As the dispute for territory between Venezuela and Guyana continues, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said that he is considering US military support of neighbouring Guyana as a threat to resolving his nation’s territorial claim there, and will bring it up in talks this week with his counterpart.
Maduro said any US military presence in Guyana is contrary “to our aspiration to maintain Latin America and the Caribbean as a zone of peace, free of conflicts, without foreign interference.”
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Last week, the US Embassy in Georgetown said the US military was to carry out joint training flights with Guyana as it faces rising tensions with Venezuela over a contested oil-rich region and described the December 7 flights as a “routine engagement.”
Sice the start of the ongoing tensions following Maduro’s December 3 controversial referendum on in declaring Venezuela the rightful owner to the Essequibo region, the United Nations Security Council held a closed-door meeting Friday on the spiraling dispute, which is also the subject of litigation before the International Court of Justice.
Guyana has administered Essequibo, which makes up more than two-thirds of its territory, for more than a century.
The decades-old dispute with Venezuela intensified after ExxonMobil discovered oil in Essequibo in 2015, helping give Guyana — population 800,000 — the world’s biggest crude reserves per capita.
The two heads – Venezuela’s Maduro and Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali are scheduled to meet on Thursday in St. Vincent and the Grenadines to hash out the dispute.
In a letter published on X, formerly Twitter, Maduro said, “I hope that in this high-level meeting we can address the main threats to the peace and stability of our countries, among them the involvement of the US Southern Command, which has begun operations in the disputed territory.”
