In December last year, however, Venezuela organized a referendum that approved the country’s annexation of the Essequibo region, which today represents 75% of the territory of neighboring Guyana. Essequibo, with 159,500 km2 (Portugal has 92,212), was attributed to the United Kingdom in 1899 as an inheritance from the Netherlands, according to the Paris Report, a resolution considered fraudulent by Venezuela. At the time, Guyana was part of the British Empire.
In 1966, when the process of independence of the United Kingdom’s colonies was underway, Caracas diplomacy managed to get London to recognize the right to discuss ownership of the region in the so-called Geneva Agreement, which was recalled by Nicolás Maduro, leader of Venezuela , following the discovery in 2015 of hydrocarbon vessel fields on the coast of Essequibo by the oil company Exxon-Mobil, making Guyana the fastest growing country per year in South America.
“Essequibo is ours”, Maduro has been saying in recent months, who wants the issue to be central in the Venezuelan presidential elections scheduled for October and, therefore, ignored the decision of the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, to prohibit the referendum . International observers in the region still fear a conflict because Venezuela’s military power is incomparably superior to that of Guyana, with 3,400 police officers, and Georgetown therefore asked the US State Department for support, which prompted Venezuelan rejection.
With so many tensions on the subcontinent, the summit scheduled for the days following the invasion of the Mexican embassy in Quito by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), an organization created in 2011 in Caracas to serve as an alternative to the OAS, founded in 1948 in Washington under the influence of the United States, was eagerly awaited. But only 10 leaders from the organization’s 33 member countries attended, leaving Obrador’s request for a formal complaint against Noboa at the International Court of Justice ineffective.
CELAC, in fact, is the scene of political tension in the region: countries currently governed by the left support the administration of Honduran president Xiomara Castro, those under right-wing leadership accused her of expressing personal opinions, particularly in the Israel-Hamas war, in the name of the organism.
