After independence in 1966, Guyana sought an influential role in international affairs, particularly among Third World and non-aligned nations. It served twice on the UN Security Council. Former Vice President, Deputy Prime Minister, and Attorney General Mohamed Shahabuddeen served a 9-year term on the International Court of Justice (1987–96). In June 2023, Guyana was elected as a non-permanent member to the UN Security Council. The country will serve on the Council for a period of two years, beginning in January 2024.
British Guiana was a British colony, part of the mainland British West Indies, which resides on the northern coast of South America. Since 1966 it has been known as the independent nation of Guyana.
The Essequibo River is the largest river in Guyana, and the largest river between the Orinoco and Amazon. Rising in the Acarai Mountains near the Brazil–Guyana border, the Essequibo flows to the north for 1,014 km (630 mi) through forest and savanna into the Atlantic Ocean. It has a total drainage basin of 156,828 km2 (60,552 sq mi) and an average discharge of 5,650 m3/s (200,000 cu ft/s).
The Guianas, also spelled Guyanas or Guayanas, is a region in north-eastern South America. Strictly, the term refers to the three Guyanas: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, formerly British, Dutch and French Guyana. Broadly it refers to the South American coast from the mouth of the Oronoco to the mouth of the Amazon.
Potaro-Siparuni is a region of Guyana. It borders the region of Cuyuni-Mazaruni to the north, the regions of Upper Demerara-Berbice and East Berbice-Corentyne to the east, the region of Upper Takutu-Upper Essequibo to the south and Brazil to the west.
Essequibo was a Dutch colony in the Guianas and later a county on the Essequibo River in the Guiana region on the north coast of South America. It was a colony of the Dutch West India Company between 1616 and 1792 and a colony of the Dutch state from 1792 until 1815. It was merged with Demerara in 1812 by the British who took control. It formally became a British colony in 1815 until Demerara-Essequibo was merged with Berbice to form the colony of British Guiana in 1831. In 1838, it became a county of British Guiana till 1958. In 1966, British Guiana gained independence as Guyana and in 1970 it became a republic as the Co-operative Republic of Guyana. It was located around the lower course of the Essequibo River.
Ankoko Island is an island located at the confluence of the Cuyuni River and Wenamu River, at 6°43′N61°8′W, on the border between Venezuela and Guyana.
The Schomburgk Line is the name given to a survey line that figured in a 19th-century territorial dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. The line was named after German-born English explorer and naturalist Robert Hermann Schomburgk (1804–1865). The dispute arose because when the United Kingdom acquired British Guiana from the Netherlands in 1814, the western border with Venezuela was not defined.
The Guyana–Venezuela territorial dispute is an ongoing territorial dispute between Guyana and Venezuela over the Essequibo region, also known as Esequibo or Guayana Esequiba in Spanish, a 159,500 km2 (61,600 sq mi) area west of the Essequibo River. The territory, excluding the Venezuelan-controlled Ankoko Island, is controlled by Guyana as part of six of its regions, based on the 1899 Paris Arbitral Award. It is also claimed by Venezuela as the Guayana Esequiba State. The boundary dispute was inherited from the colonial powers and has persisted following the independence of Venezuela and Guyana.
Guyana, officially the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, is a country on the northern coast of South America, part of the historic mainland British West Indies. Guyana is an indigenous word which means "Land of Many Waters". Georgetown is the capital of Guyana and is also the country's largest city. Guyana is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north, Brazil to the south and southwest, Venezuela to the west, and Suriname to the east. With a land area of 214,969 km2 (83,000 sq mi), Guyana is the third-smallest sovereign state by area in mainland South America after Uruguay and Suriname, and is the second-least populous sovereign state in South America after Suriname; it is also one of the least densely populated countries on Earth. It has a wide variety of natural habitats and very high biodiversity. The country also hosts a part of the Amazon rainforest, the largest tropical rainforest in the world.
William Lindsay Scruggs was an American author, lawyer, and diplomat. He was a scholar of South American foreign policy and U.S. ambassador to Colombia and Venezuela. He played a key role in the Venezuela Crisis of 1895 and helped shape the modern interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine.
This is a timeline of the territorial evolution of the Caribbean and nearby areas of North, Central, and South America, listing each change to the internal and external borders of the various countries that make up the region.
Guyana–Venezuela relations include diplomatic, economic and other interactions between the neighboring countries of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
The Venezuelan crisis of 1895 occurred over Venezuela's longstanding dispute with Great Britain about the territory of Essequibo, which Britain believed was part of British Guiana and Venezuela recognized as its own Guayana Esequiba. As the dispute became a crisis, the key issue became Britain's refusal to include in the proposed international arbitration the territory east of the "Schomburgk Line", which a surveyor had drawn half-a-century earlier as a boundary between Venezuela and the former Dutch territory ceded by the Dutch in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814, later part of British Guiana. The crisis ultimately saw Britain accept the United States' intervention in the dispute to force arbitration of the entire disputed territory, and tacitly accept the US right to intervene under the Monroe Doctrine. A tribunal convened in Paris in 1898 to decide the matter, and in 1899 awarded the bulk of the disputed territory to British Guiana.
United Kingdom–Venezuela relations are the bilateral relations between the United Kingdom and Venezuela since 1821 when so-called "British Legions" of former British soldiers fought to defend the Second Republic of Venezuela against Spanish royalists in the Venezuelan War of Independence.
A consultative referendum was initiated by the government of Nicolás Maduro regarding Venezuela's claim over the Guayana Esequiba, whose territory is disputed with, and controlled by, neighboring Guyana. The referendum took place on 3 December 2023 in Venezuela. The population of the territory in question was not consulted and did not vote as voting only took place within Venezuela.
The long-standing territorial dispute over the Essequibo region escalated into a crisis in 2023. The region is controlled by Guyana but is claimed by Venezuela. The dispute dates back many years and the current border was established by the Paris Arbitral Award in 1899. Venezuela renewed its claim in 1962 and the matter was referred to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2018.
The Protocol to the Agreement to resolve the controversy between Venezuela and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland over the frontier between Venezuela and British Guiana, simply known as the Port of Spain Protocol, is a protocol of the 1966 Geneva Agreement between Guyana and Venezuela and a 12-year moratorium on Venezuela's reclamation of Guayana Esequiba.
The Mallet-Prevost memorandum is a document posthumously published, written by Severo Mallet-Prevost, official secretary of the US–Venezuela delegation during the 1899 Paris Arbitral Award, which stated that the award, ruled largely in favour of Britain in a territorial dispute with Venezuela, resulted from the pressure by the Tribunal President Friedrich Martens and a political deal between Russia and Britain. Said memorandum led to complaints by Venezuela in the United Nations in 1962, which resulted in the Geneva Agreement, signed with the United Kingdom in 1966.
The Paris Arbitral Award is an arbitral award issued on 3 October 1899 by an arbitral tribunal convened in Paris, created two years earlier as established in the Arbitral Treaty of Washington D. C. on 2 February 1897, in which the United States on the one hand and the United Kingdom on the other, had agreed to submit to international arbitration the dispute over the border to the west of the British colony and the east of independent Venezuela, as a mechanism for an amicable solution to the territorial differendum.
Secretary-General of the United Nations [1] 
