Essequibo, or the Persistence of El Dorado

The history of the dispute is an endless parade of ghosts.

~ Enrique Bernardo Núñez

I. The pirate and the myth

The privateer Walter Raleigh, colonizer of Ireland and North America, was the first English explorer of what he labeled the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana. His account of his 1595 expedition through lands previously explored by the Spanish repeated the myths that had guided them. He claimed to possess evidence of the existence of Manoa, the capital of a fugitive Inca court, in a territory that is today disputed by Venezuela and Guyana: the Guayana Esequiba or Essequibo region. Raleigh claimed that Manoa was the indigenous name for the legendary El Dorado: capital of the Guayana empire, extension of the Andean culture, more prosperous than any city of Peru in its greatest splendor; a city on a salt lake similar to the Caspian Sea, ruled by an emperor whose quarters were filled with gold replicas of all the plants and animals of the land. The lake had an island with trees, flowers, and vegetables of gold and silver, on which the emperor and his retinue drank during long feasts, their naked bodies covered with gold dust. Further south, a rival empire was made up of Amazon warriors. Bordering Manoa were other equally remarkable peoples, with entire cities built on trees to withstand the thirty-foot floods of the Orinoco River, a people of dark skin “like the blacks,” and a society of headless people, with eyes on their shoulders, mouths on their chests, and hair on their backs.

The corsair was reproducing a Spanish legend originating in the 1560s, in pursuit of which numerous expeditions had ended in disaster. Most historians agree that by writing his account, Raleigh sought to rehabilitate himself politically. He had fallen into disgrace and was compensating for the scarce achievements of his expedition with fantastic retellings. Raleigh led a second raid in Guayana, equally unsuccessful, and his unauthorized attack on the Spanish city of San Tomé would be paid for with his head upon his return to England. The explorer Robert Schomburgk, who would contribute in the nineteenth century to the English colonization of the Essequibo by leaving evidence of his travels in maps and marks on the ground, felt a great affinity for Raleigh, whom he saw as his predecessor. In his prologue to Raleigh’s book, Schomburgk imagines having traveled to the places that Raleigh could not reach, in the midst of which, somewhere, he believed he would find El Dorado.

The mists of the dream slowly dissipated, but from time to time the myth seemed to insist on its reality. In 1871, the El Callao mine was discovered in Venezuelan territory, west of the Essequibo region, where Raleigh believed El Dorado would be, and it became one of the most important gold mines in the world. The Venezuelan government of Guzmán Blanco granted exploitation concessions under very advantageous conditions to foreign companies, even to English companies, in spite of the fact that there was already an open conflict in the face of the aggressive advance of British imperialism over Venezuelan territory. The modern imperialist corsairs were attracted by the prospect of getting their hands on gold deposits in the surroundings of the Cuyuní and Caroní rivers. Not coincidentally, one of these English companies was named Manoa.

This enormous wealth in diamonds, gold, and other precious metals, on both sides of the Venezuelan-Guyanese border, has not transformed the Essequibo into anything resembling El Dorado, the colonialists’ paradise. Instead, it resembles other infernos the colonized have endured, as armed mafias with a semi-enslaved workforce plunder the earth, leaving a moonscape of mercury-contaminated craters as open wounds in the rainforest. 

And yet it was oil, the black gold, that marked Venezuela’s destiny in the twentieth century, and which in recent years has revived Venezuelan irredentism in the Essequibo. Independent Guyana was for decades one of the poorest countries in South America, while Venezuela amassed huge oil revenues, and successive governments subordinated to the U.S. cherished the idea of reconquering the territory lost to British imperialism. In 2015, while the Venezuelan economy collapsed, off the coast of Guyana’s disputed Essequibo region, a huge oil deposit was found: an underground Manoa, a petroleum lake. As contagious as the gold fever of the nineteenth century, oil fever rekindled the Venezuelan territorial claim, which is now being settled at the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ), while Venezuelan troops are massing on a border they claim not to recognize. The U.S. and U.K. governments no longer see the Venezuelan claim as the useful Damocles’ sword it used to be against Guyana, when they feared it could become “a second Cuba.”

Just as the British Empire first annexed the Essequibo by means of Schomburgk’s maps, Maduro has incorporated the territory into the official Venezuelan map after a referendum in 2023 in which the Essequibo’s inhabitants were not consulted and in which few Venezuelans voted. As in the case of Raleigh, Maduro’s real objective lies beyond the conquest of the Essequibo: his real aim is to consolidate his power in Caracas. And like Raleigh, Maduro needs to invent stories to justify conquest.

Conquering Venezuela through the Essequibo

On July 19, 2024, nine days before the presidential elections in Venezuela, during a campaign rally in Barquisimeto, Maduro threatened a “bloodbath and civil war” if he lost the elections: “We are a popular force and power, in every street, in every community. We are a military power as well. We are a police power. And the civil-military-police union, this is what I say as a leader, is not going to let this homeland be taken away.” Ten days later, paramilitary, military, and police forces would start a repressive campaign that killed twenty two people in just one week, to defend the fraud with which Maduro snatched the election. In Barquisimeto, while explaining why an opposition electoral victory could not be accepted, Maduro argued that “the people” would not let “their country be taken away. They are not going to let them hand over the Guayana Esequiba.”

The mention of the Essequibo is at first disconcerting: the government and the traditional right-wing opposition in fact agree in their annexationist policy vis-à-vis a territory that makes up more than two thirds of Guyana. Moreover, the most common popular response to Maduro’s expansionist agitation has been indifference and skepticism – hardly a matter to fight a civil war over. And yet this was not a digression in Maduro’s rant. The turn towards a police state after the exhaustion of Chavismo’s broader social base is reflected in Venezuela’s foreign policy as a turn towards expansionism, given the impossibility of furthering regional alliances based on oil clientelism. Maduro’s words reflect an irreversible process of political degradation and indicate that his fraud in the July presidential elections heightens the possibility of military aggression against Guyana, should it be deemed useful for furthering military control, not in the Essequibo but in Venezuela itself.

It is telling that a self-styled anti-imperialist government is in fact recycling a conflict from the old Cold War arsenal of U.S. and British imperialism against Guyana. This is not the only irony. The centrality of oil in the dispute, due to the discovery and exploitation of oil fields that turned Guyana into the fastest growing economy in the world, also speaks of a continuity between what this black gold represents today and the myth of the golden city that Spanish and English colonizers believed was hidden in the jungles of the Essequibo. That dream of infinite wealth, a promise of redemption so often turned into a curse, is also reflected in the false promise of progress oil has proven to be in Venezuela. A dream that has shaped the disputes between colonial powers, imperialist intrigues and nationalist manipulations of the past, ghosts that haunt us today like a nightmare – we need to dig into this history to decipher the current moment.

If we were to order the countries of the world by their territorial extension, and the Essequibo were a country, it would be located near the middle of the list, between Uruguay and Suriname. Formally appropriated by the British Empire in 1899 and administered by Guyana since its independence in 1966, the region has been claimed by Venezuela since 1962. It is the largest territorial dispute recognized by the UN. Its 159,500 square kilometers, mostly covered by a dense rainforest, represent more than twice the combined territories of the Donbas and the Crimean peninsula under Russian occupation.

