In this article, I visualize the relationship between tonewood exploitation and the import of musical instruments for Venezuela's El Sistema, with the participation of the Venezuelan State, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and manufacturing companies from China and the Global North. My basis is a documentary study about the acquisitions and tenders to meet the demand of El Sistema, supporting this information with semi-structured interviews given to key informants. Subsequently, I contrast tonewood exploitation observed in these documents with environmentalist complaints that clarify the troubled deforestation scenario in the Global South since colonial times. All of this allowed me to uncover how, beneath the social welfare discourse of El Sistema, there are scenarios of environmental injustice. Finally, I deem the decolonization of these policies through the implementation of an ecological epistemology to be necessary and urgent. [This article was translated by Juan Carlos Trejos and Katherine Arce Méndez.]