Venezuela: Lula comments on Essequibo annexation consultation – 12/03/2023 – World

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) said, in an interview with journalists on the sidelines of COP28, in Dubai, that he expected “common sense” in relation to Venezuela’s claim to the oil-rich territory of Essequibo, in Guyana. The subject is the subject of a popular consultation held in Caracas this Sunday (3).

“I spoke on the phone with the president of Guyana twice. Celso [Amorim, assessor especial da Presidência] has already gone to Venezuela to talk to the [Nicolás] Maduro, dictator of Venezuela]. There is a referendum, which will probably give what Maduro wants, because it is a call to the people to increase what they understand to be their territory. And he does not accept the agreement that Brazil has already accepted”, stated the PT member.

Venezuelans claim that the area of ​​160 thousand km² (slightly larger than Acre) is part of their territory. The historical agenda has united Venezuelans for more than a hundred years, which is why the expectation is that the “yes” vote will win by a large majority.

The agreement that Lula refers to is the Geneva Agreement of 1966, the result of a campaign by Caracas that began in the 1940s denouncing an international report decreeing that the region was part of what was then British Guiana as fraudulent.

Contrary to what the dictatorship’s propaganda says, he did not declare that the previous report was a fraud, but accepted the Venezuelan complaint and the British promise to negotiate territorial limits. Months after its signing, however, Guyana became independent, dragging out negotiations. The conflict was then frozen from 1970 to 1982, when Venezuela decided to renege on the current agreement and return to the 1966 terms. The case ended up being referred to the UN (United Nations).

On Friday (1st), judges at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, Netherlands, said that Venezuela must refrain from any action that changes the status of the region. The court did not, however, recommend the suspension of the plebiscite, as Georgetown desired.

“There’s only one thing that South America doesn’t need right now: confusion. If there’s one thing we need to grow and improve the lives of our people, it’s for us to lower the beam, work with a lot of willingness to improve the lives of our people and Don’t keep thinking about a fight. Don’t keep making up stories. I hope that common sense prevails on the side of Venezuela and Guyana.”

For the PT member, the situation represents a political problem. He is a defender of Maduro’s Chavista dictatorship, which he considers a democratic regime despite the controls over the Judiciary and Legislature that made it in practice a full authoritarian state in 2017, and even received the Venezuelan in Brasília this year.

Furthermore, a possible attack could involve Brazilian borders, given the impossibility of a land attack on Essequibo. Given the instability, the Ministry of Defense announced the reinforcement of its northern border.

The majority view among diplomats, however, is that the regime is unlikely to use the consultation to undertake any effective military action. The plebiscite has been seen as Maduro’s strategy to take the focus off the local economic crisis and gain support among the population through an almost unanimous issue in Venezuelan society.