Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, gave the nation’s state-owned enterprises instructions to “immediately” start exploring and exploiting the oil, gas, and mines in Guyana’s Essequibo region. Venezuela claims ownership of this territory, which is larger than Greece and rich in minerals.
The declaration was made one day after Maduro secured his desired outcome in a referendum over the weekend regarding whether or not to assert regional sovereignty.
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Concerning the whole Essequibo region, Maduro declared that he would “immediately” go forward with granting “operating licenses for the exploration and exploitation of oil, gas, and mines.” He also gave the go-ahead for the establishment of regional offices for prominent Venezuelan businesses, such as the mining conglomerate Corporación Venezolana de Guayana and the oil tycoon PDVSA.
The Maduro administration wants to declare the region formally part of Venezuela through a statute that will soon be addressed by the governing party-controlled National Assembly, although it is unclear how exactly the administration plans to carry out this notion.
Apart from the declaration about the resource extraction in Essequibo, Maduro also declared on Tuesday that a new Comprehensive Defense Operational Zone, called Zodi in Spanish, would be established for the contested area. This would be comparable to the special military commands that carry out operations in various parts of the nation.
Around 61,600 square miles, or 159,500 square kilometers, make up two thirds of Guyana. However, Venezuela has always challenged the line established by international arbitrators in 1899, when Guyana was still a British territory, and has always claimed Essequibo as its own since the area was inside its borders during the Spanish colonial era.
Over time, Venezuela’s resolve to pursuing the territorial claim has changed. When ExxonMobil said in 2015 that it had discovered oil in commercial amounts off the shore of the Essequibo, it aroused attention once more.
Guyana has recently condemned the referendum and the acts of Venezuela as a pretext for annexing the country. It had appealed to the highest court of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, which ruled that Venezuela could not move to alter the status quo until the panel could rule on the conflicting claims of the two nations, potentially taking years.
