Editorial | Guyana’s borders sacrosanct

Nicolás Maduro should scuttle his December 3 referendum to assert Venezuela’s claim to Guyana’s Essequibo region and properly return to the international judicial process to settle the countries’ border dispute.

For while part of Mr Maduro’s aim may be to shore up support for himself and his government ahead of next year’s presidential and assembly elections, appeals to jingoism such as the one on which he has embarked, are known to be dangerous. They have a way of spinning out of control.

That is a bit of advice that some of Venezuela’s closer friends in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) should offer to Mr Maduro, with a warning that should he persist with this provocation, he risked Venezuela’s political and moral support from CARICOM in its fraught relationship with the United States.

Venezuela’s claim to the western two-thirds of Guyana is not recent. The matter has ebbed and flowed since Caracas revived the issue over 60 years ago. From Guyana’s perspective, however, its territory has been a settled matter since an 1899 arbitration ruling on a dispute between Venezuela and Great Britain, Guyana’s colonial ruler, established the current borders.

Since 2018, though, the matter has been at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), having been sent there for resolution by the UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, on the basis of an agreement between the parties on the eve of Guyana’s 1966 independence on how the question might be resolved. Prior to that decision, the secretary general had operated in a ‘good offices’ role, attempting, through various representatives, to coax the sides to an agreement.

NO JURISDICTION

Despite the court’s ruling to the contrary in April, Venezuela insists that the ICJ has no jurisdiction in the matter. Since then, Caracas has stepped up its rhetoric on the dispute.

In September, for example, it warned oil companies against participating in a Guyanese bid for oil exploration off the country’s coast, claiming that the area was properly Venezuelan waters. Then last week, the National Assembly approved the referendum to declare the 16,000-square-mile Essequibo, a thick jungle area rich in natural resources, Venezuelan territory.

Specifically, among the referendum’s five questions is whether Venezuelans reject the 1899 arbitration agreement as fraudulent.

“We are going to a nationalist referendum, where we all fit,” Mr Maduro said on Monday, adding that the vote was outside political claques.

“... We are thinking about Venezuelans who love our land and who are outraged with the pretensions of the empires of the world, the transnationals and of the government of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana to take away what is ours, land and sea that the liberators of our America conquered under the command of Father (Simon) Bolívar,” he said.

Mr Maduro has also claimed that Guyana plans to allow the United States to establish military bases on its territory from which it can threaten Venezuela. Guyana’s president, Irfaan Ali, has rejected these accusations and has warned that Venezuela’s behaviour has the potential “to incite violence and to threaten the peace and security of the state of Guyana and, by extension, the Caribbean region”.

STAND DOWN

This newspaper agrees. Mr Maduro must stand down. He must be told by CARICOM’s most persuasive voices, which, in this matter, are those of the Barbadian prime minister, Mia Mottley, and Dr Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines.

While CARICOM has consistently backed Guyana, a member state, in the dispute, the community has maintained a principled relationship with Venezuela, from whose PetroCaribe oil initiative several regional countries benefited. CARICOM has consistently rejected US sanctions against Caracas, and advised the Americans against interfering in its internal affairs.

But Ms Mottley – who has emerged as a major global spokesperson for the causes of developing countries – ­­ ­­is among the loudest, and most eloquent, of the regional voices against America’s sanctions policy against Venezuela, including at the UN General Assembly last month.

In Mr Gonsalves’ case, he obviously enjoys a special relationship with Caracas, and his country has been active in ALBA, the regional hemispheric political and economic cooperation agreement that was founded by Mr Maduro’s predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez.

Mr Maduro and the Venezuelan people must be clear that CARICOM will not countenance any compromise to Guyana’s territorial integrity.