Why Venezuela is Preparing to Conquer Guyana

on the 3rd of December 2023 Venezuela hosted a nationwide referendum on whether or not their country should Annex 2third of guyana's territory their Geographic neighbor immediately to the east this region of Guyana is known as the esao and it's a huge piece of land only slightly smaller than the US state of Florida is but guyan themselves were not welcome to vote in the Venezuelan referendum calling for the partition of their own country a couple days later on the fifth of December the Venezuelan government claimed more than 10 1.2 million people or more than onethird of their entire population had voted in the referendum and the 95% of the votes were in favor of annexing the esaka region from Guyana and creating a brand new Venezuelan State out of it to be called Guyana esba but in reality thirdparty International observers believe that fewer than 2.4 million Venezuelans actually participated in the referendum but that didn't stop Venezuela's decade long autocratic leader Nicholas Maduro from declaring that the Venezuelan people had spoken loud and clear claiming that the vote was so overwhelming that the Venezuelan government has no other choice Choice than to abide by it Maduro immediately ordered the publishing of a brand new official map of Venezuela that includes the esbo territory to be displayed in every school University government building and house in the country a Venezuelan General was immediately appointed by Maduro to become Venezuela's new governor of the territory while Venezuelan troop movements directly near the border with hako began increasing in activity and satellites revealed increased Venezuelan air strip and road construction beginning near the border as well the Venezuelan government promptly issued arrest warrants for political candidates in the country who opposed the referendum and the annexation well immediately before the referendum on the annexation took place Venezuela's defense minister very publicly and ominously stated that Venezuela's dispute with Guyana over the esoko is quote not a war for now Guyana has of course denounced Venezuela's referendum and rejected their unilateral demand to Annex 2third of their territory if Venezuela wants to truly Annex the esaka region beyond their own self-published Maps they will have to come and claim it themselves but an allout Venezuelan inv invasion of the esaka will not be an easy task the theater of operations will be huge across an area roughly the size of Florida and at the northern edge of the Amazon rainforest it's also almost entirely covered by incredibly dense jungle it's also very sparsely populated with only about 128,000 people who actually live there which makes the esaka one of the most sparsely populated places in the entire world with an average density that's less than half the density of lap land in Far Northern Finland above the Arctic Circle nonetheless that hasn't stop the Venezuelan government from already offering Venezuelan citizenship to all of the 128,000 people who live here including rolling out identification cards for all of them but because the region is so densely jungled and so sparsely populated there's been very little need to ever build out any infrastructure in the region or develop it from guyana's perspective as a result there's literally only one single paved road that runs from Venezuela into the esoko region and into Guyana in general and it runs through Brazil first before it enters into Guyana later immediately alarmed following Venezuela's referendum and demands for the eso's annexation then and worried that in order to enforce their claims Venezuelan troops and their Logistics may use the strategically vital paved Road and March through their territory Brazil has already deployed their own troops and vehicles to the region around the road to try and discourage the Venezuelans from ever attempting it and at the same time the United States Air Force has already begun conducting aerial patrols over guyana's territory to send a further message to the Venezuelans to not try their luck and just like that seemingly out of nowhere there's a major geopolitical crisis in South America and a genuine risk of state-on-state warfare exploding in Latin America for the first time in decades a war that can involve not only Venezuela and Guyana but Brazil and the United States as well but if the asako region is so underdeveloped so sparsely populated and so geographically challenging for Venezuela to invade in the first place then why is Venezuela threatening a land grab War right now all of a sudden a t hit well as it usually does in the 21st century the answer is actually a lot more complicated than it appears at first it has to do with oil the global struggle for the control of access to energy resources historic grievances over the age of colonialism and literally trillions of dollars worth of bounty to whoever eventually emerges Victorious and the risk of conflict spreads very far from the shores of just Guyana and Venezuela throughout the 20th and 21st centuries it became well understood that one of the single largest concentrations of crude oil that could be found anywhere in the world was right here across Venezuela in an area known as the Oronoco Oil Belt for decades oil companies from around the world attempted to discover additional oil deposits around this area but with only limited successes there were hunches that the oil built in Northern Venezuela might have extended further to the East and into the northern reaches of guyana's Maritime exclusive economic zone but then in 2014 after dozens of attempted drillings in guyana's offshore with no luck Royal Dutch Shell decided to throw in the towel and sell out the entirety of their 30% state St in guyana's offshore oil project to an American Independent petroleum company named hes hes bought out all of Shell's shares in the project for 30 million acquiring their 30% stake in the project those being spearheaded by Exxon Mobile with a 45% stake and joined by the China National offshore oil Corporation with an additional 25% stake and the very next year hess's gamble on buying out Shell's shares would result in one of the biggest jackpots in the entire history of the oil industry and that's because in 201 15 this Consortium led by Exxon Mobile began discovering a series of historically massive offshore oil deposits about 100 Mil north of guana's Coast Exxon would later confirm that these offshore oil