Guyana will not agree to any Agenda with Venezuela that seeks to undermine the International Court of Justice process

This is not the first time in our history that Venezuela has declared its intention to annex the Essequibo region of our country and, in all probability, by the very nature of its declaration to do so by the use of force. We must thank Nigel Westmaas for reminding us of his article “Revisiting the Rupununi Uprising of 1969” published in the Stabroek Weekend of 24th December, 2023. I raise this matter because there are still Guyanese, some who do not live in Guyana, who persist in dismissing the enormous achievement of the Argyle Declaration in its very first Article of having “agreed that Guyana and Venezuela, directly or indirectly,

will not threaten or use force against one another in any circumstances,

including those consequential to any existing controversies between the two States”. Then, again, in Article 6 “agreed that both States will refrain, whether by words or deeds, from escalating any conflict or disagreement arising from any controversy between them. The two States will cooperate to avoid incidents on the ground conducive to tension between them. In the event of such an incident the two States will immediately communicate with one another, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Community of Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAC), and the President of Brazil to contain, reverse and prevent its recurrence”.

These two Declarations alone prevent any possibility, and we must presume that both sides will honour the Declaration, of an invasion of the Essequibo region by Venezuela. Of course, this is a negotiated Declaration with significant external input from the presence of high officials from the United Nations, from the President of Brazil, from CELAC and from Colombia and a host of CARICOM leaders and, therefore, it treats both Guyana and Venezuela with equivalence, though, in fact, it is only Venezuela which is the aggressor and, by its Referendum, threatens the use of force. Nevertheless, people like Ms. Janette Bulkan, who is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, in an article published in Stabroek News on 1st January, 2024, have the gall to dismiss the significance of this Declaration. According to Bulkan, “Venezuela conceded nothing in the Argyle Declaration”. She goes on, “in fact Venezuela had no intention anyway of attempting a military invasion”. Really? Then how, may I ask, would Venezuela deliver on a Referendum which specifically sets out an intention to annex our territory, declared our citizens to be their citizens and gives notice of three months to the oil and gas companies within our territorial waters to get out?

Let us not ever ignore the fact that before Maduro, the Chavez administration bartered its oil with Russia for some US$20 billion worth of arms from Russia, including Russian fighter jets, surface-to-air-missiles systems and dozens of tanks and Venezuelan armed forces are the beneficiaries of external training. As I have observed, this is not the first time that we have been threatened with the use of force by Venezuela in pursuit of this claim to the Essequibo. It was some 56 years ago, in 1968, when the rancher barons in the Rupununi attempted a secessionist insurrection, it soon became apparent that this had been organized, armed and financed by the Venezuelan government. At the time, Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, on a radio broadcast to the nation following the attempted insurrection, revealed that at a meeting of the ranchers on the 23rd December, 1968, “a plan was unfolded for capturing the main government outposts in the Rupununi with assistance from the Venezuelan authorities and declaring the establishment of a separatist state in cessation from the rest of Guyana”. In that speech, Burnham goes on to say that “it is perhaps not without significance that at the same moment that Venezuelan representatives were sitting down with their Guyanese counterparts at a meeting of the Mixed Commission in Caracas between Christmas and New Year, Venezuelan army personnel were training and equipping saboteurs and terrorists and launching them on a campaign of insurrection in Guyana”.

Burnham was, of course, referring to the Mixed Commission which flowed from the Geneva Agreement which has now, finally, led to the Secretary-General of the United Nations advising Guyana and Venezuela that “having carefully analysed the developments in the good offices process during the course of 2017” and “significant progress not having been made toward arriving at a full agreement for a solution to the controversy” he had “chosen the International Court of Justice as the means now to be used for a solution”. There are still some people, including, of course, Venezuela, that grossly misinterpret the Geneva Agreement, which was signed in 1966, and its purpose. In fact, Forbes Burnham addressed this in the National Assembly in 1968, pointing out that the United Kingdom, which then had responsibility for British Guiana’s external relations, while firmly rejecting the Venezuelan claim that the 1899 International Arbitral

Tribunal Award was a nullity, with the concurrence of the British Guiana government, offered to allow the relevant documentary material to be examined by experts from the UK, British Guiana and Venezuela, but emphasized that the United Kingdom representative who made this offer in the United Nations was careful to say “in making this offer I must make it very clear that it is in no sense an offer to engage in substantive talks about the revision of the frontier. That we cannot do; for we consider that there is no justification for it”.

