An old fight over a chunk of South America flares again
Venezuela again targets territory held by 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, anticolonial 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 anticommunist president, Rómulo Betancourt, came up with a strategy that blunted the independence push: At the United Nations, his government resurrected a longfestering 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, Venezuela’s 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 fastestgrowing 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.”
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. They shook hands and agreed not to use force and to meet again. But Maduro maintained the territorial claim.
John Kirby, a spokesperson for the US National Security Council, said American officials were following the dispute “very, very closely” and made clear the Biden administration believed that an 1899 agreement establishing the current boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana “should be respected.’’
“We don’t want to see this come to blows,” he told reporters this month.
The tensions are also complicating the 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 administration announced the release of a Maduro ally indicted in a bribery scheme in exchange for the release of US 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 Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “And with no accountability, he is taking more.”