“It's a great shame,” he says, gesturing at the scar blighting the pristine forest in south-eastern Venezuela, cleared by thousands of small-scale, illegal miners in their hunt for gold.

But after a decades-long free-for-all in which prospectors have wreaked environmental havoc while private companies have failed to extract an ounce of gold from Las Cristinas, Hugo Chávez, the president, has said it may be exploited in a joint venture between the state and a Rusoro Mining, a Russian miner.

Since oil provides more than 90 per cent of export revenues and more than half of government spending, collapsing energy prices have ignited the government's interest in the sizeable gold reserves in order to bolster its earnings, as well as in commodities such as coffee and cacao – once Venezuela's biggest export.