The stakes will be high in the face-to-face talks be­tween Guyana Pres­i­dent Ir­faan Ali and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in St Vin­cent on Thurs­day.

The fo­cus of the di­a­logue will be more than 160,000 km² of ter­ri­to­ry with a high po­ten­tial for oil ex­ploita­tion and an es­ti­mat­ed pop­u­la­tion of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 125,000, known as Es­se­qui­bo to the Guyanese and Guayana Es­e­qui­ba to Venezue­lans.

The dis­pute over the ter­ri­to­ry is cen­turies old but there is now in­creased con­cern in­ter­na­tion­al­ly that the sta­bil­i­ty of the re­gion might be un­der threat if there is any fur­ther es­ca­la­tion.

The dis­turb­ing par­al­lels be­tween Venezuela’s threat­ened an­nex­a­tion of Guyana’s min­er­al-rich Es­se­qui­bo and Rus­sia’s re­cent ag­gres­sive in­cur­sions in­to Ukraine are clear and the re­cent build-up of troops along the dis­put­ed bor­der has on­ly added to those fears.

Some ex­perts see the cur­rent cri­sis as an at­tempt by the Venezue­lan leader to gain a po­lit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic ad­van­tage.

Through­out his tenure, Maduro, 61, who as­cend­ed to the pres­i­den­cy in 2013 fol­low­ing the death of pop­ulist leader Hugo Chávez, has presided over a na­tion in the grip of a se­vere eco­nom­ic cri­sis and has been fre­quent­ly ac­cused of un­der­min­ing democ­ra­cy and vi­o­lat­ing hu­man rights.

As he has faced waves of eco­nom­ic and po­lit­i­cal tur­moil—with record lev­els of in­fla­tion that sparked the biggest mi­grant cri­sis in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean—in neigh­bour­ing Guyana, the dis­cov­ery of oil has brought un­prece­dent­ed pros­per­i­ty to South Amer­i­ca’s on­ly Eng­lish-speak­ing na­tion.

Venezuela has been more ag­gres­sive to­wards Guyana dur­ing Maduro’s ad­min­is­tra­tion, which on­ly adds to the com­plex­i­ty of the his­tor­i­cal and po­lit­i­cal fac­tors to be nav­i­gat­ed for any chance of a suc­cess­ful out­come on Thurs­day.

At this point, there seems to be no mid­dle ground. Venezuela’s re­fusal to recog­nise and ac­cept the 1899 Paris Ar­bi­tral Award of Es­se­qui­bo to Guyana, or the in­ter­ven­tions of the In­ter­na­tion­al Court of Jus­tice (ICJ) sharply con­trasts with Guyana’s in­sis­tence that the mat­ter be heard by the ICJ as planned.

There is a dis­turb­ing back­drop to the planned di­a­logue in the in­creas­ing fre­quen­cy and sever­i­ty of the bor­der in­ci­dents be­tween the two na­tions since the dis­cov­ery of oil in Guyana.

In Oc­to­ber 2013, the Venezue­lan Navy de­tained an oil ex­plo­ration ves­sel con­duct­ing seafloor sur­veys on be­half of the Guyana gov­ern­ment. The ship and its crew were es­cort­ed to Mar­gari­ta Is­land to be pros­e­cut­ed.

In 2015, Venezuela ac­cused Exxon­Mo­bil of breach­ing in­ter­na­tion­al law while drilling for oil in Guyana and Guyanese au­thor­i­ties seized a Venezue­lan ves­sel, the Yakua­na, in its ter­ri­to­r­i­al wa­ters.

Maduro an­nounced then that he would take the dis­pute to the ICJ but it was Guyana that ini­ti­at­ed an ar­bi­tra­tion pro­ceed­ing against Venezuela to de­cide the va­lid­i­ty of the 1899 Paris Award be­fore the ICJ in 2018.

In Jan­u­ary 2021, Venezuela claimed 200 nau­ti­cal miles of seabed from the Orinoco Delta for Venezuela, ex­tend­ing in­to where Guyana made oil dis­cov­er­ies, then seized two Guyanese fish­ing boats.

These un­re­solved in­ci­dents will over­shad­ow the di­a­logue tak­ing place this week and the body lan­guage be­tween the two lead­ers will be close­ly scru­ti­nised when they sit for these high­ly an­tic­i­pat­ed talks.

While not yet at the point of make or break, for these talks to suc­ceed, vi­able diplo­mat­ic op­tions for fu­ture di­a­logue will have to be es­tab­lished.

Hope­ful­ly, there is still room for frank but re­spect­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion to set­tle this long stand­ing dis­pute once and for all.