Sleepwalking into another Venezuelan economic blockade

Nov 24, 2013 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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The nightmarish maritime relations between Guyana and Venezuela that have been unfolding since 10th October were long in the making. The frigate – PC 23 Yekuana – of the Bolivarian Navy of Venezuela entered Guyana’s exclusive economic zone around 16:00 h on Thursday 10th October and, under the threat of force, prevented the unarmed vessel –Teknik Perdana–from conducting seismic surveys.
The Yekuana incident was not the most extreme use of armed force, but it was merely a continuation of a policy of economic blockade of the Essequibo. The Venezuelan government, under President Raúl Leoni Otero (1964-69), placed an advertisement in the Times newspaper of London on 15th June 1968 to the effect that the Essequibo belonged to Venezuela and that it would not recognize economic concessions granted there by the Guyana Government. President Leoni then issued Decreto No. 1152 of 9th July 1968, purporting to annex a nine-mile wide belt of sea-space along Guyana’s entire Essequibo coast and requiring various agencies, including the Defence Ministry, to impose Venezuelan sovereignty over it.
President Rafael Antonio Caldera Rodriguez (1969-74) blocked Guyana’s attempt to allow petroleum exploration rights in the Essequibo by DEMITEX, a German company. President Luis Herrera Campins (1979-83) reinforced the blockade by obstructing the development of the Upper Mazaruni Hydro-power Project. He issued a communiqué in April 1981 stating that because of “Venezuela’s claim on the Essequibo territory” it “asserted the rejection of Venezuela to the hydro-electric project of the upper Mazaruni.” Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, José Alberto Zambrano Velasco, wrote a letter giving the President of the World Bank an ultimatum to refrain from financing the Upper Mazaruni Hydro-Electric Project.
Venezuela’s President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frias (1998-2013), issued a July 2000 declaration to prevent the Beal Aerospace Corporation from establishing a satellite station in the Barima-Waini Region and opposed the issuance of petroleum exploration licences to American companies off the Essequibo coast.
Guyanese must not be mesmerized by the mirage of Venezuelan magnanimity. Presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro Moros have not brought about a miraculous change in Venezuela’s attitude towards its claim to Guyana’s territory. President Carlos Andrés Pérez, forty years ago, signalled a similar ‘shift’ from confrontation to cooperation. Fortified by the tripling of petroleum revenues in 1973-74 as a result of the international oil crisis, Venezuela offered, in 1974, a large interest-free loan and to purchase sugar from Guyana.
Prime Minister Forbes Burnham paid his first visit to Venezuela in 1975 and reached agreements for the formation of a mixed company for the exploitation of bauxite resources and other fields of functional cooperation.  President Andrés Pérez paid a visit to Guyana in 1978, during which he indicated Venezuela’s willingness to help finance the hydro-electric power project in the Cuyuni-Mazaruni Region of the Essequibo.
Behind the apparent friendliness, however, the realpolitik of Venezuela’s geo-political interests remained unchanged.  Perez frankly expressed Venezuela’s geopolitical interest in gaining a Salida al Atlantico– access to the Atlantic – from the Orinoco delta by offering to reduce the territorial claim to about 31,000 km2 in return for the Essequibo coast.
President Jaime Ramón Lusinchi (1984-89) embarked on a ‘new’ programme of technical co-operation and assistance with Guyana. This continued when Carlos Andrés Pérez returned to the Presidency of Venezuela in 1989, forming yet another ‘new’ relationship with a visit to Georgetown in 1991. Guyana’s President Desmond Hoyte paid a visit to Caracas on 24-27 March 1987 and Venezuela expanded its development assistance. Agreements were concluded on the concessionary sale of petroleum, bauxite mining, preparing a feasibility study for supplying electric power from the Guri scheme in Bolivar State, financing the construction of the Health Sciences Faculty building at the University of Guyana and a gymnasium and sports hall in Georgetown.
Venezuela, despite its apparent economic generosity, has never altered its maritime strategy. Its ambition – nurtured over the past seventy years – derives from its possession of a 2,718 km Caribbean coastline, the longest of any state; a sizeable continental shelf which is rich in petroleum and other mineral resources; numerous natural harbours; extensive maritime transport and transnational economic activity and its strategic location as a link between the North and South American continental land-masses.
Guyana sought the shelter of international law. The Maritime Boundaries Act 1977 determined that sovereignty “has always extended to the territorial sea and to the seabed and subsoil underlying and the airspace over such sea.” Guyana asserted that it had always had “full and exclusive sovereign rights in respect of the continental shelf”. The President made Order No. 19 of 1991 under the Act on 23 February 1991 declaring a specific area an exclusive economic zone.
The Act established a fishery zone beyond and adjacent to the territorial sea with an outer limit of 200 miles from the baseline of the territorial sea. This area coincides with that of the EEZ and serves to ensure Guyana’s sovereignty over its living marine resources.
Guyana took another step towards the consolidation of sovereignty over its marine resources with the introduction of the Petroleum (Exploration and Production) Act, 1986 which became law on 14th June 1986.
President Carlos Andrés Pérez, despite his bonhomie, was the one to sign the Treaty between the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and the Republic of Venezuela on the Delimitation of Marine and Sub-Marine Areas on 18th April 1990 with Prime Minister Arthur Robinson. Both states sought to project their own economic interests without resorting to a more appropriate multilateral mechanism by consulting Barbados, Grenada and Guyana, which that particular situation warranted. Venezuela sought a strategic salida al Atlántico and Trinidad and Tobago sought access to new areas of potential hydrocarbon resources. Venezuela’s quest for a salida is critical to understanding the Yekuana incident in October.
Venezuela’s maritime strategy has remained unchanged over the past 50 years. Guyana’s diplomats need to be wide awake and well informed so as not to sleepwalk into another economic blockade.

 

 

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