2023-10-06 15:01:02
The Essequibo has been the epicenter of a territorial dispute between Guyana and Venezuela for more than 180 years.
Although tensions over control of the region rich in mineral resources have persisted throughout this time, in recent years they have worsened following the insistence of the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, to “reconquer” a territory that, according to him, “ “always” belonged to his country.
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Caracas insists on the need to resume “peace negotiations” to try to end the dispute, respecting the 1966 Geneva Agreement, in which the parties committed to seeking a peaceful solution through direct dialogue.
But Guyana rejects dialogue.
In a statement on September 30, the president of Guyana, Irfaan Ali, assured that the controversy must be resolved in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Essequibo – also known as Guayana Esequiba – comprises 159,000 square kilometers rich in natural and forest resources, and constitutes two thirds of Guyana’s territory.
Caracas and Georgetown have never been able to agree on the layout of the border that separates them and the Essequibo region frequently appears on Venezuelan maps with a line called “Reclamation Zone.”
Map of the area.
This is a dispute that has multiple episodes and that was attempted to be resolved in a court in Paris in 1899 and that since the Geneva Agreement was signed between Venezuela and the United Kingdom in 1966, it has maintained a status quo.
Here we tell you the key points.
Why does Venezuela claim two-thirds of Guyana?
Guayana Esequiba was initially controlled by the Spanish and Dutch empires, which would later cede it to the British.
It was part of the Captaincy General of Venezuela, when it was founded in 1777, and was later integrated into the nascent Republic of Venezuela, for a brief period, starting in 1811.
“In 1819, with the creation of the Republic of Colombia (Gran Colombia), Great Britain recognized the course of the Essequibo River as the border,” Venezuelan historian Manuel Donís, an expert member of the National Academy of the History of Colombia, tells BBC Mundo. Venezuela that has dedicated 35 years to the historical study of the borders of Essequibo.
Venezuela insists that the territory, which comprises almost two-thirds of present-day Guyana, belongs to it. (EPA).
“When Venezuela separated from the Republic of Colombia in 1830, the Essequibo River remained as the limit of the Republic of Venezuela. That was recognized for much of the 19th century until gold was found in the Yuruari River basin, in Venezuelan Guiana, which triggered British ambition for that territory.”
London had acquired the territory in 1814 – around 51,700 square kilometers at that time – through a treaty with the Netherlands, but the pact did not define its western border and that is why the British appointed explorer Robert Schomburgk in 1840 to draw it.
Shortly following, the so-called “Schomburgk Line” was unveiled, a controversial route that claimed nearly 80,000 additional square kilometers.
“A second border line was already advancing towards the west of the Essequibo River, and these lines were followed by others. Schomburgk died, but Great Britain modified the maps and practically intended to reach (the Venezuelan town of) Upata with a fourth line,” explains Donís.
When did the dispute start?
According to a document from the US State Department, the dispute officially began in 1841, when the Venezuelan government of General José Antonio Páez denounced an alleged incursion into his country by the British Empire, of which Guyana was a part.
Venezuela knew that it might not face the most powerful empire in the world alone and that is why it sought the support of the United States, which was beginning to emerge as an emerging power.
“America for Americans”: the Monroe Doctrine created in rejection of European imperialism in the American continent made the US side with Venezuela. (Getty Images).
And under the Monroe Doctrine, which called for an “America for Americans,” the United States decided to intervene in the border dispute in 1895.
After Venezuelan insistence and pressure from then-US President Grover Cleveland and his former ambassador in Caracas, in January of that year the US House of Representatives proposed Resolution 252 to Congress, which recommended that the dispute be resolved in a international arbitration.
Cleveland had previously declared in a controversial intervention that the border line at Essequibo had been expanded “in a mysterious way.”
At first, the United Kingdom rejected the American interference, but London knew that it might not afford to enter into a new war with the North American giant, which was inflexible in its decision to support Venezuela, and ended up accepting the proposal.
When did the first arbitration take place?
On February 2, 1897, the US, representing Venezuela, and the United Kingdom signed a treaty in Washington to submit the dispute to international arbitration.
Venezuela, convinced that the uti possidetis iuris would apply – a legal principle of International Law that guarantees States to administer territories that geographically and historically belong to them – agreed to go to a court in Paris.
For Venezuelans, Essequibo is part of their country. (GETTY IMAGES).
For the historian Manuel Donís, Venezuela was deceived.
“According to the uti possidetis iuris, the territory that was considered Venezuela when it was a Spanish colony, should be the same when it became a republic. “Venezuela acted in good faith, but was the victim of a compromise between the Americans, the British and (Russian jurist) Friedrich Martens,” he says.
The commission ended up acting on October 3, 1899 in favor of the United Kingdom, establishing the “Schomburgk Line” as the border between both territories. The controversial ruling is known today as the Paris Arbitration Award.
Half a century later, evidence emerged that denounced the complicity between the British delegates and the jurist Friedrich Martens, whose vote was decisive for the ruling once morest Venezuela.
After the death of Severo Mallet-Prevost – an American lawyer who was part of Venezuela’s defense in the Paris Arbitration Award – his legal representative made public in 1949 a document that Mallet-Prevost had written four years earlier, in which denounces that the award was a political compromise.
“Three judges who had the majority disposed of the territory of Venezuela, because the two British judges were not acting as judges, but rather as men of the government.”
Guyana was historically less prosperous than Venezuela, but this has changed in recent years with the discovery of large oil fields on the Guyanese coast and the great economic crisis that the Bolivarian Republic is going through. (GETTY IMAGES).