This has been the consistent position of Guyana ever since and Guyana went to Saint Vincent with that clear understanding. It is nonsense, therefore, for Janette Bulkan to claim that because the Argyle Declaration provides for both countries to continue to meet and discuss matters which they can mutually agree on, somehow Guyana caved in to exactly what Venezuela wanted. In this regard, it is important to note that under Article 7 of the Declaration, a Joint Commission of the Foreign Ministers must first meet to prepare the Agenda for the Meeting of the Heads of State. Of course, Guyana will not agree to any Agenda that seeks to undermine its commitment to the process and procedures of the International Court of Justice for the resolution to the border controversy as firmly stated in Article 4 of the Argyle Declaration. For us to comprehend the real meaning and intention of President Maduro in once more actively and belligerently pursuing Venezuela’s claim to the Essequibo, we must first grasp the fact that Chavez, and now Maduro, have bankrupted their country and both are dictators, having abandoned any pretense at governing through democratic elections. Guyana’s economy is the fastest growing in the world. Guyana is a democracy with free and fair elections. In this respect Janette Bulkan has it right when she points out that “Maduro has overseen a country that has descended into political repression, economic freefall, and social anarchy”. Venezuela has the largest oil and gas reserves in the world, but the Chavez/Maduro governments have run their oil industry almost to a standstill in contrast to Guyana which has the single largest oil discovery of the 21st century, the 17th largest oil reserve in the world estimated to be worth US$ ½ trillion and will soon be producing some 500,000 barrels of oil per day. By the end of 2027 Guyana is forecast to be producing some 1.2 million barrels of oil per day, but Venezuela’s oil production has fallen to 700,000

barrels of oil per day from 3.2 million barrels of oil per day and is falling further by the day.

When Chavez became President, Venezuela was the number one supplier of oil to the US in the world, more than even Saudi Arabia, but no more. We have seen that Chavez bartered his oil revenue for military hardware to become, at least on paper, the third most powerful country in South America. Venezuela’s economy, almost totally dependent on oil revenue, as a result, collapsed. It is estimated that some two thirds of its people are living in poverty and thousands of Venezuelans are fleeing the country. Guyana, we know, is estimated to have some 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil within our economic zone. By comparison with Venezuela’s heavy crude oil, Guyana’s lite crude oil is easily and readily refinable. Maduro sees Guyana’s oil with envious eyes. We are already successfully exporting our oil to Europe, helping to replace the supply of Russian oil to those European countries which, as a result of the Ukrainian war, prefer to purchase their oil from anywhere but Russia. At home Maduro is in political trouble. The US had banned the importation of Venezuelan oil and, in order to have the ban lifted, the US insists that Maduro holds free elections but it’s estimated that less than 25% of Venezuela’s population would support Maduro. He cannot win a free and fair election. Access to Guyana’s oil production and oil resources under Venezuelan control, is perceived by Maduro, as an attractive option for survival.

In short, President Maduro is a desperate man and desperate rulers resort to unpredictable and reckless behaviour for their survival. This is the nature of the challenge that Guyana must continue to confront in the foreseeable future. We will do so through diplomacy, embracing the friendship of the US, UK, Canada, Commonwealth Nations and pursuing the friendship and support of the countries which comprise the Organisation of American States. Sir Shridath Ramphal was so absolutely right when he said that “the Venezuelan claim of a massive chunk of Guyana’s territory is a calumny, born of greed, nurtured by falsity and fable and maintained by political demagoguery. It is a claim that is contemptuous of the rule of international law and scornful of the sanctity of treaties”. Guyana, in contrast, will rely on international law, the ruling of the International Court of Justice and the United Nations to support the ruling.