By Janette Bulkan
Janette Bulkan is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia
This column reflects on the Joint Declaration of Argyle against the geopolitical backdrop in which Guyana and Venezuela are enmeshed. One can contrast the Guyana government’s declarations of sovereignty against the tangible exercise of power and influence before and after May 2015, when ExxonMobil made its first announcement of a significant oil find in Guyana’s Exclusive Economic Zone.
In December 1823 US President James Monroe outlined in his State of the Union Address to Congress the precepts that would later be referred to as the Monroe Doctrine. Monroe warned the European colonial powers to respect the sovereignty of the newly independent countries of Central and South America, which the USA regarded as under its sphere of influence. Over the ensuing two centuries, the USA has asserted its hegemonic interests in the hemisphere, Guyana included, in both overt and covert ways.
Many onlookers perhaps felt impressed at the announcement of the considerable lineup of interlocutors and observers who descended on the Argyle Airport in St Vincent and the Grenadines on 14 December 2023 on the occasion of a brief meeting of the Presidents of Guyana and Venezuela. The three ‘principal Interlocutors’ (the Prime Ministers of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Dominica, and the Personal Envoy of the President of Brazil), were joined by two ‘Observers’ representing António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, to orchestrate the ‘Joint Declaration of Argyle for Dialogue and Peace between Guyana and Venezuela’ issued at the close. While conventionally such meetings are prefaced by weeks and months of technical preparation by experienced diplomatic and skilled mediators, Guyana’s unfamiliarity with international political processes showed in its failure to understand what the ‘big boys’ (physically present or as spectres) were actually negotiating at Argyle Airport and which bypassed the ongoing process at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague to which Guyana was previously committed. The childish determination of the PPP to negate or destroy all initiatives of the Coalition Government (2015-2020), notwithstanding the multi-million dollar investment in legal expertise to argue on our behalf at the ICJ, has emboldened the Venezuelan side. The Guyanese team at Argyle failed to read the cards laid on the table by Venezuela and its political allies and corporate backers.
The pile on of onlookers named in the Joint Declaration were: six CARICOM Prime Ministers (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, The Bahamas, Barbados, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis and Trinidad and Tobago), and two CELAC representatives (Colombia and Honduras). Guyanese can be very sure that the eminences grises who remain unnamed were very much present – namely the USA and two of its leading oil multinationals, ExxonMobil and Chevron.
Yet, what exactly did Guyana get in the communiqué issued at the close of the meeting? In a letter published in the Stabroek News on 16 December, Dr Thomas Singh enumerated some of the ways in which the Argyle Declaration seemed unfavourable to Guyana:
“Venezuela conceded nothing in the Argyle Declaration, while Guyana seems satisfied: 1. That Venezuela’s rejection of the ICJ was simply ‘noted’ …. 2. That there will be further talks outside of the ICJ (just as Venezuela wanted). 3. With a rejection of open, hot, conflict (when in fact Venezuela had no intention anyway of attempting a military invasion). 4. With a possible de-escalation in rhetoric while Venezuela continues with its plans (for occupation and administrative takeover of our Essequibo?). 5. With an affirmation of the primacy of the Geneva Agreement without any reference to the 1899 Arbitral Award and its validity (even in the things that were ‘noted’)”.
Other commentators expressed similar concerns – why did Guyana simply not go to the Argyle meeting? And when Guyana decided to go, why did it do so minus the legal team representing its case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague?
It was no wonder then that President Maduro described Argyle as a win for Venezuela on his return home: there had been no reprimand of even the most recent of Venezuela’s serial violations of international law regarding its land boundary with Guyana which was settled in 1899, nor for its manufactured claim to all territory west of the Essequibo River, and the adjacent maritime territory.
President Maduro has ruled Venezuela by decree, rather than hold free and fair elections, with independent international observers, since November 2013. In the past 10 years, Maduro has overseen a country that has descended into political repression, economic freefall, and social anarchy. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), over 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled their country. Some 30,000 Venezuelans are estimated to have moved to Guyana in the last few years.
Maduro’s increasingly repressive control over the State and the lives of its citizens, and his failure to hold free and fair elections had led to USA-imposed sanctions against the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA in 2017, a full-fledged oil embargo in 2019, secondary sanctions in 2020, and the freezing of billions of dollars of Venezuelan assets. However, by 2022, President Biden had changed tack – partly to shore up US and EU oil supplies following the fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine, and partly to support the US multinational oil company, Chevron, which by 2020 had become ‘the single largest foreign producer of oil in Venezuela’. The USA is also keen to stem the flow of Venezuelan refugees to the USA, the refugee issue topping the list of concerns of Americans polled recently. On 20 December, the New York Times announced that the USA and Venezuela had agreed to a prisoner exchange and that the USA had started deportation flights to Venezuela.
In addition to working alongside Venezuela’s state-owned PDVSA, Chevron co-owns Blocks 5, 6 and 42 in Suriname, abutting the boundary line with Guyana. Chevron had been trying since at least 2015 to secure a licence in Guyana’s deepwater petroleum blocks. Chevron had held talks with President Granger in 2017 before announcing its proposal to buy out Anadarko Petroleum Corp, which held an exploration licence for the Roraima Block [1.94 million hectares, while Exxon’s Stabroek Block has 2.68 million hectares] offshore Guyana. At the time Chevron said the total value of its proposed Anadarko buyout was US$50 billion. At the end of what was described as ‘the sector’s most high-profile public contest since the 1980s’, Occidental purchased Anadarko for US$57 billion (US$38 billion in cash; the rest in stock) in May 2019.