fields within guyana's exclusive economic zone represented an estimated total of 11 billion barrels worth of recoverable oil a find that represents what is to date the single largest oil discovery of the 21st century and a fact that almost overnight catapulted Guyana from having zero known oil reserves to having the 17th largest oil reserves in the world with an amount of oil wealth that's nearly equivalent to the entirety of neighboring Brazil or Algeria by 2023 Exxon would calculate that these oil reserves in Guyana were worth an estimated half a trillion dollar and more might end up being discovered too and in order to capture it all the Exxon Le Consortium has already invested more than $40 billion into developing offshore oil platforms and projects in Guyana just since 2015 and they're expected to continue investing tens of billions of dollars more by the end of the decade the Exon Le Consortium also signed a deal with Guyana in 2016 that would split the profits of their oil 50/50 50% to the government of Guyana and 50% to the Exon Le Consortium in addition to 2% royalties to the Guyana government as well offshore oil rigs were rapidly built and put into place and production began near the end of December in 2019 and then in October of 2023 just a month and a half before Venezuela would hold its referendum Chevron announced that it would be buying out Hess for a whopping $59 billion immediately before this hess's 30% ownership stake in the Guyana offshore project that they had bought from Shell for only $30 million just 9 years previously was estimated by City Group analysts to be worth about 43% of hess's total portfolio meaning the Chevron is largely buying out Hess for their shares in Guyana and they value those shares at more than $25 billion more than $ 830 times what hes paid for them 9 years ago currently as of the end of 2023 Guyana is producing about 380,000 barrels of oil a day from these offshore fields which isn't nothing but within only a few years from now by 2027 or 2028 as more foreign investment pours in and more platforms are developed they're expected to increase production levels to about 1.2 million barrels per day which by then will be just over 1% of the entire planet's production and rank Gana roughly alongside modern day day algeria's production levels with a total population of only around 800,000 people Guyana will by then become by far the largest per capita producer of oil in the world and by 2036 it's expected that guyana's government will be raking in about $16 billion a year in taxes and levies on the oil industry I figure this nearly four times as much as guyana's entire economy was before the discovery of oil back in 2014 as a result Guyana has been experiencing the fastest growing economy any where in the world ever since 2021 as the money keeps pouring into the country from the Exxon lead Consortium and as the oil fields continue being developed across 2022 alone the guyane economy grew by an almost unbelievable 62.3% before the discovery of oil in 2014 Guyana was a sleepy little country with very few other major industries and so the GDP per capita in the country was nearly $5,400 per person per year which made it one of the poorest countries in the American Americas but now by 2028 with the unexpected oil boom guyana's nominal GDP per capita is expected to rise to more than $ 37,000 per person within just the next few years which by then will be the third highest in the Americas only behind the United States and Canada and about On a par with Italy it's for this reason that some people have already taken a calling Guyana the world's next United Arab Emirates another small formerly British controlled country that was once extremely poor but managed to grow exorbitantly wealthy Inu entral and Powerful in the world within only a matter of years through the harnessing of their oil might after it was discovered obviously Guyana has emerged in the 2020s as the most important new addition to the global energy map in the 21st century and that has bred incredible levels of attention from the outside world that it never could have imagined before most of guyana's present and likely future oil exports as well are flowing on the backs of tankers across the Atlantic towards the biggest port in the European Union roddam and the Netherlands a fact that's greatly benefiting the Europeans as they've been able to use guyana's recently come online oil to help replace some of their previously large volumes of Russian oil that they've C out over the war that's still raging in Ukraine OPEC the international oil cartel that's made up of most of the world's largest producers has already been approaching Guyana with the prospect of becoming their latest member Advance says that Guyana for the moment has publicly rejected in favor of maintaining their own independence but that Independence may not last forever because directly next door to all of their amazing oil discoveries and incoming wealth ever since 2015 has been Venezuela who despite having literally the largest crude oil reserves of any country in the world has been gradually struggling to actually produce any of it ever since the 1990s as you can see from this graph Venezuela's oil production was once around 3.2 million barrels a day back in the mid 1990s a rate that if they had continued managing today would have placed their production in the top 10 worldwide right alongside the likes of Persian Gulf States like the United Arab Emirates and Iran but they didn't maintain that rate and in fact they they seen a continuous decline in oil production over the past 30 years ever since to the point where today they're barely producing more than 700,000 barrels a day a rate of oil production that's even less than the United Kingdom despite Venezuela having more than 120 times the amount of proven reserves as the UK does now Venezuela produces and exports so little of their own oil the tiny Guyana right next door to them is all set to surpass both their production and Export volumes within just the next 3 years despite having a much younger industry where production only began at the end of 2019 and despite having vastly smaller volumes of reserves than Venezuela and the reason for that is very complicated in comparison to the much more recent oil industry in Guyana the oil industry in Venezuela dates back more than a century ago to 1922 when Royal Dutch Shell first hit oil in the country in the maricaibo Basin here in the far Northwest of