S. America land dispute flares again
Venezuela revives old claim to region in oil-rich Guyana
It was the depths of the Cold War in the 1960s, and Caracas was on edge.
Marxist guerrillas in Venezuela were getting weapons and training from Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Along Venezuela’s eastern border, anti-colonial leaders in what was then British Guiana were agitating for independence.
Alarmed that a Guyanese leader could create a Cuban beachhead in South America, Venezuela’s staunchly anti-communist president, Rómulo Betancourt, came up with a strategy that blunted the independence push: At the United Nations, his government resurrected a long-festering claim to more than half of Guyana’s territory.
Now the dispute over Essequibo — an oil-rich Guyanese region nearly the size of Florida — has flared back to life. This month, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro unveiled new maps displaying it as part of Venezuela, nominated an army general as its governor and offered Venezuelan identity cards to people living in the sparsely populated region.
Venezuela’s revival of the claim lays bare how much has changed in this part of South America since the Cold War — and how much, despite the passage of time, remains the same.
The fight against communism aligned Betancourt with Washington in the 1960s, when Venezuela was a democratic oasis in a region falling to military dictatorships.
Now Venezuela is ruled by a socialist authoritarian government allied with Cuba and Iran. The country, reeling from an economic collapse that has produced
a migrant exodus to the United States, has become a thorn in Washington’s side.
Guyana, long one of South America’s poorest countries, today boasts one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Huge discoveries in Essequibo by the American oil giant ExxonMobil are turning the small country into a global energy powerhouse with skyrocketing oil production.
By contrast, Venezuela’s once-booming oil industry has been hobbled by mismanagement, sanctions and crumbling infrastructure.
Guyana “will very soon be producing more oil than Venezuela,” said Phil
Gunson, an analyst with the International Crisis Group who has lived in Caracas for more than two decades.
“Think about what that’s going to do for the geopolitics of South America, when Guyana is like a second Qatar,” he added, referring to the small country on the Arabian Peninsula that has used energy wealth to raise its global standing.
Essequibo’s vast natural resources factor into the territorial dispute — Venezuela’s government has ramped up denunciations of ExxonMobil, while moving to start its own bidding process for oil leases in Guyanese territory that Venezuela does not even
control.
As tensions simmer, the United States is increasing its military cooperation with Guyana with the aim of improving the English-speaking country’s “military readiness and capabilities to respond to security threats.”
So far, actual clashes between Venezuela, with some 150,000 active military personnel according to CIA estimates, and Guyana, with only about 3,000, seem unlikely. Political analysts in Venezuela argue that Maduro is largely using the dispute to rally support ahead of elections next year.
Maduro met with his Guyanese counterpart, President
Irfaan Ali, last week in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. They shook hands, agreed not to use force and pledged to meet again. But Maduro maintained the territorial claim.
John Kirby, a spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, said American officials were following the dispute “very, very closely” and made clear the administration believed that an 1899 agreement establishing the current boundary “should be respected.’’
“We don’t want to see this come to blows,” he told reporters this month.
The tensions are also complicating the Biden administration’s efforts to thaw relations with Venezuela. The United States recently lifted sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry in a bid to improve the country’s battered economy. And on Wednesday the Biden administration announced the release of a Maduro ally indicted in a bribery scheme in exchange for the release of U.S. citizens held in Venezuelan jails.
But Maduro’s revival of the territorial dispute is sparking calls to reimpose sanctions.
“When President Biden gave him an inch, President Maduro took a mile,” said Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “And with no accountability, he is taking more.”
Under Hugo Chávez, the leader of Venezuela’s socialist-inspired revolution, the country’s policy toward Guyana softened considerably. Chávez visited Guyana in 2004, and Venezuela exported subsidized oil to Guyana in exchange for Guyanese rice.
Still, Chávez never withdrew Venezuela’s claim, reflecting how ingrained the issue remains in the country, where books abound about the Essequibo dispute.
“It doesn’t matter who’s in power in Venezuela,” said
Jan Mangal, a former petroleum adviser to Guyana’s previous president, David Granger. “Essequibo will always be a political football they will use.”
In Venezuela, opponents of Maduro have also seized on the territorial claim. María Corina Machado, who was recently elected in a primary to challenge Maduro for the presidency next year, made a trip by canoe in 2013 to the region in dispute in an effort to advance Venezuela’s claim.
Maduro, taking up the issue with full force, organized a referendum last month on the territorial dispute. The government reported that more than 95% of voters supported the claim, although observers said turnout was far lower than expected.
Afterward, Venezuela’s top prosecutor accused several top opposition figures of treason and ordered their arrest, saying they had taken money from ExxonMobil to sabotage the referendum. ExxonMobil could not immediately be reached for comment.
For its part, Guyana, with a population of only about 800,000, is quickly raising its profile because of its management of Essequibo’s resources. Venezuela, with about 28 million people, currently produces around 800,000 barrels of oil a day, about twice as much as Guyana. But Guyana’s output is forecast to surge to 1.2 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency.
Swimming in oil, however, doesn’t provide much comfort as the dispute casts a pall.
Fay DeYoung, 63, a Guyanese co-owner of a lakeside recreational site in Essequibo, said she would evacuate rather than live under Venezuelan control.
“We already made up our minds, if we have to go, we have to go,” she said. “We’ll just have to leave everything and go and run.”