The abrupt increase in nationalist discourse in the cause of Venezuelan sovereignty in Guayana Esequiba, promoted with unusual aggressiveness by the Government of Nicolás Maduro, rests on a conclusion that has been dormant for years, but that underlies the psyche of society, beginning by the Armed Forces: the large amount of legitimate territory that the nation has lost in various international awards and confusing political circumstances, during the times of the Spanish colony and also as an independent nation.
Despite this reality and the enormous display of propaganda orchestrated by the national government to promote an annexation referendum on the Essequibo, the voting centers were seen with few people throughout the day and Chavismo did not obtain the call it would have liked to capitalize on the initiative.
The celebration, however, has given way to the debut of a very intransigent nationalist tone in the high government, which is serving as an argument to judicially penalize any uncomfortable political position. Four of the closest collaborators of the opposition candidate, María Corina Machado – a traditional activist in the cause of Essequibo, but who is now appealing to the International Court of Justice to resolve her sovereignty – have been arrested, accused of collaborating with the multinational Exxon Mobil and the Government of Guyana.
The old Captaincy General of Venezuela, created in 1777, had about 1,500,000 square kilometers (the current Republic of Venezuela has 912,000), which included the island of Trinidad, one of the provinces of that entity, taken by the English. to Spain in 1802. With the arrival of independence, the country also lost control of the Guajira peninsula, part of the current Colombian eastern plains and large sectors of the Amazon, to the benefit of Colombia and Brazil.
Also, progressively, Guayana Esequiba. A territory over which there has been a long subsequent diplomatic struggle, first with the British, who promoted the colonization of the area, and then with the independent Government of Guyana. An issue that had remained dormant as a controversy for several decades until now.
“There are two awards that have left a deep mark on the territorial identity of Venezuela,” says Lauren Caballero, internationalist and analyst at the Central University of Venezuela. “The award of 1891, which defined the definitive border between Venezuela and Colombia and the almost total loss of the La Guajira peninsula, and the Paris Arbitration Award of 1899, which resulted in the loss of Essequibo. These two events have somehow generated a kind of trauma in the conscience of generations of Venezuelans, to the point that diplomacy in Caracas avoided for almost the entire 20th century committing itself to any international treaty that would force it to settle its territorial delimitation with third parties. ”.
The famous “castilletes milestone”, after the delimitation that resulted in the loss of almost the entire La Guajira peninsula, is the subsequent starting point of the famous dispute over the Gulf of Venezuela—controlled by the country, but claimed in part by Colombia—which for years was the one that monopolized all the news headlines in those years, with some peaks of binational diplomatic and military tension included.
“Following the doctrine of Simón Bolívar, Venezuela always appealed to the principle of uti posedetis juris to delimit its borders in a friendly and expeditious manner upon the dissolution of Gran Colombia. By then, the first British settlers were already beginning to cross the border on the western bank of the Essequibo River, which provoked diplomatic protests from Bolívar himself,” explains Kenneth Ramírez, president of the Venezuelan Council of International Relations.
Both experts warn that the loss of these territories is also caused by the incipient diplomacy of independent Venezuela, and the difficulties at that time in effectively controlling all of its territory. Venezuela was, moreover, one of the several theaters of operations of British imperial diplomacy throughout the world.
“With Brazil, the country also lost thousands of square kilometers,” says Ramírez. “Inexplicably, Venezuela agreed without further opposition to depart from the Uti Posedetis Juris, and the 1859 boundary treaty confirmed Venezuelan rights over the Orinoco and Essequibo river basins.” In that year, one of the most chaotic that Venezuela has had in its history, a nation without a government, the Federal War began, a four-year civil conflict, even more virulent than the war of independence.
The Venezuelan Congress had not wanted to ratify the famous Pombo-Michelena treaty, which placed satisfactory limits on Venezuelan demands against Colombia in 1833. After successive Colombian-Venezuelan negotiations without agreements, “in 1886, the Paris Act appointed arbitrator of the right to Queen María Cristina to execute sentence in this dispute with Colombia. The 1891 Award is very detrimental to Venezuela, since it takes away extensive territorial areas from the Caribbean to the Amazon,” says Ramírez.
“This is what explains the reluctance of the Venezuelan State to attend the International Court of Justice to settle the Essequibo controversy with Guyana; that has been a permanent position,” says Caballero. “Despite the fact that in the 1966 Geneva Agreement, Venezuelan negotiators did not exclude the possibility of a judicial settlement, as stipulated in the United Nations.”
“Venezuela has lost a fifth of its territory since the time of the Captaincy General,” adds Kenneth Ramírez. “As the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco stated in a famous parliamentary speech in 1941, he did it without firing a single shot. It is natural that there is sensitivity to the issue of borders. And it has been, once again, the diplomatic errors of the Maduro Government that have us in this situation, refusing to attend the International Court of Justice.”
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