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Notes -
Venezuela
Venezuela held a referendum last Friday on whether or not to claim sovereignty over the Essequibo region of Guyana. Essequibo is mineral rich, and the exclusive economic zone contains quite a bit of oil, which Guyana has been busily contracting off to multinationals to Venezuela’s frustration.
For reference, this is an area about the size of Greece (as Guardian helpfully points out) and equivalent to straight up two thirds of the territory of Guyana. Claiming the region amounts to essentially promising to invade and conquer most of the nation, so the Guyanese are understandably a little upset that the referendum has been approved. The linked article kind of suggests the >97% vote itself was fraudulent, or at least that observers didn’t see the kind of long lines and busy polling stations that the reported 10.5 million votes would have suggested. Ironically, this seems like the least interesting question to me; the anti-Maduro opposition also recognizes Essequibo as rightful VZL clay so it seems to be an idea with fairly popular support. The real question is: what happens next?
Maduro is at least acting like he's serious:
But is Venezuela really about to invade Guyana? I would guess no, at least not while they have other issues and priorities they’re also focusing on (like becoming less of a regional or international pariah).
Meanwhile, can they even physically act on this? Guyana’s long term strategy in case of Venezuelan invasion has to be as un-invadable as possible, so a long time ago they designated the area on the border as a national park and left it extremely wild and overgrown. This makes traditional overland invasion difficult, so a hypothetical invasion could even require movement through Brazil, which is why Brazil itself is fortifying its own defenses. Lula has restored relations with Maduro, but he isn’t going to aid Venezuela in a hostile overland annexation of a long-time Brazilian ally by force.
So there probably isn’t a ton of will or means to act on this referendum. Most likely this is a way for Maduro to boost support in advance of the election.
And what about that election? In theory America’s lifting of the sanctions are contingent upon Venezuela lifting its ban on opposition leader Maria Machado from running in the election by the end of November. Well, it’s December now and things still look uncertain:
This is vague, but enough of a bone thrown that America isn’t going to reinstate sanctions right away, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. On the other hand, the top government prosecutor has suddenly accused several opposition of figures, so this is all somewhat two steps forward, three steps back. Ironically they are accused of trying to undermine the referendum on Guyana, which the opposition supported, and which is a largely amusing accusation given that the near 100% favorability results were quite likely fixed by the government anyway.
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