Sibylla Bostoniensis

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0.

The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!
The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!

    Somebody, oh, Johnny! Somebody, oh!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!

– Sea shanty, presumed Guyanese

Let us appreciate that the only reason – the only reason – I know about what I am about to share with you is because of that whole music history thing of mine. It's not even my history. My main beat is 16th century dance music (± half a century). But dance music is working music, and as such I consider all the forms of work music to be its cousin, and so I have, of an occasion, wandered into the New England Folk Festival's sea-shanty sing. Many people go through life understanding the world around them through the perspective of a philosophical stance, a religious conviction, a grand explanatory theory, fitting the things they encounter into these frameworks; I do not know if I should be embarrased or not, but for me, so often it's just song cues.

So when I saw the word "Essequibo" go by in the web-equivalent of page six of the international news, I was all like, "Oh! I know that word!" recognizing a song cue when I see one. "It's a river. I wonder where it is?"

And I clicked the link.

That was twenty-one months ago.

Ever since, I have been on a different and ever-increasingly diverging timeline from the one just about everyone else is on.

In December of 2023, Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, tried to kick off World War Three.

He hasn't stopped trying. He's had to take breaks to steal elections and deal with some climate catastrophe and things like that. But mostly ever since – arguably since September of 2023 – Maduro has been escalating.

You wouldn't know it from recent media coverage of what the US is doing off the coast of Venezuela. At no point has any news coverage of the US military deployment to that part of the world mentioned anything about the explosive geopolitical context there. A geopolitical context, that when it has been reported on, is referred to in terms like "a pressure cooker" and "spiraling".

The US government itself has said nothing that alludes to it in any way. The US government has its story and it's sticking to it: this is about drugs.

As you may be aware, the US government is claiming to have sunk three Venezuelan boats using the US military. The first of these sinkings was on September 1st.

To hear the media tell it, the US just up and decided to start summarily executing people on boats in the Caribbean that it feels were drug-runners on Sep 1st.

No mention is made of what happened on Aug 31st.

On August 31, the day before the first US military attack on a Venezuelan vessel, at around 14:00 local time, somebody opened fire on election officials delivering ballot and ballot boxes in the country Venezuela is threatening to invade.

And they did it from the Venezuelan side of the river that is the border between the two countries.

That country is an American ally. An extremely close American ally. An ally that is of enormous importance to the US.

And which is a thirtieth the size of Venezuela by population, and which has an army less than one twentieth as large.

You would be forgiven for not knowing that Venezuela has been threatening to and apparently also materially preparing to invade another country, because while it's a fact that gets reported in the news, it is never reported in the same news as American actions involving or mentioning Venezuela.

Venezuela, which is a close ally of Russia.

You may have heard about how twenty-one months ago, in December of 2023, there was an election in Venezuela which Maduro claimed was a landslide win for him. There was a lot of coverage in English-speaking news about that election and how it was an obvious fraud, and the candidate who won the opposition party's primary wasn't on the ballot, and so on and so forth.

You probably didn't hear that in that very same election, there was a referendum. If you did hear it reported, you might have encountered it being dismissed in the media as a kind of political stunt of Maduro's, to get people to show up to the polls or to energize his base. It couldn't possibly be (the reasoning went) that he meant it. Surely it was just political theater.

The referendum questions put, on Dec 3, 2023, to the voters of Venezuela were about whether or not they supported establishing a new Venezuelan state.

Inside the borders of the country of Guyana.

2023 Dec 4: The Guardian: "Venezuela referendum result: voters back bid to claim sovereignty over large swath of Guyana".

Why?

Eleven billion gallons of light, sweet crude: the highest quality of oil that commands the highest price.

(I can hear all of Gen X breathe, "Oh of course.")

It is under the floor of the Caribbean in an area known as the Stabroek Block.

The Stabroek Block is off the coast of an area known as the Essequibo.

It takes its name from the Essequibo River, which borders it on one side, and it constitutes approximately two-thirds of the land area of the country of Guyana.