Despite its enormous size it’s sparsely populated, with about 120,000 people, mostly settled on the coast. In international territorial demarcation it is said that “the land rules over the sea,” meaning that land demarcation is done first, and then the maritime demarcation is projected from the coast. But in the case of the Essequibo it could be argued that the focal point of the dispute is in the offshore oil deposits. In the vast and lush jungles, with little state presence on either side of the border, where the most common currency is gold, authority is embodied by Venezuelan, Colombian, Brazilian and Guyanese gangs waging a subterranean dispute on their own terms.

There are curious symmetries and oppositions between Guyana and Venezuela. Both countries are run by nominally leftist regimes, administering a Bolivarian Republic and a Cooperative Republic, respectively. In the wake of a failed attempt to perpetuate rentierism after a century as an oil-exporting country, Venezuela’s economy is now approximately one fifth of what it was in 2013, the sharpest fall in the world. Inversely, between 2020 and 2024 the Guyanese economy has increased fivefold. One third of the oil discovered in the world since 2015 is located in Guyana, propelling the country towards the highest oil production per capita in the world, while Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world but faces production levels in sharp decline. Meanwhile, both countries are highly vulnerable to climate change, especially Guyana, with most of its population living in the coastal region, where important extensions of land are below sea level.

Like Venezuela a century ago, Guyana began oil exploitation by handing over concessions to imperialist companies under onerous conditions. Its low level of industrialization as oil extraction becomes the axis of the economy imposes the risk of great economic distortions, as Venezuela’s history proves. Under somewhat similar conditions, Venezuela went from being an agricultural exporter to a net importer of food. The Guyanese ruling party, the People’s Progressive Party-Civic (PPP-C), once persecuted by the U.S., has abandoned all Marxist pretensions in favor of the promotion of business interests, while Chavista “socialism” has always had a strong military and bourgeois imprint. Both parties pose as nationalists and invoke sovereignty while competing to hand over natural resources to transnational corporations. The Guyanese government cultivates political alliances with the U.S., the U.K., and India, while the Venezuelan government aligns itself with Russia. Both share alliances with China.

The Essequibo affair proves that Chavista claims about promoting regional integration and solidarity are as weak and void of content as its claims to anti-imperialism, and more generally to socialism. The promise of a revolutionary break turned into the continuation of a shameful past.

II. “But a storm is blowing from Paradise…”

The colonial dominions of Spain, Holland, and Portugal in South America were separated by vast plains and jungles, without clear borders. England, once it had seized the former Dutch dominions, would advance with little resistance from its neighbors, widening its colony from 34,000 square kilometers to 200,000 square kilometers over the course of eight decades, almost without firing a shot. In the case of the former Spanish colony of Venezuela, not only would there be a correlation of military and economic forces favorable to British imperialism; the social limits of its own national project, headed by a slave-owning class, would also end up influencing the physiognomy of its borders, since it could not offer a more attractive social order to the sectors formerly enslaved and still oppressed by British colonialism. In Venezuela slavery would be abolished two decades after emancipation in the British colonies. 

Venezuelan resistance to British imperialism was undermined by its own internal conflicts and the incoherent policies of its corrupt ruling class, such as the granting of mining concessions to British companies in areas it aspired to occupy. The anti-imperialist nature of the conflict became further complicated by Venezuelan authorities’ request for U.S. intervention in the name of the Monroe Doctrine, as a rather desperate attempt at counterbalancing British power. As an emerging imperialist power in its own right, the U.S. would intervene not in order to altruistically protect Venezuelan interests, but to obtain European recognition of its doctrine of regional domination. This was of particular importance for the U.S. as its colonialist and expansionist character, already evident in its war against Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century, took a truly global scale in the Spanish-American war of 1898 that would allow it to occupy Puerto Rico and Cuba in the Caribbean, as well as Guam and the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean and Southeast Asia.

In the twentieth century, as British power wore down and an independence movement emerged in Guyana, a newly dominant U.S. imperialism would use Venezuela’s territorial claims as a battering ram against Guyana’s pro-independence and left-leaning leadership, participating jointly in various interventionist plots. In the last quarter of the twentieth century the conflict lingered like a useless Cold War relic. When Chávez came to power, the ensuing ideological and economic rapprochement between the two governments could have delivered a friendly agreement to end the dispute, but Chávez’s regime, in its strategic shortsightedness and inability to implement coherent policy, blundered the opportunity. Finally, as Chavismo’s regional policy of oil subsidies collapsed along with Venezuela’s economy, Maduro made a dictatorial turn in 2015. When oil was discovered by U.S. corporations in Guyanese waters, Venezuela’s old territorial claims suddenly became profitable in its internal politics, as well as potential leverage in negotiations with U.S. imperialism.

These are the historical coordinates of the current situation, in which the Venezuelan dictatorship has incorporated El Esequibo into its maps and appointed military authorities to govern the territory, while massing troops on the border.

The legacy of perfidious Albion

This sprawling territory in the north of South America was at the center of world history long before oil was discovered off its coast in the early twenty-first century. Gold fever, Britain’s insatiable hunger for territorial conquest, and the Essequibo’s proximity to the strategically crucial Orinoco River drew the biggest imperialist powers at the end of the nineteenth century into confrontation. The conflict marked the end of British colonial expansion in the region and its succession by the new imperialist hegemon, the U.S. 

Maduro’s project of taking over the territory to control its oil rent will probably fail, as have other projects, such as the Swedish colonization of Barima in the eighteenth century or the establishment of Jewish settlements in British Guiana. Regardless of its outcome, this project is already shaping the present and future of both Venezuela and Guyana – and, as it develops in the midst of U.S. imperialism’s stage of relative decline, it may perhaps also be a symptom of the emerging world order of our own time.

Before the Spaniards, Raleigh, the Dutch, and Schomburgk, there was already Guayana, a land with its original peoples and its history. Guayana is a word of indigenous origin that designates “the land of many waters,” alluding to great rivers such as the Orinoco, the Caura, the Casiquiare, and the Esequibo, whose hundreds of tributaries cross the region like blood vessels. The Guayana Shield is a geological formation that stretches from southeastern Colombia to the Brazilian region of Amapá, including southeastern Venezuela and almost all of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. The presence of Warao, Sarao, Arawako, Kariña, Patamuná, Arekuna, Akawaio, Wapishana, Makushi, Wai Wai, and Pemón peoples is older than those states. Traces of indigenous peoples go back seven thousand years according to some estimates.

Between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Dutch established colonies on the northeastern coast of the continent. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the colonies of Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice came under British control, formalized in 1814. These colonial domains expanded fivefold towards the end of the century, mostly to the west but also to the east. While the Essequibo river served for a long time as a line of maximum aspiration for Venezuela in its disputes with the British Empire, the old Dutch colony was already present on the western margin of the Essequibo and on the Atlantic coast to the west of the mouth of the river. Because Spanish dominions to its west were relatively distant and the borders were unclear, some academic literature has considered the Dutch colony a “society without borders.” The indigenous peoples of the region tended to ally themselves with the Dutch against Spanish religious missions.

