Forewarned

The visit of US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Daniel P. Erikson to this country has upset the ever choleric Venezuelans yet again. He was reported as spending two days here with a view to extending collaboration in various areas of defence including cybersecurity, training and information. It was enough for the volatile Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil to launch into one of his customary rants. “The threats to the our region’s stability, driven by Guyana and its military association with the US, must be decisively cleared,” he was quoted as saying, before going on to urge the strengthening of Caribbean and Latin unity in order to protect “our zone of peace against imperial pretensions.”

While the Venezuelan government is becoming seemingly overwrought about the visit to Guyana of a British patrol vessel and now a US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, a few days ago the Caracas Chronicles carried a feature entitled ‘Venezuela Is Going To War… On TikTok.’ Luis González Morales described the Venezuelan government and its allies as mounting the “production of a large amount of content ‘analyzing’ the military capabilities of both nations, alongside ‘content creators’ who have been posting to TikTok assuring that the war [has] already started.” It all, as he rightly pointed out, fell into the category of disinformation.

His favourite video, said the columnist, showed an amphibious landing supposedly in Essequibo (which is spelt ‘Ezequibo’) but which is actually in Falcón state. And at the time of writing, that had been seen 1.7 million times and had 77,000 likes – although as he pointed out, while that represented the number of views it did not necessarily record the number of viewers. Even more entertaining was the Venezuelan fighter jet supposedly shot down by the Guyanese, the evidence being supplied by low quality video game footage.

If all of this was risible, of a more serious nature was the general conviction that Venezuela would automatically win in any conflict with Guyana. There were videos, Mr Morales said, showing the GDF “playing at being soldiers.” He then went on to disparage Venezuela’s armed forces, which he said had no real combat experience. It might be noted that he is not the first Venezuelan commentator to express this view. He went on to remark, “Our Su-30s have never had to intercept a hostile contact, our S-300s have probably never been test-fired and our T-72 crew ended up in last place during the tank biathlon in Russia’s 2022 Army Games.”

The number of views for this video was 4.7 million, with 157,000 likes. The views, he observed, exceeded the official population of every Venezuelan city.

Then there was the argument that not only were the Guyanese in occupation of land to which they were not entitled, but they ‘deserved’ armed action owing to the ecological damage they were

doing, the implication being that Venezuela would bring a halt to the destruction. This was accompanied by distressing images of wildlife trading. It is not that this does not occur, it is just that the situation in Venezuela’s own mining arc is far worse.

As Mr Morales commented, none of this is new, since there was a sudden increase in Essequibo videos from TikTok influencers prior to the referendum, with a whole crowd of young content creators. With the ICJ hearing and the Venezuelan election coming up his view was that there would be “more videos calling for war and others criticizing the government for not following up on their belligerent narrative.”

While Venezuela was talking war on social media, there was AG Anil Nandlall assuring the Venezuelans last week that the Government of Guyana had no plan for the US to set up a military base here, and that it had made no formal request for one. This was reinforced by Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo who was quoted as saying, “We have not been approached by the United States to establish a military base in Guyana.”

So will this satisfy Venezuela? Probably not, although it hopes that enough noisy rhetoric from its side of the Cuyuni will dissuade this country from allowing the introduction of an American military base. But for the rest, this is all part of a game on the part of Caracas. On the one hand it wants to convey to the region that Guyana is the bellicose one, and that visits by US defence officials and UK patrol boats represent bad faith in relation to the Argyle Declaration; and on the other, it wants to stir up a bit of war fever and have its own population accept its government’s militaristic posture in relation to Guyana. In other words, it is leaving its options open.

There is a school of thought here which says that Venezuela never intended to invade Guyana, and by implication, still does not intend to do so. The problem is that while it is possible that Caracas did not initially have it in mind to occupy some portion of this country, it could easily have been trapped in the logic of the situation which it had created, and been forced to follow through with its threats. The referendum was intended to galvanise the population behind the government, and deflect attention from this year’s election which President Nicolás Maduro is guaranteed to lose. Despite the propaganda, Venezuelans simply did not turn out to vote, leaving him with a difficulty. What allowed him to retreat from his pugnacious stand was Argyle.

All of which does not mean we might not still face problems on the annexation front this year; there is the ICJ hearing in April, which as Mr Morales said is bound to generate a lot of propaganda, but more important is what line Mr Maduro decides to take with regard to the election. Will he decide to accept the reimposition of US sanctions and rig the poll again, or even perhaps postpone it? If so, will he try and distract the population with some Essequibo adventurism? For their part, the Americans want a more stable and economically viable Venezuela, because so many of the illegal migrants on the Mexican border are Venezuelan.

However Venezuela decides to play it Guyana has to be ready, and whatever might be happening on the defence front, the impression is not being conveyed that we are doing what is necessary in terms of preparing our population at all levels with information on a regular basis. Are there any arrangements, for example, for an onslaught on social media such as Venezuela has? There is no indication either that we have been providing the Latin world, Brazil in particular, with an accurate and comprehensive background to the issue, with a full account of Essequibo’s history going back to the seventeenth century.

Worse yet, it does not appear that we have been advising our Indigenous population, particularly those living in the border areas, about the issue. It should be noted that President Maduro has been repeating that ‘most’ of the inhabitants of Essequibo are Indigenous, and has been getting some of the Indigenous nations in Venezuela to recite the propaganda. He did it again at Christmas, when a preview of his message to the country was entitled ‘The Christmas of the Essequibo’, with an “emotional message from the Venezuelan Indigenous peoples in defence of the integrity of the national territory.”

Soothing reassurances to Caracas that this country will not be getting a US base, etc, etc, will not mollify it, because it does not want to be mollified. It can only be hoped that Takuba Lodge and our Embassy in Venezuela are assiduously collecting evidence of our neighbour’s breach of the provisions of Argyle, because President Irfaan Ali can rest assured that Mr Maduro will be on the attack about our so-called violations at the next meeting. It was only on Thursday that Venezuela had the effrontery to call on the governments of Guyana and the US to end their military threats.

And while our officials are at it, will they please make sure that the President is better apprised of all aspects of the issue and its full history than he was the last time, so he doesn’t have to let pass unchallenged his counterpart’s constant harping on the fact that Essequibo has belonged to his country since the creation of the Captaincy General of Venezuela in 1777.

It is complete balderdash.

President Maduro holds the Essequibo card in case he needs to play it; he might play it, he might not, depending on how events work out. However, officials here have to be aware that if he finds himself cornered on the political home front then he may become dangerous. As the adage says, to be forewarned is to be forearmed.