Whoever owns the Essequibo owns the Stabroek Block and whoever owns the Stabroek owns those 11B gallons of easily-accessed, high-value oil.



As far as almost everyone outside of Venezuela has been concerned, for the last hundred years Guyana has owned the Essequibo.

Venezuela disagrees. Venezuela calls the area "Guayana Esequiba" and insists it's rightfully theirs.

Two days after the referendum, on Dec 5th, 2023, the government of Venezuela published its nine-point plan for "Guayana Esequiba". (If you can't access that link directly, here is the Archive.org copy.) This is a machine translation:

Announcement for the protection and defense of the Guayana Esequiba

In a binding ratification of the advisory referendum on Sunday, December 3, the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, announced nine strategic actions to execute the decisions approved by the Venezuelan people in defense of the historical rights to the Guayana Esequiba.

Below, learn in detail the announcements made during the General Assembly of the Federal Governing Council, with the participation of the Council of State and the Defense Council of the Nation:

1. Created High Commission by the Defense of the Guayana Esequiba. This body coordinated by the Vice-President of the Republic, Delcy Rodríguez, will be composed of the Defense Council, the Federal Council of Government, the National Security Council and political, religious and academic sectors, especially the universities of the country.

2. Activate debate in the National Assembly of the Organic Law for the Defense of the Guayana Esequiba. The legal instrument, subsequent discussion and approval, will allow the creation of the Guayana Esequiba and the execution of the decisions approved by the people in the consultative referendum.

3. Creation of Integral Defense Zone of the Guayana Esequiba. It will be composed of three Areas of Integral Development and 28 sectors of Integral Development, military and administratively dependent of the Region of Integral Defense Guayana.

4. Designated - provisionally, until the Organic Law is approved by the Defense of the Esequiba Guayana- the M/G Alexis Rodríguez Cabello as the Unique Authority of the Guayana Esequiba. Your political-administrative headquarters will be in Tumeremo.

5. Authorized Petroleos de Venezuela and the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana to create the divisions PDVSA Esequibo and CVG Esequibo. Likewise, President Nicolás Maduro ordered the granting of operational licenses for the exploration and exploitation of oil, gas and minerals.

6. The new Map of Venezuela should be published and disseminated in all schools, high schools and universities in the country. In this sense, communal councils, Local Supply and Production Committees (Clap) and the Bolivarian Militia is called to join the distribution of the new Map of Venezuela in the communities.

7. Activate a Social Care Plan for the population of the Guayana Esequiba, as well as carry out a census and deliver the identity card to its inhabitants. At this point is the creation of an Administrative Service of Identification, Migration and Aliens (Saime) office in Tumeremo.

8. Establish a rule prohibiting the recruitment of companies operating or collaborating in the unilateral concessions given by Guyana at sea to be delimited.

9. Approve a Special Law that decrees areas of environmental protection and new National Parks in the Guayana Esequiba.

Things then got really spicy.






1.

Before proceeding, some advice about how to approach this.

This is a story about facts, of which there are a great number, and the most important ones of them are the dates. Everything I will relate here I am nailing to a calendar, because this is a story about the history that has been unfolding over the last two years (or several centuries, depending on how you look at it), and the order things unfolded and when is part of the story. Don't let your eyes glaze over when you see dates. I will do my best to make the story hang together in your mind, but this will make the most sense if you keep your eyes on the whens as well as the whats and the wheres and the whos.

This is also a story about things you will probably find objectionable. I recommend kind of putting your moral sensibilities in park for the first read-through, just long enough to acquire the facts – if only because if you start cringing or wincing at the beginning, you're going to sprain something by the end.

But also because one of the ways we attempt to understand stories is by what we could call moral templates. We try to figure out "who's the bad guy" as a way to navigate accounts of causality and construe stories as fables with lessons. It is very tempting to prematurely project onto this story templates you already know like ones about colonialism and imperialism and tyranny and extractive industries. Doing that will make it hard to navigate. I'm not saying don't use your moral judgment; I'm saying wait to use it.