Together with Shell, Chevron is working with the government of Trinidad on plans to develop large offshore gas reserves in an area called Plataforma Deltana, located offshore Venezuela. And on 23 October 2023, Chevron announced that it had purchased Hess for US$53 billion, finally giving that company a stake in ‘Guyana’s booming oilfields’ and an insider’s view of its arch-rival, ExxonMobil. What about Guyana’s sovereignty in all this? Guyana had no seat at this table: the control of its natural resources is almost entirely in the hands of overseas corporations who buy and sell the property rights for astronomical amounts of dollars, from which Guyana receives not one red cent, in large part because the political Parties refuse to take expert advice on modern legislation.
Meanwhile Maduro had other reasons to be confident on the eve of the Argyle meeting. On 25 April 2023, Norway brokered an International Conference on the Political Process in Venezuela in Bogotá, Colombia, which saw representatives from 19 countries and the European Union (EU) in attendance. The fact that neither Venezuela nor the USA was at the table was merely a diplomatic convenience. While the conference ended without any concrete developments, there was agreement that the attendees would help to jumpstart the paralyzed dialogue process between the government and opposition candidates, that Venezuela would issue a timetable towards the holding of free and fair elections, overseen by international observers, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions and the return to Venezuela of some claimants for refugee status rejected by the USA.
Maduro’s reactions since the ICJ’s rejection on 6 April 2023 of his government’s preliminary objection to Guyana’s application on the border controversy are yet another manifestation of Venezuela’s long-standing disregard of international processes. Venezuela’s sabre rattling in 2023 fits with its expansionist proclivity, and tradition of operating as a rogue nation state. Venezuela only settled its western land border in 1941 after Colombia gave up about 13,000 km2 of territory. Venezuela is not a Party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
Back to the Monroe Doctrine. In the last decade of the 19th century, the USA saw the opportunity presented by Venezuela’s claim to the Essequibo as a useful pretext to assert its dominant role in the southern hemisphere, formalized in the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. On 17 December 1895 President Cleveland issued a special message to the US Congress on ‘the Boundary Question’ (between Venezuela and the then-British Guiana) which was interpreted on both sides of the Atlantic as a threat of war against Great Britain and in defence of the Venezuelan claim. The seriousness of the US position was evident in the high-level Commission struck by the President on 2 January 1896, or a mere two weeks later, to put together a case on Venezuela’s behalf. That commission consisted of Justice David J. Brewer, then a member of the US Supreme Court, and Chief Justice Richard H. Alvey of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. In May 1896, the chief historical expert, George Lincoln Burr, was despatched to Holland to examine the documents in the archives there.
The 1897 Treaty and later agreements led to the appointment of another high-level Arbitral Tribunal which presided over formal proceedings in Paris from June 1899 to adjudicate Venezuela’s claims. The American-Venezuelan appointees were Melville W. Fuller, Chief Justice, and David J. Brewer, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. In short, Venezuela was represented by America’s leading legal figures in the negotiations that led to the 1897 Treaty and the 1899 Arbitral Award’s ‘full, final and perfect settlement’ of the land boundary.
In the years following the 1899 Arbitral Award (1901-1905), teams of Commissioners nominated by Venezuela and the United Kingdom demarcated the land boundary on the ground. An agreed boundary map was adopted and signed in Georgetown on 10 January 1905 by the Chief Commissioners on both sides.
Since 1962, Venezuela has alleged that there had been a ‘stitch up’ by the five judges who presided over the months-long deliberations in Paris in 1899 and which resulted in a decision unfavourable to Venezuela. In fact, it was the Government of Venezuela which had contracted the US President for representation in 1895, which had agreed to the two US Supreme Court Judges who had represented Venezuelan interests in 1899 (and to whom the Venezuelan government would impute dishonourable motives six decades later), and which had expressed satisfaction with the 1899 Award. However, the USA then as now, subscribes to the Palmerston adage: ‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow’ (1848).”
What role has Guyana been playing while its petroleum prospecting and production licences are being traded for US$57 billion (Anadarko) and US$53 billion (Hess)? After all, Guyana’s sovereign territory is the site on which these geostrategic power plays are taking place. We can speculate on the roles of Chevron and the US government at the Argyle meeting. No doubt they wanted to manage Maduro; they have no skin in the game on the matter before the ICJ [the settlement of Guyana’s land boundary]. Guyana is anxious to be seen at the top table, but has placed no demands of its own relating to sovereignty. Its territory is being traded by oil companies without any reference to the sovereign owner of that property, much less a share of the proceeds from the sale. It is scarcely to be wondered at that Venezuela was not censured at the Argyle meeting. That was not in the game plan of either the USA or Chevron, but it should have been one of Guyana’s bargaining chips. In the matter of Essequibo, Guyana has allowed the Monroe Doctrine which ensures US hegemonic interests to prevail.