In the text, Mallet-Prevost concludes that: “The court’s decision was, consequently, unanimous; but, although it is true that it gave Venezuela the most important sector in dispute from a strategic point of view, it was unfair to Venezuela and deprived it of a very extensive and important territory over which Great Britain had, in my opinion, no control. the slightest shadow of law.”
The document further indicates that Judge Friedrich Martens was not impartial and persuaded one of the parties to accept a controversial proposal that he himself had drafted.
“Venezuela considers that Essequibo was taken illegitimately and illegally by Great Britain in the 19th century, which is why it claims it,” historian Tomas Helmut Straka, professor at the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), tells BBC Mundo.
The Paris Arbitration Award, he claims, was a rigged agreement and “a typical compromise” between the great empires of the time.
Mallet-Prevost’s revelations led Venezuela to denounce the award to the world and declare it null and void.
At the end of the Second World War and with the creation of the United Nations (UN), the decolonization process began, in which several European colonies became independent and a favorable situation arose for the review of this award.
In addition to the information revealed by Mallet-Prevost, the Venezuelan Jesuits Hermann González Oropeza and Pablo Ojer Celigueta corroborated and found even more evidence of what happened in Paris, searching in the British archives that are usually opened to the public following 50 years following an event occurred. .
Guyana was part of the British Empire until its independence in 1966.
With all the documentation in hand, the government of the then president of Venezuela Rómulo Betancourt took on the task of denouncing the irregularities found to the United Nations in 1962 through its chancellor, in order for the United Kingdom to agree to a review. of the arbitration award.
But, following multiple meetings in London, the United Kingdom refuses to reissue the arbitration ruling.
However, a historical fact works in Venezuela’s favor: the imminent independence of British Guiana.
“The independence movement and the strength of the Venezuelan claim with the documentation that had been made known and that is reflected in the ‘Report that the Venezuelan experts on the question of limits with British Guiana present to the National Government’, lead to the British, and a group of Guyanese who were present, to sign the Geneva Agreement,” details historian Manuel Donís.
Signed on February 17, 1966, just three months before Guyana’s independence was recognized, the Geneva Agreement is a treaty still in force that recognizes Venezuela’s claim and seeks to find satisfactory solutions for the practical settlement of the border dispute. .
The pact indicates that if the two countries cannot agree on a peaceful solution, the UN Secretary General must choose possible solution mechanisms, contained in article 33 of the United Nations charter.
What is Guyana’s position?
Guyana considers that there is nothing more to discuss and that Venezuela must accept the borders established by the Paris Arbitration Award of 1899.
In an interview with BBC Mundo published in March 2017, the former vice president of Guyana Carl Barrington Greenidge described Venezuela’s claim as “absurd.”
So far, United Nations mediation efforts have been unsuccessful. (AFP).
Furthermore, he denied that the dispute began in 1840. For him, it all began in the 1890s or “maybe a little before,” when the United States helped Venezuela bring the United Kingdom to an arbitration table.
“They received the mouth of the Orinoco River and agreed, as part of the Treaty of Washington of 1897, to accept the decision of the arbitration court as final and definitive. Therefore, as far as we are concerned, that claim ended at that point: Venezuela received territory, Guyana received territory and the treaty operated without problems for 63 years,” he added.
“Borders are never perfect, so we don’t expect the problems to disappear completely. But the fact is that the claim itself is so absurd that Venezuela has never, ever exercised sovereignty over the Essequibo!”
Greenidge also claimed that following the United Provinces (of the Netherlands) separated from Spain in 1648, Spain never had sovereignty over the area, as it was granted to the Dutch as stipulated in a treaty.
“And when Holland lost the Napoleonic Wars, fighting on the side of the French, the territory was transferred to Great Britain in 1814.”
Why have tensions increased?
The dispute has had ups and downs in recent decades.
Guyana, the United Kingdom and Venezuela signed the Port of Spain Protocol in 1970, which froze talks between both parties for twelve years, a step considered a mistake by many Venezuelan historians.
In the 1980s, the Venezuelan claim was resumed until Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999.
“Chávez basically lowers the tone of the dispute, his project was above all to consolidate leadership in the Caribbean. To achieve this, he decides to have Guyana as an ally and not get involved with something that has always been a cause of tension in Venezuela’s very complicated relations with Trinidad and other Caribbean islands,” recalls Professor Helmut Straka.
But the multiple discoveries of vast oil fields in Guyana in the last five years, which have already begun to be exploited, have caused tensions to increase.
Guyana submitted a request to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague in 2018 to resolve the territorial conflict, but Venezuela has since denied the legitimacy of that institution to resolve the dispute.
And on December 18, 2020, the ICJ announced its ruling in which it declared itself competent in the matter; but Venezuela does not give in and does not accept it.
Hugo Chávez (pictured at a Unasur meeting in Guyana) toned down the dispute. (GETTY IMAGES).
Manuel Donís explains that for Venezuela it would not make sense to attend the International Court in The Hague, because it would only decide if the Paris Award is null and void and that is something that Caracas considers evident.
“It gives me the impression that Guyana has handled this issue of the claim very well, not only with Maduro, but since 1966, and has been taking advantage of the acquiescence, errors and hesitations of the different governments” .
The issue of Essequibo has always generated national unity among Venezuelans and that is something that the president might be trying to use to his advantage.
At the beginning of this year, the president of Venezuela sent a letter to the Secretary General of the UN in which he asked him to mediate in the territorial dispute.
“The harsh historical experience of economic aggression and territorial dispossession by imperial powers taught us a lesson never to submit our sovereignty to the decisions of international bodies,” the text reads.
Tensions continue to increase, and with an inflexible Guyana, on the one hand, and on the other a Venezuela in crisis, but which does not rest in its fight for a territory that has always appeared on its maps, the dispute over the Essequibo does not seem soon to be resolved, at least in the short term.
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