Venezuela is best known in Britain for its oil wealth and for its fantastic landscapes, which range from palm-fringed tropical beaches and snow-clad Andean peaks to pristine rainforests and 'Lost World' table-mountains. Those who know it better also love it for its rich and diverse musical traditions and its lively people with their unique combination of Latin and Caribbean cultures. Within Latin America, Venezuela is noted for its long history of democratic government: almost alone in South America, the country resisted the descent into military dictatorship during the 1970s.

Yet the country also has its darker side. The oil wealth, which has subsidised the dizzying construction boom in the capital and other main cities and provided wealth and educational opportunities for a whole new class of people, has scarcely reached the poor, as the destitute millions who cluster in tumbled shanties on the outskirts of the main cities can testify. Instead of promoting real social development and the emergence of an active and well-serviced civil society, the oil wealth has entrenched a patrimonial political order in which the abuse of office has become the norm, based on an astonishing lack of transparency and accountability in the public sector. God-given riches, which have flowed into the national treasury from oil exports, have freed the political elite from the need to extract taxes from those with wealth or to use the money prudently. Institutionalised improvidence and self-interest have been the costs of the oil boom: a cost the poor have paid in blighted lives, ill-health and socal deprivation.

Since the 1980s, Venezuela as a whole has been paying heavily for the improvidence of the oil boom years. When interest rates rocketed in 1983, Venezuela found itself among the world's most indebted countries, with a national debt of over US$36 billion. Since then, despite intense negotiations with the international financial institutions and agreements to reschedule debts in exchange for structural economic reforms, successive Venezuelan governments have dodged their obligations - the national debt has now risen to US$39 billion. The 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a continuation of chronic financial mismanagement, political opportunism and a reluctance to bring about reform of the bloated public sector that had expanded crazily during the boom years. Today, with oil prices at an all time low, the country faces its worst ever balance-of-payments crisis.

Mining has always offered a temptation of easy money. Indeed, when Cristobal Colon first landed on the coast of Venezuela in 1498 his sailors eagerly exchanged trinkets for the small gold plugs and amulets that the Indians wore. Within a few short years an enduring myth was propagated that in the interior of the Guyanas lay a golden city ruled by a gilded king, El Dorado. Yet, despite these fantasies, mining did not play a significant part in Venezuela's economy until the 1880s, when the country experienced its first gold rush in the Upper Cuyuni.

The oil years that followed the turn of the century drew the population, capital and political focus north, and for many years there was little pressure to open up Venezuela's interior. Only in the 1980s, with the collapse of the bolivar against the dollar and growing urban poverty, did macro-economic and popular pressures combine to open up the country's hinterland to gold and diamond prospectors.

Leaving aside the subsidised state bauxite and iron mines set up by the para-statal Cor-poración Venezolana de Guayana (CVG) in the 1960s and 1970s, most of the mining ventures which flourished in the east of Bolivar State in the 1980s were small in scale and financed by national capital. However, as the economic crisis deepened, national policy shifted towards the promotion of large-scale, capital-intensive mining. In the early 1990s, a number of joint ventures between foreign and Venezuelan companies got underway, but pressure to allow foreign companies unfettered access on their own terms mounted and the mining laws were again relaxed. The result has been the spread of mining over hundreds of thousands of hectares with devastating environmental consequences.

Those to suffer the most from this invasion have been the country's indigenous peoples, whose rights to their lands, while recognised in principal, are ignored in practice. Thus, while national laws admit that Venezuela's indigenous peoples should own the lands they traditionally occupy, in fact, according to official figures, well over two-thirds of the country's Indians completely lack title to their lands.

This selection of papers about the mining industry in Venezuela explores some of these issues. The papers detail how mining is seen as a major opportunity to restore vigour to the national economy and the terrible social and environmental costs that the country is being asked to pay in the attempt. At the conference in London at which most of these papers were first presented, the difference in vision between those in charge of the national economy and those who suffer the impact of mining was stark. On the one hand, with the short-term aim of resolving the country's economic plight, the political elite argue for lifting barriers to transnational investments in the mining sector, while on the other hand the indigenous peoples argue for restraint, knowing that it is they who will have to live in the ruined landscapes that result from mining in the longer-term.

The issue of mining has become a major national controversy in Venezuela and has the potential to trigger important changes in the way policy issues are debated in the national arena. For perhaps the first time in the country's history, indigenous peoples, environmentalists and academics have found common cause and have begun to root out the underlying interests at stake. This awakening of civil society, long kept asleep by oil bounties and populist promises, may have unguessed consequences for the country's future and could, hopefully, lead to a more participatory political order. Yet the debate about mining is also an international one. Foreign companies now lead the way in opening up Venezuela's interior while intergovernmental organisations advise the Venezuelan government on how to overcome its balance of payments crisis and develop the mining sector. Suddenly, the future of Venezuela's indigenous peoples, forests and dramatic landscapes is everybody's business.