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When Great Britain succumbed to the Venezuelan and United States of America demand that the British Guiana/Venezuela border controversy be taken to arbitration, The Times of London reported on 4 February 1897 that, ‘A Treaty of Arbitration was signed in Washington on 2 February 1897 and in Venezuela the incident passed without much comment, for no one wished to be reminded of the dangerous controversy which could have led to war.’
It is said that mature liberal democracies do not go to war with each other and that the confrontation between Britain and the United States of America over the Venezuela/British Guiana border problem was one of the last in which two such democracies came so close to war. Added to this, in our time, ‘acquiring territory through force is typically too costly and risky, peaceful resolution methods are the only feasible means by which the status quo can change’ (Enduring Territorial Disputes: Strategies of Bargaining, Coercive Diplomacy, and Settlement. -2011- University of Georgia Press). That said, neither Venezuela nor Guyana can be classified as a liberal democracy much less a mature one, so one needs to be on guard when, within weak constitutional/legal arrangements, governments wielding autocratic power can do almost anything they please. Nonetheless, given the way it has developed, the Guyana/Venezuela border dispute appears set upon a relatively peaceful trajectory.
In 1840, the UK government employed Robert Schomburgk to map out the boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela and, according to The Times, the Venezuelans immediately objected to the line he began to draw and in 1844 published their first formal statement claiming lands as far as the Essequibo river (The Times, 14/1/1896). Their claim was based largely on the fact that by a Paper Bull of 1493, Pope Alexander V1 had divided the ‘new world’ between Spain and Portugal, and since then Spain had continuously explored and occupied the disputed areas.
The British dismissed the contention that the Pope had the authority to divide the world and claimed that the Venezuelan argument was self-serving since in its 1811 Independence Manifesto to the World it declared that, ‘Those who conquer and obtain possession of a country by means of their labour, industrious cultivation, and intercourse with the natives thereof, are they who have preferable rights to preference … and transmit it to their posterity born therein.’ Britain also proceeded to provide evidence of their perennial effective control and occupation of lands right to the Orinoco.
Britain, being the much stronger military power, at first refused to go to arbitration and when it did, only wanted to arbitrate its claim outside of the Schomburgk line to the Orinoco. Venezuela did not agree to this limitation and so, the matter dragged on for decades. World opinion was against Britain, who was seen as a ‘Slogger Bill’, twisting the arm of her weaker opponent. Eventually, in 1895, US President Grover Cleveland, invoking the 1823 Monroe Doctrine that prohibited foreign powers from acquiring or expanding their sovereignty in the Americas, established a United States Boundary Commission to deal with the problem.
Britain protested that such action had no principle in international law and that no nation, however powerful, had the right to insert a code of international law that was not recognized by any other country. However, the British got the general message that America, the senior power in the hemisphere, would counterbalance the existing power disparities.
The Venezuelan government was elated: its President Joaquín Crespo (1841–1898) claimed that ‘The doctrine (Monroe) upon which we stand is strong [and] … cannot become obsolete while the republic endures.’ According to him, Venezuela claimed the doctrine as its right and he called upon the United States of America to determine the correct border between British Guiana and Venezuela, after which it must resist by every means at its disposal every new and willful ‘aggression upon its rights and interest’. As noted above, before the US Boundary Commission could finish its work, Great Britain yielded.
In a nutshell, the Guyana/Venezuela Border Commission was established in 1897 and in 1899 gave most of the lands within the Schomburgk line to Britain. Apparently, a few weeks after the decision, Mallet Prevost, who was the Secretary of the Venezuelan side to the Commission, perhaps smarting from the decision, wrote a posthumous letter stating that a ‘deal’ had been done between the British and the Russian Chairman of the Commission, which had deprived Venezuela of the Essequibo territory. Largely based upon this, in November 1962 at the United Nations, Venezuela denounced the 1899 agreement that had been standing for six decades.
The British Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN noted that if it was possible to open a case that was closed for so many years on the evidence put forward by the Venezuelans, ‘there will be no frontier agreement that cannot be questioned!’ In the era of the containment of communism, the denunciation came only weeks after the beginning of the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world the closest it has ever been to nuclear war. Cheddi Jagan argued that when it appeared that the PPP, whom the West considered communist, would lead British Guiana to independence, Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt succumbed under pressure from the United States to raise the border issue. In a 2004 presentation at the Guyana Pegasus, the late president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, made a similar point!
The quarrel led to the Geneva Agreement of 1966 that contains ample scope for the peaceful settlement of the dispute but coterminous with these efforts, Venezuela had become a ‘Slugger Bill’. Space does not allow one to adequately deal with its unprincipled interventions, but from 1966, when it illegally occupied Guyana’s half of the island of Ankoko, it has made many efforts to obstruct the development of the Essequibo, so by way of the Geneva Agreement, Guyana requested the Secretary General of the UN to refer the matter to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and it is there today.
There is always uncertainty in a legal decision-making process, but as noted above, Venezuela has a very weak case and so seeks to use the power disparity between Guyana and itself to force Guyana to relinquish at least some of its rights. It has now organized a referendum essentially asking its citizens, whom, with Essequibo included in its maps, it has taught for six decades to believe that Essequibo is a legitimate part of their country if the government should invade Guyana to take Essequibo!
Various reasons with different levels of value are thought to be motivating Venezuela’s radical current approach. The most common school of thought holds that it is all about the Venezuelan government smarting from the huge oil ‘discoveries’ its erstwhile enemy ExxonMobil has found and is exploiting in Guyana. Others hold that the present Venezuelan government is very weak, must soon face national elections, and is attempting to use the border problem to project strength and resolve to win public support. Then there are those who believe that the referendum is not principally directed at Guyana but is intended to indicate to the ICJ that the Venezuelan government and population are serious and that the problem will not go away unless it makes some concrete concessions.
Whether the Monroe doctrine is dead or alive, it was world opinion, but more importantly American power, that stood for Venezuela when Britain sought to bully it and avoid a peaceful settlement of their dispute. America is still the senior hemispheric power and has in various ways been close to this border issue. The Venezuelans must, therefore, be pretty concerned that once the court speaks and gives global legitimacy to the issue, American power will be expected to and surely must persistently seek to counterbalance existing power disparities in the direction of the rule of law.
