New Venezuelan border provocation

Last Thursday, Delcy Rodriguez, who acceded to the presidency of Venezuela after President Nicolas Maduro was extracted by the US to Miami to stand trial for narco-trafficking, made her first foreign visit – to the island of Grenada, a member of Caricom. She said it was to commemorate the 49th anniversary of the establishment of official relations between the two countries. At a function to meet the press, along with Grenadian PM Dickon Mitchell, she ostentatiously wore a brooch on her left lapel that was a map of Venezuela but with our Essequibo appended.
This, of course, is even more egregious than when, in December 2022, the then St Vincent PM Ralph Gonsalves allowed himself to be photographed behind a similar representation at a function honouring Simon Bolivar. Upbraided when the image surfaced in 2024 before the Argyle meeting between Presidents Nicolas Maduro and Dr Irfaan Ali, he pleaded “innocent inadvertence”, and the matter was dropped. But the incident highlighted the provocative practice of the Venezuelans to flaunt their claim to Essequibo, especially when Maduro proceeded to hold a referendum on annexing – and then actually annexing – our territory against repeated ICJ warnings. CARICOM consistently condemned these moves, as recently as the Heads of Government meeting in July 2025, which PM Mitchell had been attending since 2022. Mitchell cannot now follow his fellow member of the Venezuelan-led ALBA Initiative and plead “innocent inadvertence”. This behaviour betrays a wilful refusal to support a Caricom position.
But what makes the issue more than simply a faux pas on the Venezuelan provocation of Guyanese sensibilities and international protocols is that the two leaders sought to widen their approach to the issue of the maritime delimitation between the two territories to potentially include Guyana. Dickon ecstatically pointed out that the issue had been addressed using the formula of a bilateral agreement. Delcy Rodriguez was quick to seize the opportunity and pointedly announced, “I believe it is very important to emphasise that this is how differences between countries are resolved through bilateral, peaceful and political diplomacy. I believe we are set as an example in providing guidance in the face of all the disputes of this nature.”
This “bilateral diplomacy”, of course, has been the goal of Venezuela to settle their border controversy, and they have rejected – in the person of Delcy Rodríguez herself – the jurisdiction of the ICJ to do so under international law in accordance with the 1966 Geneva Agreement. Last year, before Maduro had been removed, Dickon Mitchell had proposed to him the establishment of a joint trilateral commission comprised of ten persons from Venezuela, Grenada and St Vincent to guide the process for demarcating maritime boundaries. A spokesperson for Mitchell had said, “It is a very important step as well because you cannot go about leasing out land to people without knowing where your boundary is; you cannot go about leasing out maritime space to people without knowing where your boundaries are.”
Last month, however, our Government had to issue a very strongly worded statement refuting a Venezuelan 11th March 2026 objection – led by Delcy Rodriguez – to our advancing a three-dimensional multi-client seismic exploration programme within our Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The statement asserted, “The maritime areas in which the seismic survey will be conducted lie unequivocally within Guyana’s Exclusive Economic Zone and continental shelf, over which Guyana exercises sovereign rights… Accordingly, Guyana firmly rejects Venezuela’s attempt to characterise these lawful activities as occurring within “undelimited maritime areas”. Such claims constitute a deliberate misrepresentation of both the geographic and legal realities governing Guyana’s maritime jurisdiction. The Ministry therefore calls upon the Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to refrain from issuing inflammatory and misleading statements that seek to undermine Guyana’s sovereign rights or discourage legitimate economic activity within Guyana’s maritime domain.”
However, rather than retracting her unfounded assertion, the acting President of Venezuela has become emboldened by her host’s cavalier approach towards the border controversy to implicitly reject our Caricom-supported recourse to the ICJ.
This cannot be allowed to stand.