the country that Discovery sparked an unprecedented oil boom in the country and by the end of the decade in 1929 there were more than 100 100 foreign energy companies operating in Venezuela all drilling for oil while the country's production had exploded to become the second highest producer in the entire world remaining only behind the United States's oil production itself but at the same time Venezuela was ruled by an autocratic military dictatorship and that regime failed to properly diversify the country's economy away from the ballooning oil industry by 1935 within only 13 years of when oil was first discovered in the country oil was already making up more than 90% of all of Venezuela's exports and the country had become the leading P state in the Western Hemisphere moreover only three foreign energy companies had managed to out manuver and outcompete all of the others to dominate 98% of the entire Venezuelan oil Market in the 1940s Venezuela passed a new law that required these foreign energy companies to pay half of their oil profits to the state the companies complied and Venezuela's government revenue exploded but with that came a classic problem that every Petro State before and since has had to confront with govern government revenues coming more from taxes on oil production and foreign oil companies the government begins relying less and less on the taxes from their own citizens and so the government begins becoming less accountable to its own people which opens the door to the country's ruling Elite to become more corrupt and more authoritarian over time which is exactly what ended up happening in Venezuela Venezuela became one of the founding members of OPEC alongside Saudi Arabia Iran Iraq and Kuwait in 1960 and then they created their own state-owned Oil Company the same year the Venezuela petroleum Corporation and with that they felt that they had enough leverage to increase the taxes on foreign oil companies profits from 50% to 65% which the companies continued to begrudgingly go along with and then in the 1970s came the global oil price boom that followed the OPEC oil embargo of countries that had supported the Israelis during the yam Gaper War of 1973 tens of billions of dollars in oil profits started flooding into the Venezuelan government's coffers which led government officials to make several short-sighted decisions in 1976 with the oil boom still roaring the Venezuelan government decided to nationalize their oil industry and established a new state-owned oil company called pdvsa that would monopolize all of the exploring drilling production refining and exports in the country foreign oil companies were still allowed to continue operating in Venezuela after 1976 but they could only do so under a joint venture with pdvsa and pdvsa had to own a minimum 60% stake in the joint venture but as is well known in the oil industry prices never remain high forever and for every boom time there's a bus time that always follows in the 1980s the global price of oil crashed and so too did Venezuela's undiversified government revenues inflation in the country accelerated but the government continued taking on huge amounts of debts by continuing to spend aggressively most notably with their purchase of half of the American Oil and Gas Company sitgo in 1986 and then the purchase of the remaining half of the company four years later in 199 90 Venezuela's purchase of sitgo was strategic for multiple reasons though Venezuela's oil reserves while being the largest in the world are also among the lowest quality in the world Venezuela's oil is extremely heavy and crude full of impurities like sulfur and Mercury that requires a lot of technical expertise to drill out of the ground and then it requires a much more intensive refining process to transform into usable finished end products like gasoline this is in stark contrast to the oil fields of Saudi Arabia which are slightly smaller than Venezuela's in volume but are also far lighter and far more pure of contaminants which makes Saudi oil significantly easier and cheaper both to drill and refine than Venezuelan oil is which is a huge part of what has made Saudi Arabia the world's most influential oil power and Venezuela a mere secondary player across the 1980s American oil refineries across the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana began anticipating that the world was starting to run out of the lighter more pure crude oil deposits that were easy to refine and as a result everyone was eventually going to have to start refining the heavier and less pure crude oil going forward like the oil that's found in Venezuela consequently most of America's Gulf Coast refineries began retooling themselves to handle the world's heavier and less pure oil and they became some of the only refineries in the world that could actually handle the processing required of Venezuela's extra heavy crude oil and their Geographic proximity to Venezuela's oil fields made them The Logical choice for the Venezuelans to use pdvsa's acquisition of sitgo in the late 1980s while expensing Ive enabled Venezuela to acquire direct ownership over some of these vital refineries while it also gave them control for a moment of about 10% of the entire us domestic oil Market which established this really lucrative trade route where pdvsa would produce super heavy crude oil in Venezuela exported to sitco refineries on the US GF Coast that they owned after 1986 and then sell the refined gasoline they produced in them directly to American consumers as the US market became the biggest export destination for Venezuelan oil by 1997 Venezuelan exports of crude oil to the US market peaked and America was importing about 17.4% of their oil from Venezuela more oil than the Americans were importing from Saudi Arabia at the time or from anyone else as well Venezuela had become America's number one largest source of oil but corruption and graft within the Venezuelan government had by this point become endemic between 1972 and 1997 as the oil wealth poured into the country the KO Institute has estimated that neeland government officials embezzled as much as $100 billion worth of the state's oil revenues a truly astonishing level of corruption by 1989 with continued government spending on social welfare programs and foreign Acquisitions like sitco the country's public debt had climbed up to $29 billion or about 66% of their total GDP at the time and $20 billion of that amount was owned to foreign