Guyana Vice Pres­i­dent Bhar­rat Jagdeo has re­ject­ed Venezuela’s con­sul­ta­tive ref­er­en­dum on the fate of the Es­se­qui­bo re­gion, say­ing it was a “dis­as­trous” out­come for the coun­try’s leader, Nico­las Maduro.

The ref­er­en­dum, which was held on Sun­day, sought to de­ter­mine whether Venezue­lans were in sup­port of in­cor­po­rat­ing the oil and min­er­al-rich Es­se­qui­bo re­gion in­to Venezuela.

Venezuela has as­sert­ed that the re­gion, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana, was tak­en from their coun­try when the bor­ders were drawn over 100 years ago.

Fig­ures from the Con­se­jo Na­cional Elec­toral (CNE) sug­gest that 10 mil­lion peo­ple vot­ed in the ref­er­en­dum and there was a 95 per cent vote in favour of an­nex­a­tion.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia dur­ing the COP28 Sum­mit in Dubai yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Jagdeo chal­lenged the fig­ures and sug­gest­ed the low turnout of vot­ers for the ref­er­en­dum re­vealed that the ma­jor­i­ty of Venezue­lans did not sup­port a recla­ma­tion of the Es­se­qui­bo re­gion.

Re­fer­ring to some re­ports which sug­gest­ed there was a 50 per cent turnout of vot­ers, Jagdeo said he felt these num­bers were de­lib­er­ate­ly fal­si­fied.

“Even if that was a re­al num­ber, it’s about half of the el­i­gi­ble vot­ers and not all of the peo­ple who turned out vot­ed ‘yes,’ so when you look at the yes vote com­pared to the to­tal el­i­gi­ble pop­u­la­tion, it’s less than half, that can’t be seen as a man­date,” Jagdeo said.

“And es­pe­cial­ly in a coun­try where from child­hood peo­ple were told that Es­se­qui­bo be­longed to them, so we think it’s a re­jec­tion of Maduro’s ref­er­en­dum and the peo­ple of Venezuela saw through it as a dis­trac­tion from his elec­toral woes.”

Yes­ter­day, it was re­port­ed that some Venezue­lans did not par­tic­i­pate in the ref­er­en­dum, with one woman de­scrib­ing it as a “trap” to sus­pend their 2024 elec­tions.

Last Fri­day, a rul­ing from the In­ter­na­tion­al Court of Jus­tice or­dered Venezuela to re­frain from tak­ing any ac­tion that would al­ter the sit­u­a­tion in Es­se­qui­bo. De­spite this, how­ev­er, Venezuela went ahead with the ref­er­en­dum.

Yes­ter­day, Jagdeo said while Guyana did not be­lieve Venezuela would take mil­i­tary ac­tion, they were quite pre­pared to de­fend them­selves if nec­es­sary.

“Maduro has been telling many of the lead­ers around the world he has no ag­gres­sive in­tent to­wards Guyana,” he said.

“His lawyer to the ICJ said that they don’t plan to in­vade but we are not let­ting our guards down and that’s why we are very vig­i­lant now and have been work­ing with sev­er­al part­ners to en­hance de­fence co­op­er­a­tion that should there be any ad­ven­tur­ous in­tent to have an in­cur­sion in­to our ter­ri­to­ry, that we are pre­pared to use what­ev­er means nec­es­sary to de­fend our coun­try.”

In ad­di­tion to this, he felt Guyana has al­so been get­ting the nec­es­sary sup­port it needs.

“The in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty has been very vo­cal in favour of the sov­er­eign­ty and ter­ri­to­r­i­al in­tegri­ty of Guyana,” he not­ed.

Ad­dress­ing the is­sue of sup­port from T&T specif­i­cal­ly, the Jagdeo said com­mu­ni­ca­tion had tak­en place through the mech­a­nism of Cari­com.

“Cari­com has been very ro­bust in their sup­port for Guyana. They have some of the strongest state­ments that have em­anat­ed from around the world,” he said.

He said there was no doubt that all the mem­ber states of Cari­com sup­port­ed his coun­try in the im­passe.

He made it clear that Guyana and T&T still have strong bi­lat­er­al re­la­tions and even em­pha­sised the point that it (T&T) sub­scribed to all the Cari­com state­ments on the is­sue.