Title: Origin of the territorial dispute between Venezuela and Guayana, 2022
It was the depths of the Cold War in the 1960s, and Caracas was on edge. Marxist guerrillas in Venezuela were getting weapons and training from Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Along Venezuela’s eastern border, anticolonial leaders in what was then British Guiana were agitating for independence. Alarmed that a Guyanese leader could create a Cuban beachhead in South America, Venezuela’s staunchly anti-Communist president, Rómulo Betancourt, came up with a strategy, which blunted the independence push: At the United Nations, his government resurrected a long-festering claim to more than half of Guyana’s territory.
Now the dispute over Essequibo — an oil-rich, Guyanese region nearly the size of Florida — has flared back to life. This month, Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, unveiled new maps displaying it as part of Venezuela, nominated an Army general as its governor and offered Venezuelan identity cards to people living in the sparsely-populated region. Venezuela’s revival of the claim lays bare how much has changed in this part of South America since the Cold War — and how much, despite the passage of time, remains the same.The fight against communism aligned Mr. Betancourt with Washington in the 1960s, when Venezuela was a democratic oasis in a region falling to military dictatorships. Now Venezuela is ruled by a socialist authoritarian government allied with Cuba and Iran. The country, reeling from an economic collapse that has produced a migrant exodus to the United States, has become a thorn in Washington’s side.