After an independence struggle marked by long and bloody civil wars, Gran Colombia was established in 1819, encompassing approximately the territories of what are now Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela. Gran Colombia claimed all territory west of the Essequibo River. The British Empire had been an ally of the independence struggle, and Simón Bolívar would not only advocate for the continuation of this alliance, but even the imitation of conservative institutions like its hereditary parliament. In 1823, the same year an anti-slavery rebellion broke out in the sugar cane plantations of Demerara, U.S. President James Monroe defined any European country’s attempt to colonize an independent country in the region as a policy hostile to the U.S. – what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine. 

In 1831, the states of Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela separated. Ten years later, the British Empire tried to advance its occupation west to the Cuyuní River, through demarcations made by the explorer Schomburgk. In 1844, the Venezuelan ambassador in London requested a negotiation of the border limits, and in 1850 Venezuela and the U.K. agreed on the “neutralization” of the disputed territory until a definitive border was established. During the course of the nineteenth century, the Venezuelan authorities made several proposals for a border to the west of the Essequibo river, without reaching an agreement. The British ignored the neutralization agreement and continued their westward territorial expansion, taking advantage of Venezuelan political instability, especially the Federal War between 1859 and 1863. During this war, a sector of the Venezuelan oligarchy unsuccessfully sought British intervention in exchange for the Essequibo. A decade later, in 1876, the Guzmán Blanco government would invoke the Monroe Doctrine, writing a letter to the U.S. Secretary of State in the hope that the U.S. could get the British to submit to arbitration.

Between the end of the 1850s and the 1880s, important mining activity developed around the gold deposits surrounding the Yuruari River, giving birth to Venezuelan settlements that today constitute its easternmost towns of the Guayana region, such as El Perú and El Callao. The French-administered El Callao concession became one of the most productive in the world.

Political instability continued in Venezuela, with four changes of government between 1877 and 1879. In 1881 the British government rejected a Venezuelan proposal to establish the border on the Moroco River, where a Catholic mission had been established in flight from Venezuela’s independence war in 1817. In 1887, Venezuela broke diplomatic relations with the U.K. for claiming the Venezuelan towns of El Callao, Guasipati, and El Dorado. British military presence in the Orinoco delta led to fears of an imminent invasion.

In the mid-1890s, as the territorial dispute intensified, and with diplomatic relations between the two countries already broken, an English company, Goldfields of Venezuela, received a Venezuelan concession to exploit the gold deposits to the east of El Callao. Venezuela’s struggle with British imperialism was little helped by the weakness, incoherence, and corruption of its bourgeois Venezuelan governments.

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The first stage of Britain’s colonial presence in what is today Guyana coincides with a period in which, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm describes, the British Empire was the world’s “only workshop, its only massive importer and exporter, its only carrier, its only imperialist, almost its only foreign investor; and for that reason its only naval power and the only one which had a genuine world policy.” British imperialism would retain its place as “the real economic axis of the world,” according to Hobsbawn, until the beginning of the twentieth century. As late as 1913 it was still the largest foreign investor in the world. Its aggressive penetration into territory that Venezuela claimed ran parallel to its rising position in the world and stopped at its incipient decline, which prompted it to negotiate with the emerging U.S. imperialism.

In 1896 the tension between the U.S and the U.K. reached its peak, and the possibility of a military confrontation between the two powers was discussed openly in the press. This threat proved serious enough for the British Empire to accept an arbitration treaty. The outcome of this treaty was the Paris Award, which would without legal argumentation establish the borders that are in place to this day, granting the British Empire 159,000 square kilometers, if the Essequibo River, the Venezuelan line of maximum aspiration, is taken as a reference. The ruling denied Britain its maximum aspiration of gaining more than 200,000 square kilometers westward, thus preventing it from controlling the Orinoco River. Guzmán Blanco had warned decades before that this appropriation would turn Venezuela practically into a British colony. There were voices of disagreement in Venezuela, but the ruling was accepted as the lesser evil. The first physical demarcation took place between 1901 and 1905.

Both the Venezuelan governments’ invocation of U.S. intervention and their acceptance of the Paris Award must be understood within the framework of the extreme military and economic disproportion between Venezuela and the aggressive British imperialism. The U.S., in its involvement in the conflict, sought European recognition of its Monroe Doctrine of regional domination, and achieving this didn’t require a maximalist defense of the Venezuelan position; a compromise could achieve U.S. goals. The historian and writer Alejandro Bruzual argues that the agreement between the U.S. and the U.K. on the Essequibo dispute “was the hinge event of what was called the Great Rapprochement” between the two powers and at the same time marked the succession of British imperialist hegemony to the United States.

As the Venezuelan writer Enrique Bernardo Núñez points out, the territorial loss of 1899 was soon overshadowed by internal political turbulence. For years the Venezuelan state had been pursuing an arbitral solution as the one least onerous according to the political calculations of the moment. This was, it must be emphasized, a period of bourgeois, Bonapartist Venezuelan governments undergoing severe crises and, due to their own class composition, devoid of any revolutionary or anti-imperialist strategy.

Fear of imperialist military intervention was not unwarranted. Between December 1902 and February 1903, Venezuela suffered an extortive naval blockade by the U.K., Germany, and Italy to impose the payment of illegitimate foreign debt, including exaggerated compensations for alleged economic losses businessmen from those countries incurred during the Venezuelan civil wars. The Venezuelan government again invoked U.S. intervention. Roosevelt brokered an agreement with the European powers that would allow him to occupy Venezuelan customs and use a third of their revenues to pay debts, reduced to approximately half of the original claim. Roosevelt incorporated his own corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, giving it an openly interventionist character. This pragmatic dependence of the Venezuelan state on U.S. imperialism corrodes romantic nationalistic representations of this history.

“The outcome of the controversy is a sign, a warning. An uninhabited country cannot be considered a private wasteland. The only way to take possession of territory is to fertilize it with one’s own sweat,” concluded Núñez. British conquest, through deeds and under the legal guise of inter-imperialist agreements, left a legacy of resentment that was never fully overcome. The U.S. would cynically exploit that grievance in the Cold War era, as Maduro’s dictatorship has in the last decade.

From British dispossession to alliance with imperialism

Chávez and Maduro’s claims to socialism and anti-imperialism have always been contradicted by the stubborn facts of social, economic, and political life in Venezuela, a peripheral raw materials exporting capitalist country with an abysmal wealth gap. The reactionary dictatorial turn of the last decade has seen the regime morphing into an obscene version of those political predecessors it had always sought to symbolically differentiate itself from. Like the Punto Fijo Pact regime that ruled from 1958 to 1998, Chavismo has again resorted to suspending constitutional guarantees, accumulating political prisoners, applying forceful disappearances, and banning leftist parties from elections. Maduro’s turn to right-wing expansionist nationalism fits into the context of this broader political process. By reviving expansionist ambitions in the Essequibo, Maduro is in fact recovering an artifact from the Cold War era, a territorial claim used by right-leaning Venezuelan governments eager to collaborate with U.S. imperialism in besieging the Guyanese people and their leftist political forces, something Chávez himself acknowledged. Historical memory is therefore an urgent antidote to the regime’s war propaganda and crucial for understanding the dynamics and tendencies at play.