Banks so in 1989 Venezuela appealed to the international monetary fund for a fin Financial bailout and as a part of those negotiations they agreed to a series of austerity measures that cut back on social welfare spending and that sparked a series of deadly riots across the country that killed hundreds in 1992 with unrest in Venezuela mounting and the government growing increasingly unpopular a then largely unknown Venezuelan military officer named Hugo Chavez launched a coup d' dayah against the government the coup attempt failed more than 140 people were killed and Chavez and his conspirators were arrested Hugo Chavez would spend the next 2 years in jail for his role in organizing the coup until he was pardoned in 1994 but his actions had catapulted him into Venezuela's national Spotlight and riding on that momentum after he was released from prison he decided to try and become Venezuela's next leader through more legal means by running for president in 1998 Chavez ran under a socialist campaign that promised to distribute Venezuela's massive oil wealth more equitably to the poor of the country he promised to end the corruption and The graft that had long been associated with Venezuela's government and oil industry and it was on this message that the Venezuelan workingclass voted Chavez into power in 1998 over the next few years as the price of oil continued to remain high and Venezuela continued making lots of money Chavez followed through on his campaign promises and dramatically expanded social welfare and healthc Care spending in the country and managed to greatly reduce the national poverty rate in the process this earned him an incredible amount of popularity among Venezuela's working class that then enabled him to continue expanding the powers of his own office in the country with very little push back Independent Media Outlets were steadily shut down press freedoms grew smaller and presidential term limits were abolished while Chavez expanded the control of his own party over the national oil industry the remaining oil projects in the country that were jointly owned between pdvsa and American energy companies like Exxon and kico Phillips were seized entirely for pdvsa while Chavez nearly simultaneously fired thousands of experienced pdvsa employees who went on strike between 2002 and 2003 who he then replaced bed with more inexperienced party loyalists the end result of expelling Highly experienced foreign companies and gutting pdvsa of many of their most experienced workers at the same time resulted in a sharp decline of Venezuela's productivity when it came to oil production but the shamas administration wasn't finished with its mismanagement of the industry just yet Venezuela began voluntarily selling their oil at a subsidized discount to fellow nations in the region who they consider to be friendly such as Cuba and Nicaragua while Venezuela continued distancing their own foreign policy away from the United States and closer towards Russia and China Chavez's Administration in Venezuela led the country into purchasing 20 billion dollar worth of Arms from Russia equipment that included Russian fighter jets surfaced to air missile systems and dozens of Tanks Venezuela was able to pay for all of this equipment by granting the Russian state owned Oil Company rosn the ability to become one of their own extraction Partners in the venezuel and oil fields and by taking out loans from Russia loans that they put up 49.9% of their ownership St in sitco in the United States as collateral for Chavez's realignment of Venezuela towards Russia also sparked a in Washington which led to the Bush Administration slapping a total arms embargo on Venezuela in 2006 and as oil production out of Venezuela continued dwindling under Chavez Venezuela's oil exports to the United States continued decreasing as well and the Gulf Coast refineries that were ones absorbing millions of extra heavy crude Venezuelan barrels a day be shifting towards receiving millions of extra heavy Canadian crude oil barrels coming out of the Alberta oil sands through pipelines instead and so extra heavy Canadian crude oil begin displacing extra heavy Venezuelan crude oil in America and so Venezuela's ability to make money out of their oil industry by exporting to American refineries and the American Market decreased even further at the same time Chavez also never managed to really diversify the Venezuelan government's Reliance away from the oil revenues that were still coming in by the time he died in 2013 after 15 years in power Venezuela was still deriving a whopping 96% of their export earnings through oil while 45% of the Venezuelan government's budget was still coming from the oil money as well Venezuela was still producing around 3 million barrels of oil per day in 2013 only marginally lower than what they were producing back in 1997 at their Peak immediately before the rise of Chavez and for the moment Global oil prices were still high and coasting off of those high oil prices throughout most of his time in office Chavez's lavish government spending and years of deficits had roughly tripled Venezuela's national debt by the time of his death from a total of just $ 33.6 billion in 1998 when he assumed office to a total of $11.6 billion in 2013 a figure that seemed manageable at the time as the Venezuelan economy continued growing and the total GDP stood at 371 billion which gave the Venezuelans a debt to GDP ratio of only 27% but with the economy and the government each still so reliant on the oil industry Chavez's huge deficits and piling on of debt were things that were only really sustainable so long as the price of oil continued remaining high after Chavez died in 2013 his hand pic successor Nicholas Maduro immediately assumed the presidency and continued on with all of Chavez's policies and high levels of spending but then in 2014 the year after Maduro assumed the presidency the price of oil completely collapsed Maduro failed to adapt and continued on with all of the same Chavez era policies but without the high oil prices in place to actually sustain them and with that came a rapid collapse in the undiversified Venezuelan economy as well massive protest began breaking out against the Maduro government in Venezuela in 2015 as the country's economy crumbled and the government responded with increasingly harsh levels of repression over the following 10 years between 2013 and 2023 maduro's Venezuela has plummeted 43 places in the reporters