2.

Guyana is an absolutely fascinating country, of both enormous troubles and promise, and I regret that it took something bad happening to bring it to my attention.

Guyana has had a rough go of it. Guyana, the modern nation, was originally a Dutch colony founded on the lands of the Wai Wai, Macushi, Patamona, Lokono, Kalina, Wapishana, Pemon, Akawaio and Warao, who are still there thankyouverymuch. The Dutch founded the colony to grow sugar cane, and they imported hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans to do it. The Dutch and the British fought over the territory and ultimately the Dutch and the British signed a treaty giving it to the British.

And then, in 1833, England banned slavery throughout their empire. Overnight, the enslaved people in Guyana were enslaved no longer. The African people in the colony of Guyana found themselves free English citizens.

Which meant the British plantation owners certainly didn't want to employ them to work the sugar cane fields. That would involve paying them.

So instead, the English started bringing in indentured servants.

From India.

These indentured servants were various levels of voluntary, from people who willingly signed up in hopes of making a better life for themselves to people who were frankly kidnapped. Most were Hindu, some were Muslim, some were of other minority Indian religions. The deal was work five years as an indentured servant and then work another five years uncontracted, and you were then free and clear and entitled to land of your own. All told, the British brought about a quarter of a million Indians to Guyana, and an estimated only 80,000 returned back to India.

That is why, today, Guyana's primary four demographics are Afro-Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese, Amerindian (the preferred term in Guyana), and mixed-race people.

It is also the answer to the question you're going to have about why the current President of Guyana is named Mohamed Irfaan Ali.

And that is why, today, Guyana is the only English-speaking country in South America.

Alas, from the point of view of the recently liberated African people in the 19th century, the Indian indentured servants were scabs taking their jobs; relations between them soured and remained poor them until, well, they're not all better yet. Guyanese politics wound up organized around ethnicity, and this... did not work out well for them.

The UK ran Guyana (then "British Guiana") as an extractive economy right up until Guyana became independent in 1966.

At the point of independence, 80% of Guyana's export earnings were controlled by just three British companies. That's where the profits went and where the technical and managerial expertise came from. The people of Guyana provided only labour. Indeed, in the worlds of historian Charles Mann, they were punished if they tried to do anything else. Distant owners had little interest in building up the institutions necessary for complex societies: schools, infrastructure or a native bureaucracy. Guyana was first and foremost an extractive economy. The young country had only one university, a night school that had been established only three years before independence. [Source]

Entering independence, Guyana had an ascendant Indo-Guyanese party – the Indo-Guyanese were the largest demographic – that was expressly socialist and it was the height of the Cold War, so you can guess what happened next: the US and the UK weren't going to stand for that. So of course the US meddled in their elections, supporting a candidate of the Afro-Guyanese party who swore he was pro-capitalism, but as soon as he was elected, declared himself a leftist, kicked the US to the curb, and made alliances with Cuba, China, and North Korea: Linden Forbes Burnham.

Burham was a standard awful dictator who absolutely wrecked the country, including economically. Huge numbers of Guyanese fled their country; to this day, about a half of all Guyanese citizens do not live in Guyana. Of course the people mostly likely to leave were those with the best prospects abroad, so this constituted an enormous brain-drain.

I'm Guyanese; my username reflects the fact that I was born at Suddie Hospital, Essequibo. My father was killed in the 1969 Rupununi Uprising and my mother and siblings all migrated as soon as we were able to do so. I've lived in the U.S. since 1980. [...] The current problems in Guyana are not all attributable to colonialism; much rests on the fact that starting around 1972, practically the entire middle class migrated in search of better economic opportunities and there are now more Guyanese living overseas than in the actual country. This decapitated the economy as the people who could be relied on to run the country all left and it has resulted in generations with poor education and work ethic and dependent on remittances of foreign currency and "barrels" from relatives living abroad. The end result is a wide gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" which explains much of the crimes that occur in Guyana today. [Source]

Then Burham died in 1985. The Indo-Guyanese party wrested control of the country back. Unsurprisingly, this did not usher in an age of peace and prosperity.