The physical demarcation of the border between Brazil, British Guyana, and Venezuela concluded in 1932. The two World Wars further weakened British imperialism while strengthening American imperialism. Subordinate to the U.S., the Venezuelan regime interpreted these changes as favorable to its position. The Venezuelan Congress questioned the arbitration award for the first time in 1944. In 1949, Mallet Prevost, one of the U.S. lawyers who represented Venezuela in the arbitration, stated in a posthumous will that the process was hindered by a pact between the British and Russian Empires.

In the post-war period Venezuela experienced significant growth, driven by large oil exports. A metallurgical industry developed, highlighting the mineral wealth of the Guayana Shield. The pro-U.S. military dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez questioned the arbitration award at a regional meeting of foreign ministers in 1951. The interests of the dictatorship converged with those of British and U.S. imperialism, which sought at the time to politically condition Guyanese independence. The Cold War stage of the border conflict incorporated these new and contradictory elements, which would dramatically change the character of Venezuela’s position from a just reclamation against an imperialist power to a reactionary one against a poorer and smaller nation.

In British Guiana, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) was founded in 1950, under the leadership of Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, as a left-leaning independence movement. In 1953 the PPP won the first elections for a government with limited autonomy under British sovereignty. The colonialists dissolved this government in short order to prevent it from declaring independence. The maneuvers of U.S. and British imperialism succeeded in dividing the PPP. The right-wing split of the People’s National Congress (PNC) was led by Burnham, generating a polarization on the basis of racial alignments. In spite of this, in 1961 the PPP won the elections again. The following year the Venezuelan state repudiated the Paris Award before the UN Decolonization Committee as it discussed the Guyanese case. A July 1962 memo to President Kennedy by Secretary of State Dean Rusk outlining a U.S. policy to oust Jagan noted: “The Venezuelan and Brazilian (territorial) claims are considered to be weak and neither country desires to take over the narrow coastal strip on which British Guiana’s population and its problems are located.” Rusk recommended encouraging “Venezuela and possibly Brazil to pursue their territorial claims. This could result in an indefinite delay in independence.” The Venezuelan post-dictatorial government of Rómulo Betancourt opted to make common cause with imperialism against Guyanese independence, seeing an opportunity to generate a nationalist distraction from its domestic problems, such as the leftist guerrillas and the right-wing military residues of perezjimenismo. Betancourt even proposed a joint management of the Essequibo to the British.

In the 1964 Guyanese elections, the Venezuelan government supported Burnham and the PNC, which had allied itself to the right-wing United Force (UF). Betancourt’s successor, Raúl Leoni, hatched a coup plot against Jagan, sending arms to his adversaries with CIA coordination. Under imperialist instigation the PNC and UF launched a campaign of racial and political violence. A U.S. embassy memo to the Secretary of State in July 1964, declassified in 2005, showed that the U.S. government was aware of a Venezuelan government plan to train mercenaries and kidnap Jagan in order to place Burnham in power. The U.S. pursued the policy of imposing Burnham by manipulating proportional representation in the elections, recognizing that preventing a Jagan government was a shared goal of the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. Our country’s shameful role in the affair is rarely discussed in Venezuela, although between 2004 and 2008 Chávez did allude to the declassified memorandum on several occasions and condemned the Betancourt and Caldera governments’ interference in Guyana’s affairs.

In 1965 the official Venezuelan government map designated Guayana Esequiba as a Reclamation Zone. In February 1966, months before Guyana’s independence, the governments of the U.K. and Venezuela signed the Geneva Agreement. Burnham, representing colonial British Guiana, also signed. The existence of a territorial dispute was endowed to the future independent Guyanese State, as a British condition for recognizing the country’s independence. The Geneva Agreement was a product of imperialist pressure just as the 1899 Paris Award had been.

Venezuelan aggression intensified. In 1968 the military unilaterally occupied the island of Anacoco, half of which belonged to Guyana according to the 1899 borders. Venezuelan president Leoni issued a unilateral decree of maritime delimitation, patrolling waters adjacent to the Essequibo. At the height of this policy, the Venezuelan regime supported the 1969 Rupununi uprising, a South American version of the Bay of Pigs failure. A group of cattle ranchers attempted to secede from Guyana, invoking Venezuelan military occupation, but they were quickly crushed. Burnham’s repression left dozens dead, while the rancher leadership was received and protected in Venezuela and the U.S.

As a consequence of this defeat, in 1970 the Venezuelan government agreed to a 12-year moratorium on its territorial claim. In 1974 a rapprochement took place between Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez and Burnham. Pérez, who had previously played an important repressive role in the Interior Ministry, took a nationalist turn, using increased oil revenues after the Arab oil embargo to nationalize Venezuela’s iron and oil companies, at the cost of large indemnities to imperialist corporations. He also established diplomatic relations with countries in the Stalinist bloc. Burnham went even further, launching his own brand of “socialism” and turning to China, Cuba, and the USSR, renaming the country as the Cooperative Republic of Guyana, and nationalizing bauxite and the sugar industry.

When the Port of Spain moratorium expired, the Social-Christian government of Luis Herrera Campins launched a campaign titled “The Essequibo is ours,” the same slogan used decades later by Maduro. The Venezuelan government invoked Guyana’s logistical support to Cuba’s military campaigns in Angola and Namibia to obtain a U.S. license for the purchase of F-16 jets.

Venezuela also continued to participate in U.S. spying efforts. One such provocation took place in April of 1981. An expedition of fifty young people, headed by explorer and Venezuelan Minister of Youth Charles Brewer-Carías reached the outskirts of Matthews Ridge, decorating Essequibo territory with Venezuelan flags. Upon his return to Caracas, the minister called for an invasion of the Essequibo and was awarded for spying against Guyana. 

In a 2015 interview with the New York Times, Brewer-Carías distanced himself from Maduro’s territorial claims: “All those people who talk so much about the Essequibo have never actually been there…. It is impossible to take away the land that a country has developed…. We are so given to magical thinking that we think we are going to get it to have oil wells and gold mines.” Following the imperialist tide, he no longer believes in invading Guyana. But he still believes in El Dorado. In a 2023 interview he claimed to have found Lake Parima and the city of Manoa at a point on the Venezuela-Brazil border. Raleigh’s dream survived the Cold War.

From Chávez’s lost opportunity to Maduro’s expansionist atavism

So-called cooperative socialism in Guyana showed its severe limitations as the 1970s reached their end, when international bauxite prices fell and the government imposed harsh cuts on consumption. After Burnham’s death in 1985, the Guyanese regime moved away from statist capitalism, while in Venezuela the oil mirage vanished, and inexhaustible cycles of monetary devaluation and inflation began, continuing to this day. A failed attempt to impose IMF-recommended structural reforms in Venezuela led to a popular rebellion and two failed military uprisings between 1989 and 1992. Chávez came to power in 1999 and would eventually shift official discourse from nationalism and bolivarianismo to an oil- and military-based socialism, with transnational corporations and patriotic capitalists. In Guyana the PPP returned to power in 1992 and embraced capitalism.

