Venezuela’s border row with Guyana
VENEZUELA’S revival of its territorial claim to some two thirds of Guyana’s 83 000 square miles will be expected to engage the attention of Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders when they assemble for their special two-day meeting next week in Trinidad. It must have come as a very big surprise and deep disappointment to the CARICOM leaders that President Hugo Chavez Frias should have chosen the centennial of an October, 1899, international Arbitration Tribunal award on the Venezuela-Guyana dispute to criticise the award and reaffirm his country’s territorial claim. At last July’s CARICOM Summit in Port-of-Spain, when they held a lengthy meeting with Chavez at their retreat in Tobago, the Community leaders were to subsequently issue a communique pointing to the rather warm relations that were developing with official visits between representatives of the two border neighbours. Briefed by then President Janet Jagan, and noting statements of the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, Jose Vincente Rangel, the CARICOM leaders anticipated in their communique that a High Level Bilateral Commission, established last March, would “contribute in a significant manner” to cooperation between the two neighbours. Further, in the search for a peaceful solution, the dispute remains under the aegis of the United Nations Secretary General through his Good Officer, Sir Alister McIntyre, former Secretary General of CARICOM and ex-vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies. Guyana has more than its fair share of normal problems as the 20th century draws to a close, to have to worry at this stage about Venezuelan troop movements near its borders and protests against oil exploration and economic investment in the Essequibo region by a government in Caracas. It was Venezuela that had originally failed to honour the 1899 Paris Tribunal award of the demarcated and existing boundaries between the two countries as “a full, perfect and final settlement”. Successive governments in Caracas have rejected the award and at times pursued sabre-rattling politics. Curiously, what was deemed in 1899 by the Paris Tribunal to be “a full, perfect and final settlement”, was to have been politically manoeuvred, prior to Guyana’s independence in 1966, into the Geneva Accord requiring “satisfactory solutions for a practical settlement of the controversy”. This development remains one of the very troubling aspect of a 19th century border problem inherited by a poor CARICOM state that is anxious to live at peace with its neighbours without any diminishing of its territorial integrity.
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