Editorial | Gonsalves’ diplomacy

The fundamentals of the Guyana-Venezuela border dispute weren’t changed by Thursday’s summit between Irfaan Ali and Nicolás Maduro, the presidents, respectively, of Guyana and Venezuela.

The leaders left St Vincent and the Grenadines with the positions with which they arrived: that their country was the rightful owner of the disputed Essequibo region of Guyana. Further, President Ali continued to insist that the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Guyana took the matter five years ago, is the rightful forum within which to resolve the dispute. The Venezuelans maintained their stance that the ICJ, despite the court’s declaration to the contrary, has no jurisdiction in the matter.

The summit, nonetheless, had two significant outcomes. The first is the immediate de-escalation of tensions and the possibility that a miscalculation by either side could lead to skirmishes, or even full-scale war.

Important also was their declared commitment, despite the tensions, to “good neighbourliness (and) peaceful coexistence” and “to continue dialogue on any other pending matters of mutual importance to the two countries”. And they agreed to keep talking.

For his domestic audience, Mr Maduro, however, may feel that he winkled something out of the meeting, which, after his bluster at home, will allow him to calm things without having to pay a political price. He got a specific mention in the Argyle declaration of the 1966 Geneva Agreement, signed on the eve of Guyana’s independence from Britain, as one of the mechanisms for resolving the dispute. Additionally, the establishment of a joint commission of the two countries’ foreign ministers as a mechanism for advancing discussions ahead of a planned follow-up summit in three months has echoes of an approach employed under the Geneva Agreement, which Caracas has argued is the real, and only, framework for resolving the dispute.

NOTABLE DEVELOPMENT

A secondary, but notable, development from the St Vincent talks is the central role the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) played in an important bit of hemispheric diplomacy, that burnished the image of the St Vincent and the Grenadines prime minister, Ralph Gonsalves, critical interlocutor between the parties. Jamaica, once the heavyweight of Caribbean diplomacy, had no role in the talks.

Venezuela has long claimed Guyana’s Essequibo region, the western two-thirds of the country, which it says was cynically awarded to Britain (the colonial ruler of what was British Guiana) in 1899 by corrupt arbitration judges. Having initially accepted the arbitration findings, Caracas, starting in the 1940s, based on the writings of one of its lawyers in the case, sporadically questioned the legality of the 1899 decision. It escalated the matter as Guyana headed towards its independence in 1966. These claims to the 62,000 square miles of largely forested, but mineral-rich territory, have become more insistent, and increasingly shrill, in recent years as Guyana made big oil finds off its coast and awarded new exploration licences in the seas adjacent to the Essequibo region.

The Geneva Agreement called for a joint commission between Venezuela and Guyana. It was charged with “seeking satisfactory solutions for the practical settlement of the controversy between Venezuela and the United Kingdom which has arisen as the result of the Venezuelan contention that the Arbitral Award of 1899 … is null and void”.

The commission had four years to complete the task. Having failed, and with the countries unable to agree on a mechanism for breaking the deadlock, the issue passed to the United Nations secretary general. In 2018, with the blessing of the current office holder, António Guterres, Guyana took the dispute to the World Court. Georgetown is seeking a declaration from the court that the 1899 arbitration award was valid.

Venezuela’s position is that the issue has no place at the ICJ, whose jurisdiction, on this question, it does not recognise. More fundamentally, Caracas argues that the 1966 agreement made the 1899 arbitration ruling a nullity.

RALLY DIVIDED COUNTRY

Mr Maduro, who faces a deep economic and political crisis at home after years of sanctions by the United States, sees the Essequibo dispute as something around which he can rally a deeply divided country ahead of next year’s presidential and legislative elections, when he is likely, for the first time, to face a united opposition.

The December 6 indicative referendum in which Venezuelans were asked to endorse their country’s ownership of the Essequibo, and to greenlight the establishment of a Venezuelan state in the region, proved Mr Maduro right. Ninety-five per cent voted in favour.

President Maduro followed up this mandate with provocatively bellicose statements, raising concerns that the tensions could flare into a war with Guyana.

Rightly, CARICOM, as it has done for decades, has insisted on the sanctity of Guyana’s borders and made clear its support for its fellow CARICOM member.

The region has, even when this newspaper has chafed over the community’s seeming lack of force, displayed skilled diplomacy.

While CARICOM instinctively and institutionally backs Guyana, several member states have in the past benefited from Caracas’ preferential oil facility, PetroCaribe. Some have also been offended by what was perceived as America’s, and the West’s, high-handed, ideological interference into Venezuela’s internal affairs – until it suited Washington to do otherwise.

Prime Minister Gonsalves, the leader of a CARICOM member, a friend of Mr Maduro and the current chairman of the Community of Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAC), leveraged those relationships, with the help of Brazil’s Lula, to bring Mr Maduro and Dr Ali around the table at Argyle.

Keeping them there, and finding a solution to this issue, is the Sisyphean task when no one feels itself capable of making concessions.

Even as Dr Gonsalves continues the initiative and offers the carrot of friendship, CARICOM must also quietly remind Mr Maduro of its stick: a potentially loud voice and 14 votes at the United Nations.