Sabino Romero, chief of the Indigenous Yupka community in the Sierra of Perijá, Venezuela, was murdered in March of 2013. The Yupka community claims that the suspected murderers were hired by cattle ranchers attempting to take the ancestral lands of the Yupka people. Romero was a lands activist who defended his community’s ancestral lands from cattle ranchers and mining companies.

By Alex Glomset

Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous rights have always been a contentious issue in many parts of Latin and South America including Venezuela, and though progress has made on several fronts, there are still concerns that equal rights are not being given to these groups.  In the September 2014 review of Venezuela by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, several of these issues surrounding Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous children’s rights were addressed.

Since 2002, Venezuela broke with the traditional celebrations on October 12 of Columbus’s so-called “discovery” and began celebrating instead “Indigenous Resistance Day” as homage to the country’s indigenous populations, their history, cultures, and struggles to maintain their identity.