Venezuela’s unneighborly vote
Sunday’s Venezuelan plebiscite to annex disputed territory from neighboring Guyana, with the government of dictator Nicolas Maduro claiming the highest turnout in the history and a 95% approval, is a dangerous development that could camouflage a possible Venezuelan invasion as an act of popular will.
Pre-internet, we would have had to make a trip to the library or crack open the V volume of the family encyclopedia to untangle this one. Now, all the historical records are easy to find.
The boundary squabble started when the colonial Spanish and Dutch empires each held large chunks of South America’s Caribbean coast. When Venezuela won its full independence from Spain in the 1820s under Simón Bolívar, the demarcation line with then-British controlled Guyana to the east was in dispute and so it festered, with Venezuela claiming ever since what amounted to more than two-thirds of the territory.
In 1895, the U.S. got involved under President Grover Cleveland, who invoked the Monroe Doctrine to defend a fellow New World republic, Venezuela, from bullying by Britain, a leading world power with the biggest navy afloat. It was the first time the U.S. took on such a high profile in international affairs, which is why we recall learning about it in our high school U.S. history class.
There was a five-man commission to settle the matter, with very big shots on the panel. The two Americans (representing Venezuela) were the chief justice of the United States and another justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Brits had the lord chief justice of England and the lord justice of appeal. The neutral tie-breaker was a Russian judge. The commission in 1899, in Paris, found mostly for Britain and the crisis ended, but Venezuela stewed.
As Britain was preparing to grant Guyana independence a half century ago, there was a new agreement with Venezuela, in 1966, that acknowledged that Venezuela rejected the 1899 commission, but that there would be further discussions.
Eventually the UN secretary-general turned it over to the World Court, with Guyana asking the court a few years ago to uphold the 1899 border. The court agreed to hear the case, but Maduro doesn’t want the World Court involved and so he organized Sunday’s referendum asking Venezuelans to say yes to five questions.
We don’t know if Maduro used the same mysterious Dominion Voting Systems that Donald Trump claimed that Maduro’s dead predecessor Hugo Chavez manipulated from the grave in 2020.
The first question was: “Do you agree to reject by all means in accordance with the law, the line fraudulently interposed by the 1899 Paris Arbitration Award, which seeks to deprive us of our Guayana Esequiba?”
Other questions rejected the World Court’s jurisdiction and asked if a new Venezuelan state on the disputed territory held by Guyana should be declared. Maduro says that his countrymen are all in favor. Guyana doesn’t get a say in being swallowed.
ExxonMobil’s discovery of a major oil field offshore of course has nothing to with Maduro’s interest. Hey, Maduro could add to Venezuela’s immense oil riches and destroy the economy in the annexed territory as he’s done with his own.
Venezuela’s population is 29 million (and more than 7 million of them are refugees). Tiny Guyana has 800,000 people. In the 1890s, Britain was the bully, but who’s the bully now?