It wasn't until 1992 that Guyana had an election that was internationally recognized as being free and fair. Indo-Guyanese, though their proportion of the population had dropped slightly since independence, were still comfortably the biggest group, and now the PPP came to power. It was their turn to be in charge, and they would run the country for another 20 years. The PPP set about dismantling Burnham's state control of the economy and most of his authoritarianism. [...]

So Indo-Guyanese parties kept winning elections until 2015, when the PNC got back into power. For many Afro-Guyanese, this 23-year period from 1992 to 2015 is remembered as being both corrupt and a time when the Indo-Guyanese lorded it over them. Of course, many Indo-Guyanese would say the same about the previous period living under the PNC. This racial division of its politics has been a massive constraint on Guyana's development. [Source]

The consequences of all this for Guyana were dire:

It is 108th in the world in the UNDP's Human Development Index. In terms of life expectancy, the World Bank puts it at 154th in the world, below Gabon and Eritrea, and has the highest maternal mortality rate in South America. As of 2020, two fifths of the population live below the poverty line, earning less than $5.50 a day. The education system is so bad that children make seven years worth of progress in the 12 they spend at school. Around four fifths of university graduates leave Guyana after graduating. And so the Guyanese diaspora is nearly as large as the country's current population.

Even worse, its suicide rate is four times the world average, until very recently, the highest in the entire world. That statistic actually hides something even darker. 80% of these suicides are by Indo-Guyanese, mostly men living in rural areas. This is something that seems to be common throughout the Indian diaspora worldwide, and we don't really know why.

Illegal logging and wildcat gold mining are endemic, and beyond that, crime has become a massive problem. In 2002, New York, a hub for Guyanese in the United States, deported all its Guyanese criminals. Crime surged. Now Guyana's crime rate has almost tripled the world average with the world's 20th highest homicide rate. [Source]

Guyana has been one of the most wretchedly poor and disordered places on Earth for a long time.

And then, oil.

[...] on May 5th 2015 the Deepwater Champion oil rig broke through to liquid. The geologists were right: Guyana had oil.

It would take some time for the true scale of this discovery to become clear. As Exxon and its partners kept exploring over the years that followed, their understanding of the extent of this oil deposit grew and grew and grew.

Today 11 billion barrels worth of oil have been found.

That by itself is a lot. It's a good bit more than that of Norway or Ecuador for example. But while Guyana only sits around 18th in the world for proven oil reserves, there's a big difference between it and every other country higher on the list.

With a population of just 830,000 Guyana is far, far smaller than every country with more oil – meaning its oil per capita is amongst the highest in the world, beaten only by that of Kuwait. But there is yet still a difference between Kuwait and Guyana. Kuwait is an Emirate – a form of monarchy, meaning much of the spoils of its oil wealth is confined to the ruling family. Guyana, however is a democracy meaning, at least in theory, oil revenue should be used for the benefit of the nation and its people.

It would therefore be reasonable to conclude, given the style of governance and the ratio of oil to people, that the scale of change that Guyana's oil discovery will bring about will be amongst the greatest any country has ever seen. [Source]

Given Guyana's troubled history, this should have gone completely sideways: introducing unfathomable wealth to a country beset by ethnic division and political corruption, with weak institutions and enormously vulnerable to external exploitation, should have been, well, like throwing gasoline on a fire.

But that doesn't seem to have happened.

To the contrary, it seems to have been a wake-up call.

This is where there is hope. Guyana isn't the same place that it was 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago. This is because of two groups in particular. While Afro-Guyanese are around 30% of the population and Indo-Guyanese 40%, the numbers of mixed race and indigenous voters are both increasing. And so a spread of third parties are now entering the equation, trying to block the duopoly.

And in my conversations with people in Guyana, there is certainly an appetite for a post-racial politics. After 60 years of racialized rule, things perhaps are beginning to change. And they need to change, because Guyana has a lot to sort out. [Source]

For Guyana, one of the poorest countries in the world, one of the countries that got perhaps one of the rawest deals, to strike oil in a big way: it was like Guyana finally, finally had caught a break.

