What President Granger recently referred to as the “extraordinary and abnormal” presence of Venezuelan troops on Guyana’s border and the Venezuelan government’s flagrant incursions into Guyana’s territory with maritime presence in the Cuyuni river, when added to Venezuela’s decades’ long harassment, which has stymied Guyana and particularly the Essequibo region’s development, are clear indicators of the level of intimidation our larger neighbour is prepared to reach in pursuit of its spurious territorial claim.
The current events also suggest that until this controversy is ended, Guyana needs to be on constant lookout for options to contain Venezuela, and in the present world and regional geopolitical context, it appears to me that membership of Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Pact) needs to be considered.
Established in 1947, the Rio Pact then comprised all the countries of the Americas with the exception ofCanada and the colonies of the British and other colonial empires. Of the ex- British colonies, Trinidad & Tobago joined upon independence in 1967 and the Bahamas joined in 1982.
According to its founding treaty, ‘The High Contracting Parties agree that an armed attack by any State against an American State shall be considered as an attack against all the American States and, consequently, each one of the said Contracting Parties undertakes to assist in meeting the attack in the exercise of the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. … The provisions of this Article shall be applied in case of any armed attack which takes place within the region … or within the territory of an American State.’ (Article 3 of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance)
Article 9 states, ‘In addition to other acts which the Organ of Consultation may characterise as aggression, the following shall be considered as such:
- Unprovoked armed attack by a State against the territory, the people, or the land, sea or air forces of another State;
- Invasion, by the armed forces of a State, of the territory of an American State, through the trespassing of boundaries demarcated in accordance with a treaty, judicial decision, or arbitral award, or, in the absence of frontiers thus demarcated, invasion affecting a region which is under the effective jurisdiction of another State.’
In its effort to contain communism after the Second World War, the United States supported the establishment of many regional alliances: the Rio Pact, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation and the Central Treaty Organisation. Given the extant context, it is not difficult to surmise why Trinidad & Tobago joined and Guyana stayed clear of the organisation.
Trinidad & Tobago was at the time firmly in the Western camp, and as I have argued in this column before, its prime minister, Dr Eric Williams, was very suspicious of Venezuela’s ambitions in the region (Venezuela has a territorial dispute with Trinidad & Tobago) and thus might have viewed US involvement in the Rio Pact as a level of protection against those ambitions.
On the other hand, although Guyana had an even more worrisome territorial quarrel with its southern neighbour, for nearly half a century it was ruled by leaders of a radical socialist persuasion. Neither Cheddi Jagan nor Forbes Burnham would have become involved in any arrangement that could have presented the US with the slightest of opportunity to invade or orchestrate the invasion of their territory.
The Rio Pact was invoked many times during the 1950s and 1960s, in particular unanimously supporting the United States’ naval blockade during the Cuban missile crisis. Argentina invoked the treaty during the Malvinas/Falklands war with Britain, but the United States decided that Argentina was the aggressor and supported Britain, and thereby alienated several South American countries. After 9/11 in 2001, the US invoked the treaty, but only four central American countries contributed troops while two countries (Colombia and Panama) became members of the US inspired ‘coalition of the willing’.
Cuba left the pact after its revolution and preempting the US invoking the pact and not wanting to become involved in the war in Iraq, Mexico withdrew from the treaty in 2002.
The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) was created in 2008, with a regional security council to take care of South American defence issues. And in 2012, the countries of Venezuelan President Chavez’s inspired Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA) group (Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela) left the pact.
It has been said that ‘The Rio Pact works just fine – because it doesn’t do anything. The Rio Pact is a paper alliance that has fallen into disuse’ (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ world/int/rio-pact.htm). Yet in 2012, the United States State Department spokesperson, William Ostick, stated that “it was unfortunate that the governments of Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela had notified their decision to withdraw from the pact;” suggesting that to the US it still has some value. (http://www.eluniversal.com/internacional/ 120606/)
The ideological orientation of the present regime is essentially pro-Western, and what Guyana needs most at this time is some respite from the persistent development and financial cost of this border problem. Referring the matter to the International Court of Justice is the preferred option but other useful methods of achieving this kind of relief must also be explored. Venezuela might be less adventurous and investors less inclined to be fearful if Guyana were to become part of the Rio Pact, which still contains both the United States and Brazil.
Guyana is usually reluctant to consider any move that upsets the Geneva Agreement of 1966 and remove the controversy from the purview of the United Nations Secretary General.
The chance that the border issue can become the concern of a Latin American dispute resolution mechanism that will most likely be more sympathetic to the Venezuelan case is also bothersome. However, it appears to me that there is no danger of either of these two concerns arising if Guyana should seek to join the pact.
True, article 2 of the treaty states, ‘As a consequence of the principle set forth in the preceding Article, the High Contracting Parties undertake to submit every controversy which may arise between them to methods of peaceful settlement and to endeavour to settle any such controversy among themselves by means of the procedures in force in the Inter-American System before referring it to the General Assembly or the Security Council of the United Nations.’
But the Treaty also allows for reservations. For example, ‘Honduras, in signing the present treaty … does so with the reservation that the boundary between Honduras and Nicaragua is definitively demarcated by the Joint Boundary Commission of nineteen hundred and one, starting from a point in the Gulf of’ (http://www.oas.org/juridico/english/sigs/b-29.html). Furthermore, Guyana would be seeking to join at a time when the matter is already before the secretary general.
