Guyana’s gov­ern­ment said Wednes­day said it has for­mal­ly asked Face­book and Twit­ter to re­move “il­le­gal maps” post­ed by users show­ing large parts of Guyana as Venezue­lan ter­ri­to­ry — re­flect­ing a long­stand­ing ter­ri­to­r­i­al claim by the neigh­bor­ing na­tion.

Venezuela has long laid claim to most of Guyana’s min­er­al-rich west­ern Es­se­qui­bo re­gion, dis­put­ing the de­ci­sion of an 1899 in­ter­na­tion­al bound­aries com­mis­sion at a time when Guyana was a British ter­ri­to­ry. The In­ter­na­tion­al Court of Jus­tice in The Nether­lands agreed to hear the case in 2020, but a rul­ing could take years.

The area, which cov­ers 40% of Guyana’s cur­rent ter­ri­to­ry, is be­lieved to con­tain bil­lions of bar­rels of oil and large amounts of gas de­posits in ad­di­tion to gold, di­a­monds and oth­er min­er­als.

For­eign Sec­re­tary Robert Per­saud told The As­so­ci­at­ed Press that lo­cal au­thor­i­ties be­lieve that the group post­ing the maps has in­ter­net pro­to­col ad­dress­es linked to of­fi­cial­dom in Venezuela.

He said the posts and com­ments on them “have the po­ten­tial to per­ma­nent­ly dam­age re­la­tions be­tween states, in­cite vi­o­lence against the ter­ri­to­ry and peo­ple of Guyana, and de­rail the cur­rent ad­ju­di­ca­tion of the mat­ter be­fore the ICJ,”

He ar­gued that the so­cial me­dia plat­forms can trace the posts to de­ter­mine whether they are from in­di­vid­u­als or are part of a cam­paign by Venezuela to in­flu­ence the court.

The As­so­ci­at­ed Press sent mes­sages seek­ing com­ment from a group men­tioned by Guyana, but didn’t im­me­di­ate­ly re­ceive a re­sponse. The list­ed web­site was in­ac­tive and a re­lat­ed Go­FundMe page said it was based in Mi­a­mi.

Venezuela has sev­er­al times tak­en mil­i­tary ac­tion against Guyana as part of the dis­pute. In 2013, Venezue­lan gun­boats ar­rest­ed and de­tained the crew of a ves­sel leased by Amer­i­can oil com­pa­ny Anadarko, ex­pelling them from a dis­put­ed off­shore area.

In 2019, a mil­i­tary he­li­copter at­tempt­ed to land on a rig do­ing sur­vey work for Amer­i­can oil com­pa­ny Exxon­Mo­bil in Guyana’s north­west­ern re­gion. In 2015 when Exxon de­clared that it had found a large quan­ti­ty of oil and gas off­shore Guyana, Venezuela is­sued de­crees amend­ing its na­tion­al map to en­com­pass a large part of coastal Guyana it had not pre­vi­ous­ly dis­put­ed.