One of the things in Guyana's corner is that enormous diaspora. There are Guyanese people around the world, getting educated, becoming cosmopolitan, and still caring about Guyana and staying involved in its politics.

Astonishingly, Guyana seems, collectively, to understand Dutch Disease.

"Dutch disease" is a term from economics for a theory about how a sudden improvement in one sector of an economy can wreck the whole thing. Wikipedia:

In economics, Dutch disease is the apparent causal relationship between the increase in the economic development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture).

The term was coined in 1977 by The Economist to describe the decline of the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands after the discovery of the large Groningen natural gas field in 1959.[1][2]

The presumed mechanism is that while revenues increase in a growing sector (or inflows of foreign aid), the given economy's currency becomes stronger ("appreciates") compared to foreign currencies (manifested in the exchange rate). This results in the country's other exports becoming more expensive for other countries to buy, while imports become cheaper, altogether rendering those sectors less competitive.

There is, interestingly enough, a best practice for suddenly striking oil to protect your country from Dutch Disease, and it's a "Norway-style sovereign wealth fund" – and that is exactly what Guyana is doing.

Guyana is aware of climate change. The vast majority of Guyana's population lives within 10 miles of the coast. Guyana understands that by pulling that petroleum out of the ground to sell it to be burned, they are quite likely shooting themselves in the face. But as far as they can see, it's the only shot they have, so they're planning on using that sovereign wealth fund to harden their country against climate change and to develop its other sectors so it will survive, economically, the exhaustion of its oil field.

Guyana isn't pulling the oil out of the ground, themselves. They don't have the technical capacity. So they have cut deals with oil companies.

And the first of them was Texas-based ExxonMobil.

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For more about the history and present of Guyana, I recommend this series on YouTube by Lost in Context from 2024, about which Guyanese commentors are largely very complementary:

• "How Guyana Was Made"

• "Guyana: An African Dictatorship?"

• "Guyana: Everything You Need to Know"

For more about the astounding economic slingshot Guyana seems to be making around the sun, I recommend Wendover Productions' video "The World's Fastest Growing Economy", also from 2024.

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3.

The Essequibo is the name for the expanse of land largely between the Essequibo River and, well, what is largely considered Guyana's border with Venezuela.

Into the 19th century, there was no clear boundary here between the Spanish empire and that of the British, which assumed control of what was to be called British Guiana after a treaty agreement with the Netherlands in 1814. By 1841, independent Venezuela bridled against the territorial boundary drawn by German surveyor and naturalist Robert Hermann Schomburgk in the service of the British government, which they claimed violated the understood delineation of the territory at the time of Venezuela’s 1811 independence from Spain.

The dispute simmered on in an age where borders were vague and porous and maps themselves tools of political coercion. The discovery of gold and other valuable minerals in the sparsely populated region sharpened British attention to its possessions there, much to the consternation of the fledgling Venezuelan republic.

Then entered the United States and President Grover Cleveland. Most famous for being the only person — so far — to occupy the White House in two non-contiguous terms, Cleveland’s most significant but now mostly forgotten foray into foreign affairs centered on the disputed Venezuelan-Guyanese border. In 1895, the impasse between Venezuela and Britain was more than a half-century old, but came to a head with U.S. involvement.

Cleveland’s secretary of state, Richard Olney, sent a stern letter to his British counterpart, reviving the ethos of the Monroe Doctrine, which, invoked in the early part of the century, warned against European colonial projects in the Western Hemisphere. Olney, who was pressing the British to accept outside arbitration to settle the border with Venezuela, extended the principle, declaring the United States “practically sovereign on this continent.”

The bemused British scoffed at this and told the Cleveland administration that it didn’t believe the Monroe Doctrine was compatible with international law. That triggered howls of outrage in Washington and led to Cleveland delivering a special address to Congress, where he asked for the authority to appoint a boundary commission to settle the matter, and warned Britain its rulings would be enforced “by every means” at the United States’ disposal.

