Guyana is, deservedly, benefitting from its oil boom
It deserves a better deal, but Venezuela is hiding behind Exxon excuses for raw imperialism
Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, have authorized the country’s state owned extractive industries to begin exploring opportunities oil and other resources located in areas administered by the country of Guyana. The territory in question has been disputed for well over a century - forming the crux of a very early example of international arbitration - but the Guyanese government has consistently administered the territory. Guyana’s tiny military, it is essentially impossible for the country to resist any incursions across its borders or secure its own resources. One would expect that this would be broadly seen as a clear-cut case of resource imperialism. However, Maduro and his supporters in other countries have attempted to instead cast it as a sort of liberation - with Venezuela securing these resources for ‘the people’ as opposed to allowing it to be ‘stolen’ by Exxon, which is drilling oil in Guayana presently.
This claim usually comes from the Marxist-Leninist influenced left, but the idea that a country should be in control of it’s own resources is not foreign to the liberal tradition, either. Martin Luther King, Jr’s speech ‘Where do we go from here?’ includes the call and response line “And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” (Yes) You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” These are not questions posed exclusively from a socialist perspective - as King says in the same speech, “What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual.” Instead, he draws fundamentally on Henry George’s view - those resources like oil (George speaks mostly of coal but the logic is the same) gain their value from society, and do not thus properly belong exclusively to those who invest in digging them up. So liberals out not simply ignore the possibility that Guyana’s oil is currently being plundered, though we may very much doubt Venezuela can improve the situation. However, like most simple narratives used to justify aggression of this nature, the claim that Guyana’s oil is being stolen without compensation to the Guyanese people doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
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