Dear Editor,
I read Mr Wesley Kirton’s letter in SN of September 8 with some degree of concern (‘There is need for Guyana to intensify its public outreach…’). The concern is that he needed to express his concerns at all. He is someone who is very knowledgeable in these matters and if in his assessment we are really not taking every opportunity to wage an anti-propaganda war then all we are doing is relying on Ban Ki-moon.
We live in Guyana and we are seeing what risks we are exposed to when we rely on one single process. It is subject to all kinds of influences. This applies even to the most powerful countries of the world. The American political system is infested with people called lobbyists. Their duty is to represent the interest of this or that corporation, sometimes against the best interests of the American people as a whole. Who knows what influences are being played out behind the scenes even now? After all, from Omai to Baishanlin we have let the world know that we are easy pickings. We even let countries or their surrogates draft their own contracts.
In the version of my letter on this subject which you published last year I had said:
“What can we do? …We need to let the world know how cowardly this bravo pueblo really is. We need to build on the work of Joel Benjamin who moved around educating our people on what the spurious claim was about. We need some jerseys with slogans like, ‘A Venezuelan claim is one that is already settled!’ and ‘Abajo cadenas Abajo los cobardes!’ (“Abajo Cadenas” is a line from their national anthem.) Each one should be superimposed on a map of Venezuela.
I had assumed that we knew that we had to be fighting to win hearts and minds on the external front. Mr Kirton’s letter suggests I should have taken no such comfort.
However, readers should also know that not all Venezuelans have been convinced by their successive governments’ propaganda on Essequibo. During Maduro’s mobilization last year a writer by the name of Francisco Toro wrote in his blog, the Caracas Chronicles, “This post is a call to get real: what’s happening on Venezuela’s grandiloquently self-styled fachada atlantica …[Atlantic front] is nothing but an attempt to give off-shore oil investors in Guyana cold feet.
This isn’t the prelude to a war, or an invasion, much less some adolescent fantasy liberation of a long-lost corner of the patria. It is just the mindless bullying of a tiny, poor country by its larger neighbour in some … display of primate dominance. Nothing more, nothing less.”
It is in English here: http://www.caracaschronicles.com/2015/06/12/economic-war/
Yours faithfully,
Frederick W A Collins
