Planning and engineering the Venezuelan Amazon

Blog series Americas and Oceania Collections

Author Gianfranco Selgas, Early-career researcher and lecturer in global development and political ecology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and a 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow at the British Library

The dominant narrative of 20th-century Venezuela is inextricably bound to oil. Yet, political and intellectual discourses structured around petroleum have long rendered other regional cultures of extraction invisible, specifically the agricultural, hydrological, and mining hubs of the Caribbean coast and the Guayana-Amazon region. While the money rent generated by a fossil-fueled economy captured the national imagination, these regional environments generated distinct political-ecological formations that both challenged and intertwined with Venezuelan and global petromodernity.

To chart this under-examined history for my book project, I initially conducted archival and document research in Caracas in 2023 and had scheduled a second trip to the city in 2024. However, the severe institutional crisis and social repression following Venezuela’s contested presidential elections in July 2024, alongside subsequent flight cancellations, made traveling to the country difficult. Receiving a 2025 Eccles Visiting Fellowship at the British Library thus became a vital lifeline for my project, as it provided an indispensable space to continue my work thanks to the available collections on Venezuela. This experience highlighted the bittersweet privilege shared by fellow researchers based at foreign universities, while many colleagues back home in Venezuela face immense structural barriers.

At the British Library, my research focused on the mid-20th-century transformation of southeastern Venezuela. In the 1960s, the government founded the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG) to develop the nation’s mineral-rich interior, enlisting the Joint Center for Urban Studies at MIT and Harvard as consultants for the ‘Guayana Project’. I examined a wide array of official publications, maps, and planning reports released between 1964 and 1988, including the CVG’s annual and technical reports and financial statements (shelfmarks L.A.S.H.242/2; L.A.S.H.239; LAS.H.242/37) and the Joint Center’s detailed publications about their technical and special assistance in Venezuela (shelfmarks X12/1482; W79/1604; AL69/6923; YA.1989.a.2779). These sources reveal how US-influenced development and modernization theories became woven into the state fabric, orchestrating a ‘socialization of nature’, or the process by which capital and engineering integrate raw material substrates into society, actively altering the biosphere.

In Venezuela, planners projected Ciudad Guayana, a new industrial city developed on the south bank of the Orinoco River, and its iron, steel, aluminum, and hydroelectric industries, as both a material and symbolic object of knowledge. Materially, they enacted massive geo-engineering and geomanagerial interventions to establish the built environment. Symbolically, they deployed and used technical media, such as photographs and progress reports, to frame an environmental epistemology that made these radical landscapes legible and actionable to the public. I had the opportunity to share my findings on how technical media shaped these socioecological imaginaries during a Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talk organized by the Eccles Institute at the British Library’s Knowledge Centre on 21 August 2025.

Integrating documents, technical media, and historical analysis aids in uncovering overlooked histories and narratives of development. Regarding the Venezuelan case, conditioned by a long history of resource extraction dependency to sustain value creation and social development, these historical documents can illuminate the deep-seated structural patterns underpinning present-day social and ecological transformations in Latin America. Demonstrating the relevance of archival and document research is crucial for addressing the broader imperial, corporate, institutional, and environmental dimensions of resource-driven state-building, environment-making, and the historical role of postcolonial nations in global commodity supply chains.