During these years, with the PPP and Chavismo in power, the possibility of a negotiated solution to the border dispute came closer than ever before. For decades, the Essequibo had represented for Venezuelans little more than stripes on a map. Even today, with Venezuelan official maps having removed the stripes and erased any distinction between the Essequibo and Venezuelan territory, not many Venezuelans take Maduro’s threats of invading Guyana seriously. 

The Guyanese experience of the conflict has been very different. Venezuelan threats weigh heavily in national politics and influence a defensive national identity. Guyanese governments have also made political capital out of this threat. During the 1980s Burnham used it as a pretext to advance the militarization of society. On May 1, 1981, facing the demand for a minimum wage of 14 Guyanese dollars a day, Burnham responded: “We can discuss the fourteen dollars; we can discuss twenty-one dollars; but right now we have to defend the Essequibo.”

Robert Cuffy, a Guyanese leftist activist born in the Essequibo, told me the story of how, from the night of February 8, 2000, until the following morning, he heard intense gunfire and explosions coming from south Georgetown. His first reaction was to think a Venezuelan invasion was underway. In fact, the police were besieging a criminal named Linden “Blackie” London in the Eccles neighborhood of East Demerara, using RPGs to obliterate the building where he was sheltering. To me, this incident paints a striking picture of Guyanese-Venezuelan relations. Specifically, it illustrates ordinary Guyanese people’s vivid perception of the Venezuelan threat, even in years of relative détente.

For most Venezuelans in the 1990s and 2000s, the Essequibo was simply not an issue worthy of their attention or worries. There was no significant outcry when Chávez seemed to take steps toward abandoning the territorial claim. In 2004, just six months before winning a recall referendum by a landslide, Chávez visited Georgetown and announced he would not oppose any economic project in the Essequibo region for the benefit of the population, placing the bilateral relationship outside the framework of the territorial claim. The construction of a binational road to link Caracas with Georgetown was discussed. The announcements did not significantly impact political debate in Venezuela, showing that the political cost of abandoning the claim in exchange for minor concessions would have been minimal. Chávez incorporated Guyana into the Petrocaribe scheme of oil credits and subsidized prices in 2005, supplying 5,200 barrels of oil a day, half of Guyana’s demand, at a discounted price. Later, Chávez even canceled debt Burnham had contracted in 1974.

In mid-2005, the Guyanese Ambassador in Caracas, Odeen Ishmael, also the main Guyanese historian of the Essequibo conflict, described the relationship between Presidents Chávez and Bharrat Jagdeo as friendly. Jagdeo, an economist trained in the USSR in the 1980s, presided over Guyana between 1999 and 2011. He is currently Guyana’s vice president. Ishmael was of the opinion that both governments should concentrate on reaching an agreement on the maritime issue: “Both sides will have to make concessions, both sides will have to take giant steps.” He even expressed openness to Venezuelan participation in the exploration and exploitation of oil: “Venezuela is a country with many resources. It could assist us with the exploration of oil, we just started looking for it in the east of our country. We can cooperate in this field within Petrocaribe.”
But neither giant nor dwarf steps were taken by Chávez towards a definitive resolution of the dispute.

In February 2007, Ishmael again made statements along the same lines: “Hugo Chávez proclaims himself as anti-imperialist, and only anti-imperialism can solve the problem by abandoning the Esequibo claim… Chávez has given great assistance to Guyana… brotherhood exists, and fraternity between two socialist countries implies abandoning the border dispute. Brothers are called to live in peace. That is why we believe that Chávez may take a step forward to obtain a quick solution and abandon the claim over the Essequibo… We believe that the two countries may continue talking to reach some type of concession or agreement for the control of the maritime area of the Essequibo coast, given that those limits have not been defined.”

Chávez did not take advantage of this disposition of the Guyanese government to make concessions. The Venezuelan state could have secured an outlet to the Atlantic between the territorial seas of Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago; at present, this would have given the Venezuelan state a share in what would be a binational oil field. A road could have been built between Caracas and Georgetown. None of this was achieved. As in the biblical story of Esau, who traded his birthright for a lentil stew, Chavismo orchestrated a corruption scheme that involved trading oil for overpriced Guyanese rice, instead of pursuing true regional integration and overcoming a conflict sowed by imperialism.

This failure is characteristic of Chavista foreign policy, lacking as it does a genuinely strategic vision and limited as it is to short-term objectives guided by clientelism and corruption. Chávez claimed to pursue Bolívar’s dream of politically and economically uniting Latin America and the Caribbean, integrating the disparate economies of otherwise weak countries into a developmental juggernaut with the resources and autonomy to come out as a strong regional bloc on the world stage. But he never developed a strategy to account for the specific forms of dependence in which imperialist domination is exercised in the region. For example, there was never any serious challenge to the mechanisms of foreign debt and unequal exchange with industrialized countries, or even consistent criticism of free trade agreements designed in the neoliberal euphoria of the 1990s for the benefit of U.S. and European corporations, such as Mercosur; Chávez simply rebranded these exploitative agreements as an example of the type of regional integration he envisioned. In practice, what Chavismo actually did was to subsidize right-wing governments in countries like Haiti and the Dominican Republic, making overpriced payments for agricultural imports while Venezuelan agriculture lay in shambles, only to then embellish these practices with rhetorical fireworks. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Chávez and Maduro failed to consolidate lasting ties among Caribbean countries in a manner that would not depend on the fluctuations of the capitalist energy market. As a result of this blind and costly policy, and with the fall of international oil prices in 2014 and 2015, as well as dwindling Venezuelan production after years of corruption and state divestment, the vaunted but artificial and precarious prospect of integration vanished. After years of building up Petrocaribe as an example of integration, economic solidarity and complementarity, all Chavismo has to show for it are the swollen bank accounts of corrupt politicians in tax havens and a set of debts that Venezuela’s government has been collecting, albeit with huge discounts. In a very short time, Chavismo went from representing a wealthy, lavishly spending energy patron of the Caribbean, with a discourse of fraternity and mutual aid, to a bankrupt and threatening regime with expansionist aspirations.

The incident of the Teknik Perdana ship, authorized by the Guyanese government to carry out oil exploration tasks and detained by the Venezuelan government in October 2013, seven months after Chávez’s death, was the first augury of a sour future marked by tit-for-tat measures. An economic collapse that would lead to an 80% contraction of the Venezuelan economy was in its initial stages, forcing cuts on Petrocaribe subsidies. Taking advantage of the Venezuelan retreat, the U.S. promoted the Caribbean Basin Energy Security Initiative Summit in 2015. That same year, Obama would declare Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security, imposing individual sanctions on Venezuelan authorities. In Guyana, David Granger of the PNC-R won the presidential elections, ending more than two decades of PPP rule. ExxonMobil announced the discovery of oil in the Liza-1 sector of the Stabroek Block, the first major offshore discovery for Guyana. Maduro and Granger proceeded with unilateral maritime delimitations. In July, the last shipment of oil to Guyana through Petrocaribe was made, and Maduro requested the UN to appoint a mediator. The U.K. and the Commonwealth stood by Granger, sending a warship to Guyanese waters. Granger announced he would take the Essequibo case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

A new stage of confrontation had begun. Maduro continued with the interception of oil tankers. In December, Chavismo lost its parliamentary majority and Maduro responded by de facto annulling the National Assembly. The traditional right-wing opposition created a “Parliamentary Commission for the Defense of the Essequibo” to wrestle with Maduro over this nationalist issue. 

