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23-12-5
Why Venezuela wants to annex a huge chunk of Guyana - CBC > .
People around the globe are witnessing the disintegration of an oil-rich country. Venezuela had the world’s fourth-highest per-capita income in 1950. Now it’s being ripped apart by record levels of poverty.
More than 90% of Venezuelans struggle to subsist. How did Hugo Chávez drive this once affluent, democratic country to ruin? This documentary ... investigates the political, economic, societal and geostrategic reasons for Venezuela's crisis. The film features interviews Debray did with then presidential candidate Chávez in 1998, and with Juan Guaidó in 2019. Multiple countries recognize Guaidó as Venezuela's president, rather than the man who occupies the office, Nicolás Maduro.
Guayana Esequiba, sometimes also called
Esequibo or
Essequibo, is a disputed territory of 159,500 km2 (61,600 sq mi) west of the
Essequibo River. The territory is claimed by both
Guyana and
Venezuela, but it has been administered and controlled by Guyana since the
1899 Paris Arbitral Award. The boundary dispute was inherited from the colonial powers (
Spain in the case of Venezuela, and
the Netherlands and
the United Kingdom in the case of Guyana) and has been complicated by the independence of Guyana from the United Kingdom in
1966.
On 31 October 2023, the government of
Guyana filed a request with the
International Court of Justice (ICJ)
, requesting intervention against a
proposed referendum approved by the Venezuelan
National Electoral Council on 23 October 2023, asking to support its position in the dispute, arguing that the referendum served as a pretext for the Venezuelan government to abandon negotiations with Guyana. The proposed referendum was condemned by the
Commonwealth of Nations and
Caribbean Community (CARICOM), who both issued statements in support of
Guyana and the agreed ICJ process for dispute resolution. In response to the increased tensions, the Brazilian military on 29 November 2023 "intensified defensive actions" along its northern border. On 1 December 2023, the ICJ ordered Venezuela to not make any attempts to disrupt the current territory controlled by Guyana until the court makes a later determination. The
referendum took place on
3 December, and the
National Electoral Council initially reported that Venezuelans voted "yes" more than 95% of the time on each of the five questions on the ballot. International analysts and media reported that turnout had been remarkably low and that the Venezuelan government had falsified the results.
