For­mer gov­ern­ment min­is­ter Dr Bhoen­dra­datt Tewarie has warned that in­creased ten­sions be­tween Venezuela and the Unit­ed States fol­lowed by tougher sanc­tions could trig­ger a new wave of mi­gra­tion across the hemi­sphere.

He said in a sit­u­a­tion where the US bor­der is closed and there is com­pli­cat­ed oil pol­i­tics and in­creased geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions, this could make life very dif­fi­cult for the coun­tries in the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca that are caught be­tween those two na­tions.

Dr Tewarie delved in­to the geopo­lit­i­cal is­sues af­fect­ing the re­gion in a wide-rang­ing ad­dress at a Michael Bap­tista Lec­ture at York Uni­ver­si­ty, Cana­da, last Thurs­day.

He was the keynote speak­er at a Cana­di­an As­so­ci­a­tion for Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean Stud­ies (CALACS) Con­gress which had as its theme, Bound­aries and Dis­junc­tures.

Tewarie said since 2005, Venezuela has been strength­en­ing re­la­tions with coun­tries of the Caribbean through Petro Caribe.

“The Caribbean has be­come im­por­tant to Venezuela for eco­nom­ic rea­sons, be­cause of the spread of the Venezue­lan pop­u­la­tion across the Caribbean, be­cause they are present in vi­tal fo­rums in which Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­can na­tions meet, be­cause, as well, they are in key, hemi­spher­ic fo­rums such as the OAS, and world fo­rums such as the UN,” he said.

“And one must note, where Venezuela has been in con­flict, as is the case of the bor­der dis­pute with Guyana, oth­er Cari­com coun­tries have played a me­di­at­ing role.”

Not­ing that many coun­tries in the re­gion had been over­whelmed by Venezue­lan mi­grants, Tewarie said small Caribbean coun­tries had “suf­fered from mi­grant over­load” with no wider re­gion­al re­sponse or co­her­ent hemi­spher­ic ef­fort.

“For small Caribbean coun­tries, Venezuela’s mi­grant cri­sis was sud­den, swift and over­whelm­ing. The high in­flux per capi­ta took a toll,” he said.

“Trinidad and To­ba­go had to make room for about 100,000; Guyana for about 50,000; be­cause of ide­o­log­i­cal and po­lit­i­cal ten­sions over the Maduro regime in­ter­na­tion­al­ly and the geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions which arose be­cause of Maduro’s al­liances, these small Caribbean coun­tries got caught up in big pow­er pol­i­tics in­volv­ing the glob­al gi­ants.”

How­ev­er, he added, while Venezue­lan mi­gra­tion might have cre­at­ed prob­lems, it helped es­tab­lish a more or­gan­ic link be­tween Caribbean coun­tries and Venezuela through peo­ple.

This, he said, “fa­cil­i­tat­ed pos­i­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion in many ways—peo­ple to peo­ple with­in in­di­vid­ual re­ceiv­ing coun­tries, among Venezue­lans across coun­tries, con­nec­tions be­tween Venezue­lans in these coun­tries with their own home coun­try, and con­tin­ued and mu­tu­al en­gage­ment with­in coun­tries be­tween hosts and guests, served to fos­ter har­mo­nious re­la­tions.”

Tewarie said in re­sponse to the lat­est geopo­lit­i­cal chal­lenges, the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca “must raise their voic­es and make space for their space.”

He called for glob­al al­liances to “roll back un­rea­son, ir­ra­tional­i­ty and mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion.”

Tewarie urged, “Let us not al­low our­selves to be noth­ing. Let’s not sur­ren­der our will, or our courage. Let the peo­ple and their lead­ers in the re­gion to­geth­er, col­lec­tive­ly, make a mean­ing­ful place for our­selves in the world.”