In 2017 Guyanese media revealed that ExxonMobil had paid $18 million in legal fees to defend the Guyanese case. The UN’s half century of deferring the case reached a conclusion when in 2018 Secretary General Antonio Guterres submitted it to the ICJ. At the end of 2019, ExxonMobil oil production began in Guyana. In spite of Maduro’s opposition, the first hearing of the case before the ICJ was held on June 30, 2020.

This escalation of the conflict coincided with the reversal of the historical migratory flow between the two countries. While in 2005 it was estimated there were between 40 and 70 thousand Guyanese immigrants in Venezuela, most of them later returned to Guyana, together with a wave of Venezuelans. By 2019, it was estimated that there were about 36,000 Venezuelans in Guyana, compared to just 6,000 in 2001 – only a small part of an exodus that involved, over a decade, more than 7 million people, almost one-fourth of the Venezuelan population. Maduro’s offensive generated hostility against Venezuelans in Guyana, as the Guyanese government warned about Chavista intelligence exploiting emigration like a Trojan Horse. In fact, migrants usually do not sympathize with Maduro. In December 2023, a Venezuelan living in the Essequibo said that if an invasion occurred he would leave for another country: “I know what will happen if Maduro takes this part of Guyana.”

III. The Essequibo region today: A vortex of confrontations

On February 9, 2024, a report based on satellite images revealed an increased Venezuelan military presence on the border with Guyana. This deployment took place while the governments of Venezuela and Guyana were holding meetings under Brazilian mediation. In the preceding months, Brazilian, U.S., British, Venezuelan, and Guyanese troops and military equipment had been mobilized in and around the Essequibo.

For U.S. imperialism, the Venezuelan territorial claim had long ceased to be useful. When its companies started exploiting Guyanese oil, U.S. Secretaries of State and other senior officials fell into line. They began visiting Guyana, joint military exercises started taking place, and statements of U.S. support for the Guyanese position proliferated. The U.K., the former colonial power, now also considers the border to be definitively fixed by the Paris Award. 

As noted by Guyanese academic Nastassia Rambarran, Venezuelan pressure actually increases the Guyanese regime’s reliance on U.S. imperialism. In the nineteenth century British pressure had similarly led Venezuelan governments to invoke the Monroe Doctrine. Currently, the Venezuelan regime itself is also tied to U.S. imperialist interests. Maduro’s threat to break ties with companies involved in the Guyanese oil deals, if carried out, would affect the largest foreign investor in the Venezuelan oil industry, the U.S. corporation Chevron, which bought a minority participation in Guyana’s Stabroek Block. U.S. oil sanctions against Venezuela, imposed in 2019 by Trump and lifted in late 2023 as part of a set of agreements on prisoner exchanges and the conditions of Venezuela’s then-upcoming presidential elections, have been partially restored. As a result, Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, has been forced to sell oil at discount prices, while Chevron’s production has not been affected.

The Brazilian state has been mostly aligned with Guyana regarding the territorial conflict since the era of its military dictatorship. On the surface, the continuation of this policy would seem surprising: Lula and Maduro are both affiliated with the Sao Paulo Forum and share certain ideological affinities – most relevantly, their apologetic vision of inter-imperialist competition, which they refer to as “multipolarity.” But Brazilian foreign policy aspires to regional leadership and a permanent seat at the UN Security Council, so it’s not guided by any form of “anti-imperialism.” Its aim is to dissuade Venezuela from any military action against Guyana or any escalation that would facilitate increased U.S. military presence in the region. While considering Maduro’s 2023 referendum on the Essequibo a matter of Venezuelan domestic policy, Lula also considers Guyana’s recourse to the ICJ as legitimate. In November 2023, Brazilian presidential advisor and former foreign minister Celso Amorim traveled to Caracas to meet with Maduro. Since then, Brazilian authorities have played a mediating role between Maduro and Irfaan Ali, Guyana’s president. Lula recently recalled that Brazil also suffered territorial losses in the nineteenth century, but proclaimed that he abides by the Italian arbitration which in 1904 consigned 59% of the disputed Pirara territory to the British.

By trying to avert the risk of a war, Lula has offered an alternative to Guyanese military dependence on the U.S., mobilizing Brazil’s troops towards the triple frontier. Lula opposes the installation of U.S. military bases in Guyana, a possibility that Ali did not rule out in December 2023. Guyanese authorities say they have made no request for the installation of a U.S. base, but the Venezuelan military alleges that secret bases have already been installed. As far as the Brazilian government is concerned, Guyana could set precedents that would affect the Amazon region as a whole. Yet in contrast to its position in the Essequibo conflict, Brazil has in the past authorized U.S. military exercises in the Amazon. In short, Lula tries to play a dual role as mediator and guarantor of Guyanese security.

A Venezuelan “special military operation”?

Military analysts consider an invasion highly improbable. The Venezuelan military might have around 100,000 regular troops across all its divisions, dozens of war jets and helicopters, and very modest naval forces. Chavismo’s socio-economic degradation and starvation salaries are not very auspicious for military morale. In 2018 the Venezuelan government even had to resort to introducing Russian troops and mercenaries from the Wagner group for Maduro’s security. Guyana has a small army of 3,000 soldiers; it essentially lacks an air or naval force. Brazil, the U.K., and the U.S., for their own reasons, have shown military muscle in the area to dissuade Maduro. On the diplomatic front, Guyana holds the temporary presidency of the Caribbean Community of Nations and has a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, while the Venezuelan state currently cannot even vote in the UN General Assembly due to accumulated debts.

The Chavista military disseminates images of military exercises, and some propagandists have even spread false news of military attacks against Guyana on Tik Tok, but the only successes of its armed forces in recent years have been in internal repression. Between March and May 2021, the Venezuelan army suffered a defeat in the western plains bordering Colombia at the hands of dissidents of the Colombian FARC guerrilla insurgency. Dozens of soldiers were reportedly killed. Thousands had to flee the war zone, taking refuge in Colombia. After the capture of eight soldiers, the government withdrew from the disputed territory and requested UN support to remove anti-personnel mines. Shortly after, in July, a street battle paralyzed Caracas for two days, leaving at least 26 people killed and more than 40 injured. The military and police were unable to defeat a gang whose leader is known as El Coqui. The Venezuelan military does not control large swathes of its own territory, and not only in border areas. The navy has had its own difficulties. In 2020 one of its ships sank while ramming a German cruiser in an unsuccessful attempt to redirect it to shore.

