The Joint Declaration of Argyle for Dialogue and Peace between Guyana and Venezuela is clearly a regressive strategic misstep of statecraft. It is more about duologue rather than peace and has emboldened the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in its territorial claims against the Cooperative Republic of Guyana.
Former President David Granger, speaking on the programme – The Public Interest – recalled that President Rómulo Betancourt initiated Venezuela’s aggressive strategy towards Guyana by denouncing the Arbitral Award of 1899 before the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation in 1962, nearly four years before Guyana’s Independence. Venezuela, by coercing the United Kingdom to negotiate the Geneva Agreement in February 1966 three months before Guyana’s Independence, adopted a policy of negotiation by attrition to direct the duologue towards its own goals.
Every Venezuelan President thereafter pursued the goal of bilateral negotiation and ‘globality’ which aims at subsuming the territorial controversy in a programme of joint development of Guyana’s five western regions. Venezuela’s notion of ‘Pax Venezolana’ meant, essentially, pacification by subordination through offering concessionary agreements on one hand and exerting threats of aggression through the seizure of maritime vessels and military incursions, on the other hand.
Mr. Granger expressed the view that President Carlos Andrés Pérez, during his state visit in 1978, was most explicit in advancing the idea of ‘peace’ by articulating Venezuela’s eagerness to finance the hydro-electric power project in the Cuyuni-Mazaruni Region. He brazenly offered to reduce the extent of the territorial claim to about 31,000 km² in return for the coasts of the Barima-Waini and Pomeroon-Supenaam Regions. President Hugo Chávez Frías, on his state visit in February 2004, conjured up the Guyana-Venezuela High-Level Bilateral Commission particularly to demand that major projects such as offshore petroleum exploration should concede to Venezuela the right of equal determination of development projects in Guyana’s five western regions.
The former president pointed out that Venezuela’s foreign policy towards Guyana has always been driven by its territorial claim and has remained unchanged for over six decades. Venezuela’s version of ‘peace’ means, actually, Pax Venezolana by which Guyana would submit to its hegemony under the threat of aggression. This explains Venezuela’s seizure of the Teknik Perdana petroleum exploration vessel in October, a mere forty days after President Nicolás Maduro Moros paid a state visit to Guyana, on 31st August 2013 and declared publicly “…Any issues we have with our neighborly countries, either serious or not, will be solved peacefully through the diplomatic channels and international law. There will never be war.”
Venezuela’s presidents have insisted consistently on bilateral duologue to reinforce its ‘concept of globality’ to promote joint development of Guyana’s five western regions. The certainty of success at Argyle motivated Venezuela to confidently conduct a referendum with the predictable result of approving “…the creation of the Guayana Esequiba State and that an accelerated and comprehensive plan be developed for the present and future population of that territory”. Venezuela on that fiction, proclaimed the spurious Guayana Esequiba state and promulgated an ‘organic law’ declaring Guyana’s five western regions to be a constituent part of Venezuela in defiance of the provisional measures issued by the International Court of Justice on 1st December and in violation of the Argyle Declaration of 14th December 2023.
Mr. Granger expressed the opinion that the notion of Pax Venezolana still undergirds the territorial claim. The Argyle Declaration did not reverse that policy but, on the contrary, did reward Venezuela’s persistent pursuit of Guyana’s permanent submission through bilateral dialogue.