Plan For Power Line In Park Protested

Indians and environmentalists are trying to overturn a government plan to run a high-voltage power line through a prized national park in Venezuela’s “Lost World” of Amazon rain forests and ancient rock formations.

The proposed 230,000-volt line would “mean the start of an invasion and destruction of our region,” Juvencio Gomez, a chief of the Pemon Indian tribe, told reporters at Congress on Thursday.

Nearly 90 Pemon leaders representing the tribe’s 19,000 members traveled to Caracas from their villages in the eastern Venezuelan state of Bolivar, near Brazil, to voice opposition to the plan.

A popular tourist destination, Canaima is home to Angel Falls, which at 3,208 feet is the world’s longest cascade of water, and eerily beautiful, flat-topped mountains called “tepuis,” which were the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic adventure story “The Lost World.”