The Guyanese government criticized Venezuela’s troop movements in early 2024, alleging they violated Brazil-brokered agreements that bound both governments to refrain from employing force and coercion in the dispute. The Venezuelan government didn’t deny the deployment but accused the Guyanese government of violating the agreement first through its economic activities. Venezuelan military maneuvers can exert pressure even without escalating to open aggression, and Maduro has said that he hopes the Guyanese government will desist from its action before the ICJ and agree to a bilateral negotiation. Maintaining the status quo of the Geneva Agreement indefinitely may be advantageous for the Chavista regime, but not for Guyana, nor for the oil companies exploiting the offshore fields. A bilateral negotiation of a mutually satisfactory delimitation was not achieved in six decades of UN mediation, and if concessions were already politically unfeasible in Guyana in a highly polarized bilateral relation – which has strengthened the old slogan of not ceding “even a blade of grass” – the recent oil activity increases the cost of any concession. On top of it all, Guyana’s recourse to the ICJ was provided for in the Geneva Agreement itself, and given that the Guyanese government can expect a favorable resolution from it, it has no reason to withdraw its case. The Venezuelan dictatorship would therefore need to raise the stakes.

Maduro’s abandonment of Chávez’s policy of rapprochement and oil subsidies for Guyana was the result of a combination of factors: the discovery of oil deposits in the disputed sea, the departure from power of the traditionally Chavismo-aligned PPP, and the economic, social, and political debacle of Chavismo itself. Along with other repressive policies, the regime opted for right-wing nationalism, embodied in the persecution of the Colombian immigrant community in 2015 and agitation for the annexation of the Essequibo in 2023. Both campaigns failed to rally significant support or votes for the ruling party, but they nevertheless played a significant part in the consolidation of dictatorial rule.

IV. Vainglorious flags and imaginary battles

Because British colonial expansion into the Essequibo met with very little resistance on the ground from Venezuelan authorities, Maduro lacks a powerful mythology to resort to. Without real battles and heroes to sing, he has to invent them. One curious incident from Venezuela’s sporadic attempts in the nineteenth century to put up material obstacles to British expansion has been transformed in the limited and bizarre literary imagination of the Venezuelan regime for its weaponization against Guyana.

Domingo Antonio Sifontes, a Venezuelan military officer born two hundred years ago, is credited with having founded a town which he called El Dorado, very near the current frontier with Guyana, as part of an effort to stop the British imperialist advance. On January 9, 2024, he was declared a national hero, and his remains were transferred to the National Pantheon. Under the titles of “intellectual llanero,” “terror of the English,” and “illustrious fighter for sovereignty against the British troops,” the official press paid homage to Sifontes for having “led the armed struggle against the British army” in a “battle (that) became known as the Cuyuní incident,” in which he “led the victory.” This battle never happened.

Enrique Bernardo Núñez, undoubtedly committed to the Venezuelan claim against British territorial usurpation, wrote a history of the Cuyuní incident in the 1940s. It so happened that in 1894 the Venezuelan government appointed Sifontes as commander of a frontier station, with the instruction not to allow any exercise of authority by the British on the eastern bank of the Cuyuní River. Soon after, a conflict arose when the English prohibited a peasant surnamed Lira from further tilling his land on the western bank of the Cuyuní, under threat of sending him as a prisoner to the Demerara colony. On July 5, Venezuelan national celebration day, soldiers under the orders of Sifontes detonated dynamite and raised the Venezuelan flag in El Dorado, as well as in the house of Lira and an indigenous woman surnamed Casañas. They also tore down an English notice that granted Lira’s land in concession. A month later, Sifontes warned the Venezuelan government about English presence in the area.

On January 2, 1895, a small contingent of British agents found the Venezuelan post unoccupied and replaced the Venezuelan flag with the Union Jack. The Venezuelan military soon arrived on the scene, arresting the British, led by an inspector surnamed Barnes, and reestablishing the tricolor flag. Barnes would later tell the British press that an Englishman was whipped and that the Venezuelan military drank and smoked at the expense of English provisions. What outraged him most was to be under the authority of dwarfed Venezuelans, whom he loomed over from his six feet of height. Sifontes, who was not present nor directed the actions, later designated these events as “the Cuyuní incident.” In the face of English protests and threats of retaliation, Sifontes was removed from his post, and Captain Andrés Domínguez, who led the arrests, was accused of carrying out an illegal raid. The Venezuelan government even paid compensation to the English.

It was thus that flags lowered and raised without his knowledge took Sifontes, 129 years later, to the National Pantheon as the hero of an imaginary battle against British imperialism. Even stranger is the propaganda effort to forge a dubious parallelism between Maduro and Sifontes, Guyana and British imperialism.

On December 3, 2023, the same day that the referendum on the annexation of the Essequibo was being held in Venezuela, Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodriguez released a video in which a group of indigenous people wearing the emblems of the government campaign lowered a Guyanese flag, replacing it with a Venezuelan flag and singing the national anthem. The president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodriguez, averred that the Guyanese flag was the same one that Irfaan Ali had raised ten days before on Pakarampa Mountain, in the Essequibo, near the triple frontier between Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana.

The propaganda operation did not take long to show its true colors. Journalists proved the Guyanese act had not taken place on Pakarampa Mountain, but rather somewhere in its surroundings; Delcy Rodríguez’s video had been recorded 187 kilometers to the south, in Venezuela, near the Brazilian border.

In Venezuela, the sinister and the ridiculous are often to be found together. A caricature of a caricature, the stunt with the flags symbolized the transfer of sovereignty over the Essequibo promised by the referendum. With no organized opposition, the government announced that its five questions had received an approval vote of between 96.4% and 98.3%. Coverage of the referendum showed images of empty polling stations. A preliminary official announcement claimed that 10.5 million votes had been cast – but this counted each vote on all five questions separately, implying just over two million voters, barely a tenth of the electoral roll. The referendum was a failure by any reasonable definition.

A later announcement rectified the figure to an improbable 10.4 million voters, which would imply a doubling of voter turnout compared to the 2020 parliamentary elections. Popular indifference prevailed in spite of warlike official propaganda. “Will it mean I will earn more or eat better? What does it mean that Essequibo is mine? I remain poor!” a worker in Caracas told journalist Kaori Yonekura. Another worker in the eastern city of San Felix stressed that “the hunger we are already suffering is like a war, and we won’t be used as cannon fodder.” Conversations with people living in the southeast region near the frontier with Guyana described the same general apathy and skepticism.

A sector of the right-wing opposition, led by María Corina Machado, aligned itself with the annexationist objectives of the government but questioned the relevance of the referendum. “Sovereignty is exercised, not consulted,” Machado tweeted in November. That timid statement of tactical opposition was enough for the government to arrest four Machado advisors after the referendum. The government also approved an Organic Law for the Defense of the Guayana Esequiba, criminalizing the use of any Venezuelan map without the the disputed territory, with a fine of up to $100,000 in a country whose minimum wage is less than$4 a month. The law also forbade anyone the authorities considered favorable to Guyana’s position from running for office.

