mission.
Jaime Bou, the New Tribes Mission head in Venezuela, intervened on behalf of the Americans. After staff members from the U.S. Embassy later joined Bou’s efforts, the two were released and the case was closed. However, Antonio Mariño reported that the missionary organization had been financed by General Dynamics, which had sent funds and pilots from California. According to Mariño’s investigation, New Tribes was also linked to a shadowy California foundation called District 1355 as well as the evangelical sect, Summer Institute of Linguistics. All New Tribes missionaries had taken courses with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an organization repeatedly accused of ethnocide and espionage in other Latin American countries. Antonio Mariño had determined that District 1355 had sought to acquire a concession in Colombia to cultivate rice and other crops, which it proposed flying out of the region in a fleet of C-141 planes.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1561 
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