The Puppet’s Reward

Dec 02, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – America is preparing to invade Venezuela. And you can bet, like it did in Grenada in 1983, it will find a puppet or two within the Region to support its plans. And this time too, it will find scores of Guyanese who support the invasion.

The Americans may have already found its cheer-leading squad. History suggests there is one thing the United States can bank on in the warm waters of the Caribbean: the reliable emergence of a local chorus to bless its latest pirouette upon the stage of regime change. The American rationale for invasion shifts with the seasons—communism, terrorism, narco-states, democracy itself—but the choreography remains constant. First, the identification of a suitable villain (in this case, Nicolás Maduro, a man whose governance provides ample cause for distress, but whose greatest crime, in the eyes of Washington, is his stewardship of assets not his own. Then, the cultivation of a supporting cast of regional puppets, those who will lend a veneer of l righteousness to the blunt exercise of power.

Enter, on cue, the eager voices from Guyana- the cheerleaders. Their outrage is real. Venezuela’s brazen claim to the Essequibo region is an affront to sovereignty, a throwback to the gunboat diplomacy of a cruder age. The local indignation is justified, but its selective nature is instructive. Where is the comparable popular fury over the quiet, legalistic seizure of the nation’s nascent oil wealth by the ExxonMobil leviathan?

The modern colonizer does not arrive with a crown charter and a plumed hat; it comes with a production-sharing agreement and a team of corporate lawyers. The territory it claims is not mapped in forests and rivers, but in subsurface geological formations and futures contracts. Guyanese anger is thus channeled neatly eastward, toward Caracas, while the profounder abdication to the north is dressed in the respectable robes of “investment” and “development.”

This misdirection is a gift to Washington. When the first American missiles inevitably arc toward Venezuelan air defenses, sold to the public as a “limited strike” for some noble end, there will be a faction in Georgetown that cannot help but cheer. They will see not an invasion, but a rescue. Not the violation of a neighbour’s sovereignty, but the salvation of their own. They will imagine the fall of Maduro as the fall of his claim to the Essequibo. It is a tragic miscalculation.

For what has the American record ever been but the replacement of one set of troubles with another. The forces waiting in the wings in Venezuela, the so-called “democratic opposition” are, by all accounts, far more hawkish on the Essequibo issue than the current occupant of Miraflores Palace. When Maduro, in a fleeting moment of political theatre, sat across the table with his opponents, it was they who insisted the ancestral claim be paramount, a non-negotiable pillar of any future talks with them.

The cheering Guyanese therefore will find themselves staring across a border not at a weakened adversary, but at a U.S.-installed government for whom reclaiming the “lost province” would be its foundational, unifying raison d’être. An American invasion of Venezuela, marketed as a surgical strike for freedom, would produce not a clean slate but a torrent of human misery, with the first and most predictable wave of refugees seeking shelter from American shelling. Guyana will be overrun with refugees from Venezuela.

With Brazil’s and Colombia’s borders likely fortified and the Caribbean Sea a lethal barrier, the land route into the sparsely populated and contested Essequibo would become a desperate corridor, overwhelming Guyana’s meager security, infrastructure and social services, transforming its newfound petro-dream into a squalid, unsustainable nightmare of refugee camps. This is what war usually brings to neighbouring states. So let us be clear what is at stake. America does not cross oceans for democracy. It goes for the prize. And the prize in Venezuela is the largest certified oil reserves on the planet. Once the machinery of American power is firmly entrenched in Caracas—its bases established, its clients installed, its corporations ushered into the control room—the geopolitical calculus for the entire region shifts.

And what then of Guyana’s fever-dream of petro-wealth? The moment the United States has direct, unmediated access to Venezuela’s titanic reserves, the strategic value of Guyana’s own fields plummets. ExxonMobil, that loyal servant of the imperial interest, will logically follow the flag and the larger bounty. The wells off Georgetown’s coast will become a marginal footnote, a costly side-project. The investment will dry up, the rigs will depart, and Guyana will be left with the stranded assets. But it will find also a formidable adversary next door, one reborn under American patronage. Then the local cheerleaders will fall silent. When the final act concludes, and the American directors have taken their bow and moved the production to the next resource-rich theatre of conflict, the puppet/s is left on the stage, alone, to face the consequences of a plot it helped to enable but never controlled. The lesson of the Caribbean is not that puppets are found, but that they are forever forgetting they have strings.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• invade Venezuela, Peeping Tom, puppet, reward

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