The first three referendum questions referred to the rejection of the limits established in the 1899 arbitration, support for the 1966 Geneva Agreement, and rejection of the jurisdiction of the ICJ. The fourth question referred to the rejection of unilateral maritime delimitation by Guyana, with a diffuse authorization to the government to use any means in pursuit of its objectives. The fifth question referred to the incorporation of the Essequibo into the official maps, not as a Reclamation Zone but as the 24th Venezuelan state, granting nationality and identity documents to people living in the territory.

Several of the measures taken by Maduro after the referendum were in fact demanded by the right-wing opposition in late 2013, following the detention of the Teknik Perdana ship. At the time several National Assembly members traveled to the town of San Martín de Turumbán on the banks of the Cuyuní River, crossed to the Guyanese town of Eterimbán, and unfurled a banner with the slogan “The Essequibo is ours” – the same one used by Herrera Campins in the 1980s and now by Maduro. They demanded the delivery of Venezuelan identity documents to the inhabitants of the Essequibo, as well as the unilateral establishment of the Venezuelan maritime platform. This almost total coincidence has only intensified competition and mutual accusations. The arrest of Machado’s advisors was made under the accusation that they had been financed by ExxonMobil to “sabotage” the referendum. The right-wing opposition accuses Chavismo of having handed over the Essequibo to Guyana during Chavez’s time, often attributing his policy, which they describe as “treason to the homeland,” to an alleged Cuban influence.

After the referendum, Maduro presented the new Venezuelan map. He appointed a military authority for the Essequibo, ordered the creation of branches of the state oil and metallurgy companies for the territory, and gave out mining and oil concessions to private companies, while issuing a three-month term to companies with concessions from the Guyanese government to retire or else be sanctioned. He also ordered a census and the delivery of identity documents in the territory.

In addition, troops were mobilized to Puerto Barima, near the border. The Guyanese government responded by authorizing U.S. military aviation exercises and hosting a British ship for joint naval exercises. The Brazilian government also mobilized troops to the tri-border area. On December 28, the Venezuelan government went even further, carrying out the military exercise Domingo Antonio Sifontes 2023, with the participation of 5,682 military personnel, 26 ships, and 23 jet fighters, in the coast of Paria and the Orinoco Delta. By invoking Sifontes, the government drew a line between the imaginary battles of the past and those of the future. From the propaganda and the military exercise something very concrete remains, beyond the empty gestures, imaginary battles, and flag rituals: some of the mobilized troops and equipment were massed on the border.

V. Imagining a different destiny

In a July 2015 interview with Telesur, Maduro regretted that there is a perception that “now Venezuela is the imperialist power… We are the country that was dispossessed… That land of the Guayana Esequiba was not given to us by the British or Spanish Empires; it was earned by our grandparents fighting on the battlefield. It is sacred land.” The ex-colonial countries can indeed claim to have won the administration of formerly colonized territory in the course of the struggle against colonialism. But if this is the source of post-colonial state legitimacy, the Guyanese people also fought for their independence from British imperialism.

At various times in our common history there have been sectors willing to reach a just solution, outside the zero-sum calculations of nationalism. In April 1981, the Working People’s Alliance of Guyana issued a statement questioning Burnham’s foreign policy: “The WPA… neither accepts the Venezuelan claim to Guyana nor any attitude that is so blind as to ignore the aspirations of the masses on one side or the other – whether in Guyana, Suriname, or Venezuela, all of which lay claim to being part of the oppressed world. Patriotic and non-chauvinistic organizations in Guyana and Venezuela should at once set about organizing a people’s congress to explore deeply and expose approaches to the dispute and to set up a standing body of lawyers, scholars and trade unionists to propose solutions by a date to be agreed on… WPA sees the border dispute as having its origin in Spanish and British colonization under monarchies of the old order. It asserts without fear of contradiction that the blade of grass diplomacy on both sides has failed and threatens to engulf the peoples in profitless conflict… The patriotic masses of the countries involved must impose on the governments who have bungled and mishandled the border issue a commitment to a settlement in which the Caribbean sense of values prevails.”

A resolution of the Unitary Confederation of Workers of Venezuela (CUTV), in November of that year, condemned the policies of the Venezuelan government that violated the sovereignty of Guyana, calling for a solution on the basis of dialogue and bilateral negotiations. In November 2023, calling for abstention in the Essequibo referendum, the Socialism and Freedom Party of Venezuela (PSL) described the conflict as alien to “the needs of the peoples and the working classes of Venezuela and Guyana… Without any doubt, British imperialism took over a territory that belonged to the Captaincy General of Venezuela as it became independent. Already since colonial times, the British had been progressively occupying territory not controlled by the Spanish crown. And then they took advantage of the disaster in which the country was plunged after the bloody war of independence. However, even as in its origin this claim had legitimacy because it confronted British imperialism, when Guyana became independent legitimacy was lost to the extent that it became an instrument of aggression against a brotherly Caribbean people, which could lose 74% of its territory.”

The mirage of the Essequibo as represented in official maps with the stripes of the Reclamation Zone, or now assimilated in the maps issued by Maduro’s government, the mirage of a seemingly uninhabited territory without its own history, for too long seemed a harmless lie. Almost nobody took it seriously in Venezuela. Today it has become very costly. It is the symbol of a reactionary military dictatorship, an alibi for militarization and repression, an illusion of territorial possession that serves as a tool for the indefinite prolongation of a regime rejected by the majority of the Venezuelan working class.

It is said that Raleigh’s gold fever was so severe that he overlooked the real mines he learned about in his travels, feeding the dream of El Dorado, a vastly greater but imaginary wealth. Possibly, oil fever also prevents us, too, from seeing the greatest wealth that the Essequibo represents for a world under the threat of climate collapse: its bountiful jungle and its rivers. This natural wealth is threatened on both sides of the border by gold mining mafias and their military partners, and to defend it it would be necessary to weave alliances on both sides of the border.

It is also possible to imagine the potential for solidarity and mutual knowledge between the peoples of Guyana and Venezuela, who both have a history filled with revolutionary milestones, as well as failures and defeats from which they must learn. This knowledge is impeded by mistrust, after long decades of animosities cultivated by capitalist governments and imperialist powers. If neither side needed to worry about creating potential shortcuts for tanks, it would be possible to build a road to connect Caracas and Georgetown. It would also be possible to jointly demand the payment of reparations from the U.K. for its invasions, plunder, and enslavement, or to stand together against U.S. interference in Latin America and the Caribbean.
There is a place and a time of year where Venezuelan and English-speaking Caribbean traditions converge. The carnival of El Callao, inspired by the cannes brulées that celebrate emancipation in Trinidad and other Caribbean islands, was brought to Venezuela by the immigrant workers who descended into the mining pits at the end of the nineteenth century. Its music, Calypso Guayanés, is sung in English and Spanish. If we set to imagining the end of the dispute and the possibility of an alliance for the preservation of the natural heritage of the Guayana Shield shared by Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, could not the Essequibo be a hinge between South America and the Caribbean, a bridge for the common celebration of rebellion and freedom? The ghosts of Raleigh, Schomburgk, and the Spanish conquistadores would forever fall silent in Manoa, buried together with the golden idols of their imagination. ~