OPINION: Venezuela: engaging international community mandatory, engaging opposition just as compulsory 

Last Updated on Sunday, 24 March 2024, 8:00 by Denis Chabrol

by GHK Lall

Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro has upped the stakes on Guyana, remorselessly ratchets up the pressure.  On paper, in rhetoric, he is going for broke, he will have to cross the line, the point of no turning back, at some fateful hour.  What will be the fatal straw?  Or maybe the convenient concoction drummed up to rationalize, to give substance, to his creep towards actual belligerency?  Like many Guyanese, there is no wish to know, the hope that such a day doesn’t come, is staved off.  But there is no avoiding facing reality.

I have read about elections considerations and citizen distractions, among other stratagems employed by Maduro.  His country having made its claim-spurious in essence and in the mere expression-it would take a better man than Maduro to pause from hurtling toward the brink to which he pushes.  A much better one.  given all this land and all this wealth, he has to be a saint to deny what has long circulated in the heads of past Venezuelan leaders.  Plus, there are his own woes.  He has done his own assessments and thinks that he continues to make rhetorical inroads and physical moves, and he stands a good chance to prevail.  Either through the preoccupation of the international community, or the indifference of the Guyanese citizenry.  I cast around and the urgency of the pre-December referendum over there, and the pre-Argyle Agreement is largely missing.  Guyanese have their own preoccupations.  May I say that there has been a letting down of the guard here, even a sense of complacency?

For its part, the PPP Government has spoken incessantly about, and constantly reached for, the support of the international community.  It is a good start.  But adjacent to that the political opposition must be engaged, and it ought to have occurred before yesterday.  It should not be a matter of when there is a flareup (development) in Venezuela that only then there is some friendly spark about the opposition in the government here.  My impression is of other priorities that drain energies and take the national eye off the Venezuelan menace.  I hate to go where I go now, but there is no choice.

Guyanese are privy (I am) to the temperature of the local political relationship.  They are also familiar with the racial and social disgruntlements, disillusions, and disgusts.  They are not only from traditional opposition corners.  Yet little to nothing is done to repair the impaled ambience that is now so much embedded in the local environment.  Patrimony is only a section of it, but it is a huge one.  Instead, there is visceral satisfaction in the government in going in the opposite direction.  In sum and substance, Guyana is a leaking ship.  To continue with the nautical imagery, it lists badly, but stays afloat somehow.  There is no secrecy about any of this weakened state.  Yet, the business-as-usual mentality, and the mad race to slander and cripple the other side takes precedence.  At the highest elevations of national governance there is contentment with forgetting, or ignoring, that there is still another side, and it is the one across the border, wherever whoever wants to demarcate it.

Perhaps, it is better if this is presented from a different angle.  Guyana needs every Guyanese to be on the same page, of the same mindset.  A Guyana that stands as one body, one which speaks with one voice.  Not just on Venezuela, but on the routines and passionate affairs of our existence.  We were busy frightening ourselves with chatter late last year about existential crisis, and rightly so.  Pardon me, but I think that our biggest crisis is ourselves; the ongoing crisis here gives a man like Maduro ideas, fuels his ambitions.  Our present reality stands as the best confirmation.  The PPP Government’s first call, first thought, is to the international community.  In and of itself, it is a necessity; but a more vital necessity is to shore up the home front first; or at least to do so in conjunction with immediate international outreaching.  The government engaging the opposition must be just as immediate, and it cannot be as a matter of politeness.  It is a matter of encircling all Guyana.

For there is this other consideration that I place before fellow citizens.  This country can get all the visits, all the moral and vocal support that it can from the international community.  But at the forefront of the border milieu, or because of Maduro’s actions, there still must be the mind and muscle of Guyanese.  A Guyana being the way that it is presently is a weak force, and a lost cause.  All the flag waving and chanting and whistling come to naught if hearts are not truly enmeshed in what is well along the way towards a long fight for national existence, national pride, and national assets.  There can be (and is) the traditional fooling of self in high places that outsiders will takeover the fight and stand ahead of us.  Indeed, the internationals have a vested interested like never before in Guyana.  Today, it is not ideology, but money and profitability and the contributions of those to their own economies.  We either come to our senses, or Maduro will see that we get some the hard way, via many nuanced ways.

Politics has no place, or such an unchallengeable one, when there is material menace to the motherland.  When our matrimony to this land comes to mean what it should, then the first call, the first turn, the first whisper is to the neighbor right here.  All defenses start there; and there should and could be no better partner.  I hope I have made myself clear.