Tilting… at Essequibo windmill

On Venezuela’s oral argument today at ICJ on Essequibo—where do you even begin? It’s the legal equivalent of showing up a century late to a dinner party, eating half the leftovers, and then insisting the original menu was fraudulent!!
Let’s start with the centerpiece: the Arbitral Award of 3 October 1899. This wasn’t some backroom sketch on a napkin—it was a formal international arbitration involving multiple powers, accepted at the time, and explicitly declared a “full, perfect, and final settlement”!! Our argument is basically: we’re just using the map everyone agreed to. Venezuela’s counter? “Actually, we’ve decided—decades later—that it was all a conspiracy”!! Disingenuous!! Also, not how international law works.
Cause here’s the rub: you don’t get to retroactively annul history because it aged poorly. The ICJ has a well-known bias—toward not blowing up settled borders!! If every country could resurrect colonial-era grievances with a dramatic flourish and a few allegations of “imperial trickery,” the global map would look like a child’s finger painting!!
Then there’s the timeline!! For SIX decades after 1899, Caracas more or less went along with the boundary. No sustained legal revolt, no immediate cries of fraud—just quiet acceptance. And then, just when we’re heading toward independence, suddenly the award becomes “illegitimate”!! That’s not principled legal objection; that’s buyer’s remorse with a geopolitical twist!!
The Geneva Agreement of 1966 gets wheeled out next, like a legal deus ex machina. Venezuela treats it as a reset button—aha! the dispute lives again! Except… it never says the 1899 award’s invalid. It just acknowledges that Venezuela whines there’s a problem and sets up a mechanism to deal with it!! And after decades of “good offices” etc. went nowhere, the matter ended up at the ICJ – as per the Agreement!! Funny how that works, eh??
And Venezuela’s historical argument? That Essequibo was once part of Spanish Venezuela? By that logic, half the world should be filing territorial claims based on maps drawn when powdered wigs were still in fashion!! International law moved on from that for a reason: stability beats nostalgia!!
Perhaps the most unintentionally revealing move is Venezuela’s persistent insistence that the Court shouldn’t even decide the case—despite losing that argument already!! A party confident in its legal position usually doesn’t spend this much energy trying to avoid a verdict. So what’s left? A narrative heavy on “we-wuz-robbed”, light on evidence, and allergic to inconvenient chronology!! We, meanwhile, are doing something almost boring: pointing to a binding legal instrument, decades of acceptance, and the basic principle that borders aren’t a choose-your-own-adventure!!
Venezuela’s claim boils down to: the rules were unfair, so we’d like a do-over!! The ICJ’s likely response? That ain’t how this game is played!!

…at Arrival Day
Well, tomorrow’s is “Arrival Day”!! On May 5th, 1838 two ships – the Whitby and the Hesperus – arrived off Port Georgetown bearing their human cargo from the other side of the world in India. They were joining Portuguese from Madeira who’d arrived three years before on May 3rd 1835 and to be followed by the Chinese who’d land on Jan 12, 1853. They were all brought as “indentureds” – to labour on the sugar plantations after African slavery had been abolished on Aug 1st 1834!!
Most of this is very well known, of course, but what’s stubbornly – and deliberately – wiped out of our national remembrance is there were a very large number of Africans – from both the West Indies and Africa – were also brought in as indentureds!! Overall, while 239,756 Indians were brought, 75,792 returned to India after serving their term.
In comparison, almost sixty thousand Africans from WI and Africa joined the approximately 88,000 enslaves Africans who’d been freed.
Happy African Arrival Day??

…at sugar workers’ travail
Your Eyewitness has been reading about the US$10BILLION settlement in a class action against Bayer – the owner Monsanto – for their weedicide Roundup causing cancer!!
Well, Guysuco’s been using Roundup since the 1980’s. Can sugar workers collect??