GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) — Guyana's government agreed Sunday to join bilateral talks with Venezuela over an escalating territorial dispute under pressure from neighboring Brazil and a Caribbean trade bloc.
The centuries-old dispute between the two South American nations recently flared up again with the discovery of large amounts of oil in Guyana. Nicolas Maduro's government claimed sovereignty over the Essequibo Territory, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana and is near major offshore oil reserves, through a referendum last week.
As troops gather on both sides of the shared border between Venezuela and Guyana, Guyana's President Irfaan Ali said on Sunday that his country would meet on Thursday in the eastern Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent to discuss where the border lines will be between the two nations to be pulled.
But an agreement is likely to be difficult to reach as tensions rise on both sides.
“I have made it very clear that Guyana’s position on the issue of the border controversy is non-negotiable,” Ali said in a national broadcast.
The border was set by an international commission in 1899. Guyana argues it is legal and binding, while Venezuela claims it is a land-grab conspiracy because arbitrators from Britain, Russia and the United States ruled on the border. Among other things, Venezuelan officials allege that Americans and Europeans worked together to defraud their country of land.
Maduro's government said Saturday it had agreed to the talks to “preserve its goal of maintaining Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace without interference from external actors.”
Venezuela pushed for direct bilateral talks, relying on a clause in the old agreement, while Guyana says the case should be decided by the United Nations International Court of Justice.
“There is absolutely no compromise when it comes to our border. The matter is before the International Court of Justice and it will be resolved there,” Ali said. “We expect that common sense will prevail and the commitment to peace, stability and the threat of disruption will cease.”
Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St. Vincent, will chair the meeting, while Brazil, which borders both Venezuela and Guyana and has also put troops on alert, will act as an observer.
Guyana's leader Ali said he had also agreed to a talk with Maduro following an emergency meeting of Caribbean leaders late Friday where they asked for the talk and stressed their continued support for Guyana.
Full of patriotism, the Venezuelan government is taking up the fight to shore up support ahead of a presidential election among a population fed up with decades of crisis that have driven many into poverty.
The Venezuelan government says about 10.5 million people – just over half of those eligible to vote – cast their votes. It said voters voted “by all means” to reject the 1899 border, turn Essequibo into a state, grant Venezuelan citizenship to residents of the area and reject the U.N. court's jurisdiction over the dispute. But Associated Press journalists and witnesses at voting centers said the long lines typical of Venezuelan elections never formed.
In 2015, large oil reserves were first discovered off the coast of Essequibo by an ExxonMobil-led consortium, sparking interest from Venezuela, whose commitment to pursuing the territorial claim has wavered over the years. Oil production brings in about $1 billion a year to Guyana, an impoverished country of nearly 800,000 people that posted economic growth of nearly 60% in the first half of this year.
While Guyana's oil industry continues to boom, Venezuela's oil industry has collapsed. Venezuela has the world's largest proven crude oil reserves, but its oil industry has been crippled by years of mismanagement and economic sanctions imposed on the state oil company after Maduro's re-election in 2018 in what was widely seen as a fraud.