Without Borders annually published press freedoms index to the point where it's currently almost in the bottom 20 of the world on a comparable scale to the likes of Russia and bellaris where most television channels in the country are currently owned by the state the Venezuelan government's violence against its own people accelerated as well with both the United Nations and Human Rights Watch estimating that more than 20,000 Venezuelans in the country have been subjected to extrajudicial killing since Maduro took over in 2013 the collapse of oil prices in 2014 and the continued mismanagement of the oil industry and the economy was then even further exacerbated after 2018 when Nicholas Maduro claimed that he won re-election as Venezuela's president for another six-year term in an election that was widely criticized as fraudulent and unfair by dozens of outside countries from all around the world virtually every other country in the Americas and Europe refused to recognize the results of the election while only a handful of strategically aligned outside countries chose to continue recognizing maduro's leadership like Cuba Bolivia Russia Syria Iran China and North Korea among the countries who refused to recognize maduro's continued leadership in Venezuela following 2018 was the United States who decided to begin severely sanctioning maduro's government and the state-owned oil company pdvsa to try and encourage him to step down from Power these sanctions included a total ban on All American Imports of Venezuelan oil and a complete lockout of the Venezuelan government from the US Financial system that went into effect on January 1st 2019 and as a result the venez economy crashed even harder than it was already and then the following year came the covid-19 pandemic and all of the negative economic effects that came along with it too because of all these factors and many other reasons that I don't even have the time to cover in this video between 2013 when Maduro took over office in the country and 2021 the heavily oil-based Venezuelan GDP absolutely crashed and lost more than 75% of its total value representing a percentage-based economic loss more than twice as bad as the United States suffered during the Great Depression Venezuela's inflation rate skyrocketed into hyperinflation territory with levels reaching 2 million per by 2018 and only slightly coming down from there to a rate of just 360% as of 20123 which has practically made the Venezuelan currency worthless and then with the GDP crashing by more than three4 and the currency becoming effectively worthless income rates in the country skyrocketed down while poverty rates in the country skyrocketed up by 2021 it was estimated that nearly 2third of Venezuelans were living in poverty twice as many as had been in 2013 immediately before Muro assumed the presidency the economic collapse of Venezuela since 2014 is of such an extreme nature that it's widely regarded as one of the worst economic collapses anywhere in the world during times of Peace any time in the past Century and deciding to flee from the civilizational collapse and the increasingly authoritarian regime of Nicholas Maduro roughly one out of every four Venezuelans who lived in the country prior to 2013 would decide to leave the country within a decade by 2023 with Millions becoming refugees all across the Americas in Europe and many of these millions of Venezuelans who fled the country were among the nation's most well-educated and experienced contributing to a serious Venezuelan brain drain problem getting locked out from the American Financial system and no more American energy companies are their Investments operating in Venezuela post 2019 getting locked out from the ability to export any of their extra heavy crude oil to the US locked out Venezuela's ability to send their oil to the vital Gulf Coast refineries that they needed to actually refine their oil into finished products including the three Gulf Coast refineries they own by proxy through Sito all as Venezuela's own oil industry and refineries began languishing under the stresses of fleeing experienced workers and critical lack of Investments and capital necessary for upkeep and maintenance and as a result Venezuela's oil production levels have also crashed alongside their economy with production collapsing from about 3 million barrels per day in 2013 13 right when Maduro first assumed office to only about 700,000 barrels a day by the beginning of 2023 which has only compounded Venezuela's financial problems even further now at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024 the Venezuelan GDP is only about 92 billion but the government's debt is still more than $147 billion representing a total debt to GDP ratio of about 160% now the nation's GDP per capita sits at just 3,47 4 per person and is ranked in the bottom five of the Western Hemisphere and the lowest in the whole South American continent the unemployment rate is still more than 35% of the country's remaining labor force while the population has plummeted to only about 26.5 million people more than 4 million fewer than they had just a few years ago back in 2016 and with oil production levels barely managing Beyond 700,000 barrels a day Venezuela has sunk to become only the 10th largest producer in OPEC today and only only the 22nd largest producer in the world despite them controlling the largest amount of oil reserves in the world a very very far fall from the second largest producer status that they once enjoyed a century ago and then at about the same time as Venezuela's entire civilization economy and oil industry began collapsing from 2015 onwards Plucky little guyana's oil industry right next door began booming with the offshore discoveries made by the Exxon Mobile Le Consortium beginning in 2015 in an extremely ironic Twist of circumstances Venezuela became the world's fastest crashing economy at the exact same time the Guyana right next door became the world's fastest growing economy and in both circumstances it had to do with oil but as it turned out guyana's massive oil discoveries were being made within a maritime region that was an extension of a land area in the country that Venezuela had long claimed for itself dating back to the 19th century the esoko region the origin of the dispute over this area representing 2third of guyana's current territory goes back to the competing Colonial claims of the Spanish and the British empires in South America the British