This implicit threat of military action inflamed the U.S. public, with periodicals printing cartoons of Cleveland yanking the imperial tail of the British lion and Olney suggesting the “American heart” had not been so stirred since the Civil War. The British envoy in Washington lamented to his superiors that, in the aftermath of Cleveland’s “note of war,” “nothing was heard” in the country but “the voice of the Jingo bellowing out defiance.”

Coping with the deeply damaging Boer War in South Africa, Britain relented and acceded to U.S. demands for independent arbitration. Much to the chagrin of Venezuela, the commission that emerged settled the boundary roughly along the Schomburgk Line, with a few deviations, in 1899. [Source]

The Guyanese, and just about everyone else, has considered the issue of where the boundary is between Guyana and Venezuela settled since 1899.

Venezuela has objected pretty much continuously ever since.

One part of the present boundary between Guyana and Venezuela is the Cuyuni River. In the Cuyuni River is Ankoko (sometimes styled Anacoco) Island.

In February 1966, the Governments of Venezuela, the United Kingdom and Guyana signed the Geneva Agreement aimed at resolving the controversy over the Venezuelan claim that the arbitral award of 1899, which settled the border between Venezuela and Guyana, was null and void.

The Agreement provided that "no new claim or enlargement of an existing claim to territorial sovereignty in these territories (of Venezuela and British Guiana) shall be asserted while this Agreement is in force, nor shall any claim whatsoever be asserted otherwise than in the Mixed Commission while that Commission is in being".

Despite this declaration, a few months later a well-armed group of Venezuelan soldiers, along with civilians, encroached upon and occupied territory on the Guyana side of the border. This encroachment occurred, unknowing to Guyana Government, on the Guyana half of the island of Ankoko at the confluence of the boundary rivers, Cuyuni and Wenamu (Wenamo). It took the form of the introduction of military and civilian personnel and the establishment of an airstrip and the erection of other installations and structures, including a post-office, school and military and police outposts.

The incursion on Guyanese territory on Ankoko Island by Venezuela was reported to the Guyanese authorities early in October 1966 by a diamond prospector who was in that forested and almost uninhabited area at the time. As a result, a Guyanese team of senior officials, including police officers, visited the vicinity on 12 October 1966 and verified that Venezuelan personnel were occupying the Guyana side of the island where they had already constructed an airstrip. [Source]

There was nothing much the small, new country of Guyana could do about it. Venezuela is, by population, more than thirty times the size of Guyana. Venezuela went on to build a small military base there, mostly, perhaps, to prove they could.

Venezuela has been insisting that the Essequibo is theirs ever since, but did nothing further about it until oil was discovered.

And for good reason: the vast majority of the Essequibo is some of the most inaccessible terrain imaginable.

The Essequibo is, with the exception of the grasslands of the Rupuruni Highlands, a mantle of rainforest jungle clothing the shoulders of mountains. Here, it is traditional to mention that the word "Guyana" comes from one of the local indigenous languages, and means "land of many waters". What it says on the tin: Guyana comes in two consistencies, moist and wet. It is, astoundingly in 2025, substantially unexplored. Yes, even by its own native peoples. It is largely a howling wilderness, and a largely trackless one. Its main highway is a dirt road which routinely washes out, and only gets you half-way in from the north. Most transportation is by plane and boat, and, honestly, boat transportation is itself substantially limited by how unnavigable the waterways are in places – the vertiginous terrain makes for some gorgeous waterfalls, but not so great transport. So difficult is the transport of goods that people in the southwestern area of the Essequibo largely import good across the border with Brazil rather than get them from Guyana's more urban areas on the Caribbean coast.

While it has some natural resources of its own, including gold, I don't suppose it seemed to Venezuela particularly worth the trouble of seizing by force until two things happened.

Obviously, the discovery of 11B gallons of light, sweet crude is extremely attractive. But in and of itself that shouldn't be enough to tempt Venezuela: Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil fields. Venezuela already has staggering amounts of oil, without having to fight anyone over it.

