Refugees from Venezuela are afraid to come to Guyana

Mar 01, 2018 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Venezuela is not going to invade Guyana. Elections are going to be held soon in Venezuela and Maduro is going to win because he faces no opposition. When those elections are over, Maduro is going to deal with the remnants of the opposition which is trying to topple him. He will have to address his country’s economic problems and the sanctions which the Americans will impose on him. The least of his worries will be Guyana.

The opposition had a ‘last straw’ campaign last year aimed at toppling Maduro. During the protests, scores of persons were killed and the country was virtually at a standstill for weeks. The crisis worsened the already difficult situation in the country and led to a mass exodus of refugees, mainly to areas along the border with Colombia.

By the time the protests were over, the opposition was divided and defeated. They agreed to contest state elections, but were handed a heavy defeat in the face of disunity. The opposition is fragmented and weak. Maduro has taken advantage of this and called, as is his right, early elections. He will sweep the polls and the Americans will say that his election was undemocratic.

The Americans are behind everything that is happening in Venezuela. They are now using the OAS to try to stifle Venezuela, by saying that what is taking place there is undemocratic. But they are not accepting that it is the opposition which is running from democracy and not Maduro. It is the opposition which cannot unite to contest the elections. They do not have a candidate and so they are boycotting the elections in protest against the Constituent Assembly. But they did not boycott the state elections which they lost convincingly.

In the meantime, the Brazilians and Colombians are concerned about their border states being overrun by refugees from Venezuela fleeing the American-directed crisis. This is why a high-level defence delegation visited Guyana recently. They are concerned about the problems on their borders.

Guyana seems to have misread the Brazilian visit. The opposition in Guyana is asking if the hive of activity taking place on Guyana’s side of its borders has to do with any threat to our security. The government is not answering. It probably does not know. It does not have the capacity to even determine whether there is a threat.

As such, the government is putting on a sideshow to detract from the domestic criticisms of the contract it signed with ExxonMobil. Guyana is pretending to boost its border security. It cannot do that, because it does not have the manpower to do so.

Guyana does not have to worry about Venezuela refugees swarming over the border. Even the Venezuelans refugees, who are rushing to the Colombian and Brazilian borders, are refusing to come to Guyana in the numbers that they are slipping into their other neighbours. It shows just what they think of Guyana. They will probably end up starving more here than they would in their own country. Guyana’s interior communities are dirt-poor.

Yet, the threat of refugees should not be easily dismissed. An influx of Venezuelans, into Guyana, is going to create major problems for the Guyanese economy. The fear is that the economy could collapse if one million Venezuelans cross the border, as they are capable of doing against our defenceless military.

One other concern is that the Venezuelans could do to the Essequibo what the Cubans did to Miami during the Mariel boatlift in 1980. In that year, in the wake of attempts by Cuban Americans to encourage Cubans to leave by boat or any other means for Miami, Castro opened his prisons and said all those who wanted to leave were free to go. In the ensuing exodus, some 125,000 Cubans left for the United States.

The real threat to Guyana is that eventually Maduro can open his borders and allow for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans to migrate, to occupy the Essequibo. In this way, he will have a presence in the area which could be greater than the number of Guyanese. If there is any invasion from Venezuela, it is likely to take the form of encouraged exodus of persons from Venezuela to Guyana. The safety of these immigrants would provide the pretext for an armed invasion.

But that is not going to happen for now, because the Venezuelans have elections coming up, and they have more pressing issues to deal with afterwards. However, Guyana’s militarized political leaders have to find a justification for continuing to increase military spending. Within the last three years, military budgetary allocations have increased by 50%.

With Guyana getting its wish to place its case before the ICJ, it will be forced to reduce military spending unless it can find a new threat. It is fooling itself into believing there is one at the moment.