began acquiring and consolidating territory in the north of the South American continent during the early 19th century that eventually coalesced into the area of modern de gayana which was then known as British Guana but the Spanish disputed the British territorial claim asserting that their own Colonial control in the area extended All the Way East to the West Bank of the esoko river but as political movements for independence from Spain urged all across their Latin American colonies during the same time period the Spanish weren't really in any position to dispute their claim with the British upon their own independence from Spain in 1811 and then from Grand Colombia in 1830 Venezuela inherited the Old Colonial Spanish territorial claim against the British to the West Bank of the esoko river and so they began claiming the modern region of esoko that was between the river and their own territory in the west Venezuela even severed their relations with the United Kingdom over this dispute in 1887 and and then a decade later in 1897 both Venezuela and the UK agreed to pass along the esao dispute to an international tribunal and Paris that would independently decide the territory's final fate Venezuela's interests were represented by the United States during the tribunal while the jurist who would ultimately decide the case came from the United States the United Kingdom and Russia but none from Venezuela directly 2 years later in 1899 the Paris tribunal announced their final verdict burden would receive 90% of the disputed land in question while Venezuela received the remaining 10% at the time both Venezuela and the UK accepted these findings as legally binding in addition to the entire International Community and the case was closed and that remained the case largely without issue for more than 60 years until the 1960s when the eso issue came up yet again as the UK Was preparing to finally Grant British Guyana its independence in 1966 Venezuela suddenly unilaterally declared that the findings of the 1899 Paris tribunal were illegal over accusations that the British and Russian jurists at the time had secretly colluded and conspired to award Britain the majority of the disputed land Venezuela reopened their claims to the esoko region again and upon their independence in 1966 Guyana inherited the dispute on their end from the British while Guyana has continued asserting that the findings of the 1899 tribunal are final and binding from there the dispute on the esaka region remained open and unresolved with neither side agreeing to Forfeit their claim to it all the way up until 2018 when after Decades of zero progress being made the matter was finally forwarded to the international court of justice in 2018 for yet another International arbitration where it continues to remain today but maduro's Venezuela rejects the international Court of Justice's jurisdiction in their country and as a result they refused to ever participate in this most recent arbitration case and they will almost certainly refuse to recognize whatever final verdict they eventually come up with and then of course the nearly 2 Century old ES aibo territorial dispute became way way more important in 2015 after the Exxon Le Consortium discovered their estimated half a trillion dollar worth of recoverable oil reserves within guyana's exclusive economic zone an exclusive economic zone largely contributed by guyana's continued control over the esao Region's Coastline and here we arrive back at the current conflict with maduro's and Venezuela's claims to the esoko each growing louder after 2015 and recently reaching a shouting match in December of 2023 after they held the referendum declaring that they will Annex the territory outright by seizing control over the esoko region now Madura will be able to use the expanded Venezuelan Coastline to aert an expanded Venezuelan exclusive economic zone that will Encompass the majority of all the offshore oil fields that have been discovered in the area by Exxon and Company since 2015 this is crucial for many reasons but one of the biggest is that in comparison to Venezuela's own extra heavy crude oil that's expensive and difficult to drill and refine Diana's offshore oil is considered extremely light and sweet which makes it much easier and much cheaper to drill and especially to refine into finished products Venezuela's own domestic oil refineries that have long been languishing under American Financial sanctions and lack of capital for maintenance and upkeep could hypothetically refine this oil on their own assuming that is that they had the expertise that's required to operate the offshore oil platforms that are required to drill the oil out in the first place which is very complicated and very doubtful Venezuela would be able to pull it off on their own without any outside assistance but nonetheless that hasn't stopped maduro's regime from already ordering that oil exploration licenses in the disputed Maritime area be purchased from Venezuela now instead of from Guyana following the annexation referendum if Venezuela ultimately decides to commit to an invasion of the esao region in order to enforce their claims to the area they will likely Crush Guyana if it remains a simple one-on-one fight despite millions of Venezuelans having left the country and the Venezuelan economy having gone through one of the biggest Financial catastrophes ever seen in human history they still have a population of more than 265 million people compared to guyana's population of only about 800,000 the entire guyane Armed Forces only have about 4,000 total soldiers which are far too few to even man the entire length of their border with Venezuela that's 743 km long if they try to man the whole border evenly they'd only be able to deploy about five or six solders per kilometer of length they only have a few dozen old outdated Soviet era artillery pieces no tanks no armored vehicles and virtually no Navy or Air Force by comparison Venezuela has a standing army of 138,000 active duty Personnel 30,000 additional reservists and an estimated 1.6 million paramilitary forces that the Maduro regime has at its disposal while outdated by International standards and almost certainly lacking any spare parts Venezuela technically does have fighter jets they purchased from Russia over a decade ago they also have hundreds of Tanks hundreds of artillery pieces and dozens of attack helicopters that at least when compared to whatever guyana's got is