Here we are pursuing a racist agenda when the entire country is under threat. Yesterday, I came across an article that proclaimed that Venezuela is preparing for war. That almost passed me by until I realized that the only country in the region, except Colombia, with which Venezuela has a problem is Guyana.
So I went back to the article that was written by an American journalist only yesterday. Had it been written on Saturday, I might have written it off as an April Fool’s joke.
This journalist was critical of President Joe Biden. He also looked at the situation in Venezuela with its vast oil reserves. But that country is not making the kind of money that it should.
The news article stated “Venezuela’s corrupt leadership wants to maximize their nation’s oil production output. Yet, PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil conglomerate, has proven unable to achieve the increased output quotas that the Maduro government has commanded of them.
“With the situation in Venezuela worsening for Maduro, the socialist dictatorship still has a large—and modernizing—military that it could deploy to change the outlook of the country’s oil production profile.
“No, this won’t be done by discovering new sources of oil within Venezuela’s borders. It will be accomplished instead by annexing their smaller neighbor, Guyana,” concluded the reporter.
It is common knowledge that Guyana does not have anything, except its few soldiers, to defend itself. It has no fighter jet or large landing craft or even air transport carriers.
When Germany had its eyes on Britain back in 1935, it came up against a unified country that could turn to its colonies for even more people. And Britain did. Guyanese answered that call and some paid with their lives.
The situation in South America looks eerily similar to the situation that had occurred in the run up to Saddam Hussein’s unlawful invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Just as in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a larger oil-producing state (Venezuela, in this case), seeks to expand both its territory and its control over the region’s vast oil wealth.
Caracas has set for itself this objective, as Saddam did, to break out of Western sanctions, to improve Venezuela’s economy, and to enhance Venezuela’s geopolitical bargaining power in the wider region.
Just as in 1990, when few believed that Saddam would invade Kuwait, few are paying attention to the situation between Venezuela and Guyana.
On Thursday, the International Court of Justice will be ruling on arguments made by Guyana and Venezuela on the territorial issue. Indeed, Venezuela had long said that it would not seek to defend the issue in court since it believes that the court has no jurisdiction to rule on the matter.
But here is Guyana awaiting that ruling. This article could have done no more to scare me. There are those of us who sit and contend that we are friends with the United States and some of the other western countries.
How close is that friendship is anybody’s guess. During the war for the Malvinas, commonly called the Falklands War, Britain raced more than halfway around the world to fight for an island (two islands really) that it owned in the south Atlantic.
It had the firepower to take on Argentina’s might. It had the Harrier jump jets and battleships and cruisers and destroyers. It had missiles. The Argentines had the French Exocet that flew just above the waves.
It lost some ships, but it also sank some of Argentina’s including the General Belgrano, a cruiser. If Guyana should come under attack, don’t expect that reaction. Britain no longer owns us. The United States has its hands full in Ukraine and is preparing to help Taiwan.
I did not know that Venezuela had already drawn up a plan to attack Guyana. The reporter stated that in 2018, Brazil intercepted a detailed invasion plan that the Venezuelan military had concocted to take the oil rich Essequibo.
The county is the crux of a major border dispute that has ripped the heart of Venezuela-Guyana relations.
That was a mere four years ago. Whether David Granger was aware of this has not been stated. He is no longer in power. I did hear that the present government was not fazed by the Venezuela plan then. I refuse to believe this.
But here we are in a divided country that is home to thousands of Venezuelan migrants, most of them in Essequibo. At this time, we have people highlighting ethnic discrimination in a country that could be under the same pressure as Ukraine.
The journalist stated that Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro argues that Guyana has ceded control of this disputed, oil-rich territory to ExxonMobil. Caracas believes this is a violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty and risks depriving Venezuela of the oil it needs to create prosperity for its ailing economy.
He said that at the time that Brazil leaked the Venezuelan war plan, most in Washington were reassured that the Brazilians would make bold moves to deter any Venezuelan invasion of Guyana. But that was when the Right-wing, pro-American Jair Bolsonaro was running Brazil, he said.
So here we are destroying ourselves from within while a great threat looms. That threat could see us having nothing, not one ethnic group or the other.
The president and the Opposition Leader are not keen to have dialogue with each other. Our fate is now in our hands.
