The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, ordered this Thursday to begin a “defensive action” in the Atlantic Ocean after the arrival of a British warship to the coast of Guyana. The vice president of that country, Bharrat Jagdeo, has shortly afterwards denied “plans for offensive action” against its neighbors, who claim sovereignty of Essequibo, a jungle territory rich in minerals and oil. “These are routine measures that are planned for a long time, they are part of building defense capacity. We do not plan to invade Venezuela, President Maduro knows this. We have no plan to take offensive action against Venezuela,” added Jagdeo.
Maduro, who has spoken about the territorial conflict during his end-of-year message, has described the presence of the British Navy ship as a “threat.” […] against peace and sovereignty.” His Government has also denounced it as an act of “hostile provocation” and a violation of the bilateral agreements signed in mid-December in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. A couple of weeks of apparent calm followed the meeting between Presidents Maduro and Irfaan Ali, organized by Brazil with the support of the countries of the Caribbean Community (Caricom), to defuse the escalation of tensions between Venezuela and Guyana over the sovereignty of the Essequibo.
The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry has said in a statement that the arrival of the military ship HMS Trent is “extremely serious” and adds to the statements of Guyana's allies in the territorial conflict such as the United Kingdom and the United States. “Venezuela urges the Guyana authorities to take immediate action to remove the ship and refrain from continuing to involve military powers in the territorial controversy.”
The Venezuelan Armed Forces announced the operational deployment of 5,600 officers on the country's Atlantic coast, which includes disputed territorial waters. “We are going with the best disposition, with the best attitude of a trained combatant to guard Venezuelan territory and exercise sovereignty,” said Ashraf Suleiman Gutiérrez, head of the Strategic Comprehensive Maritime Insular Defense Region. The beginning of the mobilization of ocean patrol vessels, ships, missile boats, F-16 and Sukhoi fighter planes, amphibious and air defense vehicles, among other equipment, was broadcast on television, authorized live by Maduro dressed in a military suit.
In the midst of an internal gale after the primaries in which the Venezuelan opposition closed ranks around the candidate María Corina Machado, Maduro has dusted off a two-century-old conflict with Guyana over the possession of Essequibo, an extensive territory of 160,000 kilometers squares, five times the area of Belgium, with important mining and oil wealth. On the 1777 maps the border of the Captaincy General of Venezuela included this area. But it was British Guyana, and then independent Guyana, that ended up occupying this territory. Following the Paris Arbitration Award of 1899, a document considered rigged by Venezuela, Guyana's border was moved westward to keep that portion within its limits. For decades, this controversy was being mediated at the request of the United Nations within the framework of the 1966 Geneva Agreement and five years ago it led to the International Court of Justice, whose jurisdiction to settle this conflict is rejected by Venezuela.
One day after the opposition primaries that mobilized more than two million Venezuelans, Maduro announced a referendum for December 3 in which the annexation of Essequibo was approved with a participation that has been questioned due to the low mobilization. that was seen on the street and the absence of disaggregated results on the votes. The alarms went off in Latin America and were discussed in an informal session of the UN Security Council. Despite this, Maduro fled forward and appointed authorities in the region, ordered the identification of its citizens and decreed a new map of the country with Essequibo. Guyana, which in recent years has granted oil concessions in the disputed waters, also followed the gunpowder with the raising of its country's flag in the disputed sector and the mobilization of its allies in the field of diplomacy.
This is a latent tension that could be managed politically by Chavismo, according to several analysts, to suspend the 2024 presidential elections, which it would attend at a disadvantage if it is forced to comply with the democratic guarantees demanded by the international community, under the argument that an escalation with Guyana would force him to declare a state of emergency.
After the meeting in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines on December 14, the parties agreed to continue dialogue and avoid taking measures that further complicate the situation. The small Caribbean country also served to carry out the exchange of American prisoners a couple of weeks later for businessman Alex Saab, detained for money laundering in the United States, which indicates that he was a front man for senior officials in the Maduro Government, and that Venezuela claims him as a diplomat. The issue of Essequibo, on which the Government deployed an intense propaganda campaign, seemed buried for a few weeks with the new movements made on the negotiating table that Chavismo maintains with the United States, which has made sanctions more flexible, so that Maduro step towards competitive elections in 2024 such as the possible authorization of Machado to compete freely, a matter on which a decision from the Supreme Court is expected this last week of 2023, when the waters between Venezuela and Guyana seem to be agitated again
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