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Spanish – The hypocrisy of Nicolas Maduro’s regime has no limits. The dictatorship decided to investigate interim president Juan Guaido for allegedly abandoning the territorial dispute with Guayana over the Esequiba: a territory that Hugo Chavez himself chose to grant in exchange for diplomatic support in international organizations.
Delcy Rodriguez, who is usurping the position of vice-president of Venezuela, shared audio in which Vanessa Neumann, Guaido’s ambassador in the United Kingdom, and opposition member Manuel Avendaño, stated that if Guaido stopped claiming the Esequiba, he would obtain more significant support from this nation.
#ULTIMOMINUTO Fue abierta una investigación contra el presidente (E) Juan Guaidó (@jguaido) y Vanessa Neumann por "querer entregar la soberanía del Esequibo a Guyana a cambio del apoyo del Reino Unido". Así lo informó el fiscal designado por la Constituyente Tarek William Sabb pic.twitter.com/aYQM2ENgwt
— VPItv (@VPITV) September 6, 2019
Guaido’s intention, according to the vice-president, would be to “change the position of Venezuela” to “deliver the Esequiba” to “Exxon Mobil and other transnational companies.”
Neumann’s recommendation is not to “touch the subject” of Esequiba while seeking international support for Guaido. At no time does he mention the need to grant such disputed territory to transnational companies.
Although the position of Guaido’s interim government must at all times be to defend the Venezuelan territory that Guayana has appropriated, the truth is that Chavez was the one responsible for handing over the Esequiba in exchange for votes in international organizations.
Wikileaks revealed that Chavez “qualified the Esequiba claim as spurious and said the dispute was an imperialist affair,” according to a report by the U.S. ambassador to Guayana in 2004.
Now Maduro wants to investigate Guaido for an action perpetrated by socialism. It is a paradoxical situation because the interim president does not yet have the power to grant territories to any government or transnational organization.
Socialism gave away Esequiba
Venezuela demands approximately 40% of the territory that Guayana unilaterally decided to control. However, as time passed, the socialism of Chavez and Maduro left this land into oblivion.
Venezuela has all the arguments to claim Esequiba as its own. However, Guayana still has the upper hand not only in the international arena with the support of the nations of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) but also because it decided to exploit oil wells in controversial waters and could become a crude oil-producing power.
After several years of drilling in the waters of the Esequiba, the U.S. company Exxon Mobil found between 3.2 and 3.7 billion barrels near the Caribbean coast.
The Esequiba region has been under the mediation of the United Nations (UN) since 1966 when the Geneva Agreement was signed.
The defense and claims of the Venezuelan territory were gravely damaged when Chavez came into power. In 2004, during a visit to Georgetown, the capital of Guayana, Chavez affirmed that “the Venezuelan government will not be an obstacle for any project to be conducted in the Esequiba, and the purpose of which is to benefit the inhabitants of the area.”
In his speech on 20th February of the same year, Chavez said, “The Esequiba issue will be erased from the framework of social, political, and economic relations between the two countries.”
Moreover, Chavez reached an agreement with the former president of Guayana, Bharrat Jagdeo, offering to set aside the claim of the Esequiba territory to unite all the votes of the Caribbean community. This supposed agreement would influence both the votes of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the UN, where Venezuela had aspired to be a member of the Security Council.
Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, Sadio Garavini de Turno, Ph.D., political science explained to that PanAm Post that “Venezuela has taken a passive stance in the last decade because of the megalomania of former President Chavez and his ideological blindness. He also added that “Chavez wanted to have a global foreign policy. He wanted to get the votes of the English-speaking Caribbean, and that’s why he took a passive position.”
Guayana realized that it could become an oil superpower and started exploring with the aim of exploitation. Soon, it started voting against Venezuela in international organizations and joined coalitions such as the Lima Group, which fight against Maduro’s dictatorship.