However, Venezuela has been having a bit of trouble with oil production.

When we talk about oil and Venezuela, there is one piece of information that cannot be overlooked. By now, you're probably all aware of this, but there is one fact worth remembering: Chavistas [Maduro's party] have destroyed their own country's oil production. PDVESA was one of the best oil companies in the world, but the Chavistas turned it into a job placement agency for their cronies. The result: these days, it produces about four times fewer barrels than it did 45 years ago. It's crazy.

And that's not all:

Did you know that Venezuela is the Asian giant's largest debtor in all of Latin America? It receives 45% of all credit in the region despite having a population almost 7 times smaller than another good ally, Brazil. We're talking about no less than $60 billion in commercial and development loans. And here lies the real key to this whole issue.

China has lent a lot. We're talking loads of money to Venezuela. Have you heard of the New Silk Road? The Asian giant has been investing huge amounts of money in mega infrastructure beyond its borders, particularly in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And clearly, the Chavista dictatorship has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of this project.

The problem? Well, if many of these investments have already proved disappointing, Venezuela takes the cake. What has Maduro spent all that money on? Well, that's exactly the question they're asking in Beijing.

"While China has seen its investments succeed in other Latin American countries, its investment in Venezuela has not paid off. After successive contractual breaches by Venezuela and the extension of grace periods for its debts to Chinese banks, China became the most important actor in the future of a country that has not shown any progress towards development."

The truth is that in Venezuela there is no trace of those investments that were supposed to turn the Bolivarian economy around. We don't know if they have invested badly or simply stolen the money. But what is clear is that Maduro is absolutely incapable of paying Xi Jinping back.

[...]

In 2013, the price of oil, that source of dollars on which Venezuela depended, plummeted. And naturally, when your only cash cow stops producing milk, the drama begins.

Between 2014 and 2021, the Venezuelan economy shrank by 75%. Yes, three quarters. Just like taking three wheels off a car and still trying to drive it. And inflation in 2018, it reached 130,000%. In other words, prices doubled every 35 days. Or to put it another way, at that rate, prices multiplied by a thousand times in less than a year.

All this led to a crucial event. In 2020, the country stopped paying its debts, including those it owed to its major partner and star lender, China.

Be aware that although the figures are not very clear, many estimates put the amount at more than $10 billion.

All of this is from the VisualEconomik EN video, ""Why is CHINA ABANDONING VENEZUELA?"" by Josh Faulks, from 2025 Sep 16.

So. Maduro and his cronies ruined Venezuela's state oil company's productivity, crashed Venezuela's economy, and disappeared something like $10B in loans from China, right before their next-door neighbor struck oil in the chunk of seafloor that belongs to whomever owns the territory that Venezuela has been insisting for more than a century it was cheated out of.

Sure, they could keep their eyes on their own work and fix their own problems, pump their own oil.

But these are the people who caused those problems in the first place. The sort of people who apparently see oil companies – and apparently countries – not as things to run, but things to exploit for personal benefit.

Maybe the sort of people who disappeared $10B in Chinese development loans without doing much development – to say nothing of paying them back – are the sort of people who would rather just use guns to go take something valuable away from someone else.

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For more information about just how surprising the new apparent distance opening up between Caracas and Beijing is, I recommend the above video, "Why is CHINA ABANDONING VENEZUELA?" from 2025 Sep 28. One of the important things it illuminates is not just the trade relations between China and Venezuela, but how faithless Maduro has apparently been. China and Venezuela had a great thing going, and were enormously close, and Maduro has apparently burned through all that goodwill. Though the video does not come out and say it, the impression one gets is that Maduro was playing the Chinese all along.

The quote within the quote above from the video is not properly cited in the video, but seems to be from "China's Stakes in Venezuela are Too High to be Ignored", by Igor Patrick and Lucas Wosgrau Padilha, 2021 Feb 14, in the Journal of International Affairs.

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Part 2 coming soon!

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