More than 20 million Venezuelans will decide today, December 3, in a referendum whether the country should annex Essequibo, a region that represents almost 75% of the area of neighboring Guyana. The decision to consult the people was taken about a month ago by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a proponent of annexation. If the “yes” vote on the five questions posed to the population is won, the government of Caracas will decide what the next steps will be.
“Essequibo is ours,” Maduro has already said, who wants the issue to be central to the elections scheduled for October 2024. In 2015, the American oil company Exxon-Mobil found enormous oil reserves.
The area was assigned to the United Kingdom as an inheritance from the Netherlands in 1899, in accordance with the Paris Report, a resolution considered fraudulent by Venezuela. In 1966, Caracas diplomacy succeeded in having London recognize the right to discuss ownership of the region in the so-called Geneva Agreement. The case has never been forgotten by Venezuela, but has returned with force in recent years, following the discovery of hydrocarbon fields off the coast of Essequibo by Exxon-Mobil.
On the Guyanese side, President Irfaan Ali has already deemed the referendum “illegal, provocative and legally null and void.” However, Georgetown, the capital of a country with fewer than a million inhabitants, asked the US State Department for support, prompting a Venezuelan rejection because the country has no armed forces besides about 3,400 police officers.
Besides the US and the UK, Brazil is another country paying attention to the process, which has already strengthened the three-way border between the countries. Lula da Silva’s government, which has good relations with Maduro’s, has sent diplomats to Caracas to try to prevent the issue from turning into an armed conflict, which some academics see as likely and others as inevitable.
Source: DN