quite formidable but a Venezuelan invasion of Guyana to secure the esaka region through force would almost certainly not be limited to a mere one-on-one fight the United States would be almost certain to militarily respond against Venezuela for multiple reasons first Exxon Mobile and now Chevron have invested tens of billions of dollars into develop guyana's offshore oil field since 2015 and a Venezuelan assault on Guyana and seizure of the es aibo would mean that all of those Investments would basically just go up and smoke which alone would Place enormous pressures on Washington to ensure that never happens but perhaps more importantly Guyana is already sending most of their crude oil exports to the European Union and the US West Coast and within the next 3 years Guyana is expected to more than triple their oil production levels from today this represents what's almost certainly the largest incoming supply of oil onto the global market in the years ahead most of which will go towards the European Union and further assist them in diversifying away from Russia's oil and which will create downward pressures on global oil prices and downward pressures on global inflation two outcomes that the United States wants to happen very much both to hurt Russia's War Machine in Ukraine and to reduce inflationary pressures being felt at home if Venezuelan troops came suddenly rolling into the esao region they would likely mean Little Resistance from Guyana and swiftly occupy it just like Saddam Hussein was able to do with Kuwait back in 1990 and just like happened then in order to defend its interests in the global oil industry the United States would likely gather together a coalition and launch an allout attack on Venezuela to push their troops out of eso and secure guyana's offshore oil fields and would likely attempt an overthrow of the Maduro regime in the country once and for all as well for his own part Maduro is likely raising the stakes of the asako issue now at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024 for multiple reasons there is of course all that sweet oil in guyana's offshore that's at play but there's other factors going on too he might not actually be serious about ordering an invasion to seize a Florida sized chunk of land in Guyana that would likely trigger a cataclysmic war and instead he might just be simply trying to drum up patriotism in Venezuela in order to shore up some support for his deeply unpopular regime in the country ahead of 2024's presidential election according to Caracus based consulting firm called consultores ventuno maduro's approval rating in the country is currently hovering at only about 29% which is perhaps understandable for the leader who's overseen the world's greatest economic collapse in recent history Maduro must know that he's an unpopular leader which is why he resorted to fraud and repression during the election of 2018 to keep himself in power and which was what earned him unprecedented sanctions from the United States that worsen the economic situation in the country even further he might also decide to try and use the risk of War breaking out over the es aibo issue to Simply cancel 2024's election altogether I think that ultimately Nicholas Maduro has two primary basic interests he wants to continue remaining in power in Venezuela and he wants the United States to start removing some of their sanctions on his country's oil industry so that they can begin rebuilding and making more money again across 2022 and 2023 he was actually seeing some progress being made on these goals after the Russians invaded Ukraine and they and the Saudis began a campaign of coordinating oil production cuts the price of oil for a moment skyrocketed around the world and Washington suddenly became interested in getting as much oil back onto the global market as possible to begin cooling prices back down and pushing back against Russia even if some of that oil had to come from maduro's Venezuela and so in November of 2022 the Biden Administration in Washington eased some of the sanctions that went into force on Venezuela back in 2019 that finally enabled Chevron to restart their jointly owned Ventures with pdvsa in the country in January of 2023 after 4 years of a complete American embargo on Venezuelan oil imports small amounts of Venezuelan crude finally began trickling back into the still Venezuelan known CCO refineries on the American Gulf Coast and then on the 18th of October 2023 the United States agreed to effectively lift all of their sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry for a period of 6 months in exchange for Maduro agreeing to free political prisoners and agreeing to host genuinely open open and free presidential elections in 2024 and then knowing or perhaps realizing that he would almost certainly lose a genuinely open and free election in 2024 he has perhaps decided on a strategy of hyping up the es aibo issue with Guyana now to try and increase patriotic sentiment for his struggling poll numbers but then by doing this and demanding 2third of a neighboring oil rich country with tens of billions of dollars with a private us investment sunk into it he's just gone and made himself a pariah to the the United States all over again if he escalates the rhetoric over esoko and the maps showing esoko is a part of Venezuela and sends in the Army to actually enforce it on the ground then any future hope of sanctions relief on his country's already floundering oil industry will immediately evaporate so long as he continues to remain in power and any hope of Venezuela recovering with him at the helm will be destroyed for good and that's assuming the United States wouldn't just respond with a second Gulf War aimed at obliterating his regime from the face of the Earth which they probably would it seems so insane for Maduro to consider an invasion of Guyana that it won't ever actually happen but just because something doesn't make any sense to you or me doesn't mean that it won't actually happen consider something that happened back in 1982 back then Argentina was ruled by an unpopular military hun that was struggling to hold on to power in the country their idea to continue hanging on to power was to whip up a sense of patriotism by enforcing one of Argentina's long-standing territorial claims on the nearby Faulkland Islands administ by Britain a territory that they called the Islas malvinas and something that they had claimed have been stolen from them by the British during the age of colonialism home to nothing other than 1,800 people and 400,000 sheep the argentines launched a surprise fullscale amphibious invasion of the islands and secured total control over them with little resistance in less than 24 hours of Landing they expected that the British nearly 9,000 M away on the other side of the world would do nothing the islands would become theirs and the act of securing the islands after more than a Century of dispute would solidify their struggling regime's legitimacy and popularity and enable them to continue staying in power but they grossly miscalculated instead the British sent down an armada to fight them in a 10- weekl long War exploded between them hundreds of soldiers on both sides were killed and thousands were injured major ships were sunk and dozens of aircraft were shot down more people were killed and wounded over the fighting for the fauland islands in 1982 than people who actually lived there in the end the British emerged Victorious the Argentine invasion was decisively defeated and the already unpopular military hun in the country collapsed under the scale of the disaster hardly anybody believed in early February of 2022 that the Russians were imminently about to invade Ukraine despite all of the warnings and the posing because it didn't seem to make sense to westerners for them to actually do it but here we are nearly 2 years later and hundreds of thousands of deaths later with the war in Ukraine still raging on perhaps Maduro might believe that with the United States presently distract with major ongoing Wars in Ukraine and around Israel Washington would be less interested or even less capable in also intervening against a Venezuelan seizure of the esaka region now and by doing that and being successful at it it would finally resolve a centuries old territorial dispute in Venezuela's favor make it appear as if Maduro was standing up to the global Colonial powers and solidify his unpopular regime's legitimacy and popularity in the process and enable him to continue holding on to power he might also be only seeking to Simply use the threat of War to gain more leverage during his own negotiations with the United States on further sanctions relief on his country's oil industry he must know that Washington won't want another War breaking out in their own backyard with the current ones still raging in Ukraine and around Israel and as a result Washington may be open to further sanctions relief on Venezuela in order to ensure that this third war doesn't ever begin so that they can continue remaining focused on Ukraine and Israel and potentially on Taiwan from another perspective Russia would probably love nothing more than for Venezuela to make an actual go at the esao region now for one thing Russia wants as many distractions for the United States away from Ukraine as possible public support for continuing to provide arms to Ukraine is steadily waning in America and with the war erupting between Israel and Hamas in the Middle East Washington's attention has already been forced to Pivot a bit away from Ukraine if another War erupted in South America between Venezuela and Guyana and the future of all of guyana's oil was at stake American troops elves would almost certainly directly intervene and cause yet another distraction for Washington moreover A disruption in guyana's looming oil production increases and supplies onto the World Market will increase oil scarcity on the global market and put further upward pressures on oil's price which will benefit Russia as they continue selling their own oil to keep funding the war that they're trying to win in Ukraine and even if Venezuela somehow wins and takes over the esao without an American intervention the country's proven track record of DEC of incompetence and mismanagement will almost certainly end up driving the oil fields they seize in Guyana into the ground as well ultimately ending with the same result either way guyana's soon to be huge oil exports will be at least temporarily removed from the global Supply and that will enable Russia to sell their own oil for higher and stay in the fight in Ukraine for longer well it might not seem particularly rational for Venezuela to actually invade the esao region right now Venezuela's government hasn't exactly been a Bastion of rationality and re reason for several decades now and as previous examples have shown with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and Argentina's invasion of the Falcons in 1982 rational decisions are often relative to the eye of the beholder and Wars for territorial Conquest aren't completely off the table in the 21st century Venezuela will continue claiming the esaka region for the foreseeable future on all of their maps and Guyana and the world should both be prepared for how to respond if they end up deciding on escalating their claims on paper towards an actual real world Invasion now there's a lot of data that goes into producing these kinds of videos whether it's showing how much money oil and gas companies like Exxon and Chevron have invested into guyana's offshore oil fields how much Venezuela's economy has crashed since Nicholas Maduro assumed the presidency where millions of Venezuelan citizens have fled to since 2015 or showing where Venezuela's and guyana's oil exports have gone and how they've changed over time the ability to visualize raw data like this on a map is exactly what makes learning about this stuff so fascinating to me and it's why the exploring data visually course is one of my all-time favorite courses that I've ever taken with this video sponsor brilliant brilliant is a stem learning platform that helps you learn by actually doing they don't just give you a mountain of text and then expect you to remember everything you just read they use interactive exercises to teach you the intuitive principles then build these principles upon each other so that you can genuinely understand complex subjects like data visualization and analysis statistics calculus computer science or dozens of other subjects they really know how to teach for results which is why brilliant is perfect for the kind of person who wants to learn because they love 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Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 2,594,877

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: DQ7fTSirNDs

Length: 48min 12sec (2892 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023