On the morning of Thursday, November 15, 36 Venezuelan soldiers, including members of an engineering corps under the command of a general, invaded Guyana’s territory in the Cuyuni River. They blew up one dredge with plastic explosives and then ordered the crew off another one before blowing it up too. There were at least four other dredges in the vicinity with crews on them, and it appears that the intention was to destroy these as well. However, by that time soldiers of the Guyana Defence Force had arrived on the scene and intervened to prevent any further acts of hostility, so the Venezuelans left. Shortly afterwards two Venezuelan civilian helicopters flew low over the site, probably to take photographs or video footage of the results of their aggression.
The Government of Guyana did not tell the nation on Thursday what had happened that morning, although they must have had all the relevant details in their possession even at that stage. One presumes that the GDF officers stationed at Eteringbang have means of communicating with their headquarters (if they don’t it would be nothing short of a national scandal), and that they alerted the relevant authorities shortly after the Guyanese soldiers returned from seeing off the Venezuelans from our waters. Since the incident happened in the Cuyuni River, they didn’t need a Global Positioning System to tell them they were in our territory; the whole of the Cuyuni as far as the Wenamu River belongs to Guyana. It is an internationally recognized boundary which was fixed by an arbitral tribunal in 1899, and the fact that Venezuela for political reasons since 1962 has decided it would not recognize that award does not alter the reality of where the border runs.
The first official statement from the Government Information Agency, came stuttering through the fax machine of this newspaper on Friday afternoon, to be followed by one from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It might be noted that Stabroek News and perhaps other media houses too had been asking questions about the incident that morning, and so it is a moot point, perhaps, as to whether the government would have postponed telling citizens about the incident for even longer if it had been left to its own devices. Furthermore, the official communications which did come were short on detail, which might have been acceptable had the administration released a fuller account later. As it was, the media were told that the authorities were waiting on a report from members of the joint services who had flown into the area to investigate. The team duly returned on Saturday, but no further information was made available from the authorities, although this newspaper did manage to glean a few more critical details from an anonymous knowledgeable source.
The government also said it was awaiting a report from the Venezuelans. Ambassador Morandy promised that one would be forthcoming, although it never materialized, and it now seems that Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicol
