How CNN launders Exxon’s contracts, Washington’s warships, and the new cold war into “stability” — and why Guyana is a chokepoint in the fight for a multipolar future
The target under excavation is CNN’s “Oil, threat of war, and China: why elections in this small South American country are crucial for the US”, authored by Anabella González and updated September 1, 2025. In three strokes, the piece paints Guyana’s election as a hinge for global oil markets, sketches Venezuela as the looming aggressor, and stages the United States as guardian of “stability” in a basin suddenly flush with crude. China is cast as the rival builder in the background, a quiet counterweight whose bridges and bids complicate Washington’s script. It’s a clean headline formula—oil + war + China—engineered to pre-load threat perception and convert a national vote into a geopolitical morality play.
Let’s call this what it is: not a pack of lies, but a set of tricks dressed up as journalism. First trick: security overkill. The headline bangs the drum—oil, war, China—so by the time you’re two sentences in, U.S. warships look like friendly lifeguards instead of the muscle guarding Exxon’s treasure chest. Second trick: expert puppetry. The piece parades Beltway think tankers as “neutral voices,” while the people who actually live the consequences—workers, fisherfolk, Indigenous councils, Caribbean jurists—are nowhere to be found. You get geopolitics without humanity. Third trick: economy as weather. Barrels and GDP percentages rain down like forecasts, but there’s not a word about how the contracts were written, how the royalties were gutted, or how stabilization clauses lock the door on future sovereignty. Fourth trick: manufactured urgency. A century-long border dispute is shoved into a countdown clock—“looming clash!”—because fear sells faster than history. Fifth trick: Orientalist sleight of hand. China builds a bridge and suddenly it’s an invasion. ExxonMobil drills half the seabed and it’s just “the market.” One is intrusion, the other order—got it? Sixth trick: poverty wallpaper. The word “poverty” shows up, but only as a prop for the growth story. No mention of wages, schools, clinics, or seas rising over the seawall. People’s lives are reduced to background noise in a symphony for investors.
The facts don’t need correcting—the spin does. It’s the same old formula: pick experts who already agree, hide the machinery of contracts and corporate boards, and crank up the rhythm so “deterrence” sounds like democracy’s seatbelt instead of a straitjacket on sovereignty. Meanwhile the real story—the ownership chains, the restructuring of CNN’s parent company, the advertiser choke points—lurks offstage. Our job in excavation is to drag that scaffolding into the light. Once you do, the article stops looking like a neutral map and starts to read like what it is: a glossy permission slip for a future already written—oil gushing, markets soothed, alliances armed, and the working class told to wait politely for crumbs to fall from the banquet table.
After peeling back CNN’s scaffolding, we land on the raw record. This is where propaganda is most dangerous—because it doesn’t always invent, it selects. A few shiny numbers, some well-placed quotes, the name of a court or a warship, and suddenly the story bends toward Washington’s horizon. Our job isn’t to deny the data—it’s to reclaim it, to line up what’s said, drag out what’s hidden, and put it all in the hands of the people of Guyana, Venezuela, and the wider Global South so they can measure the stakes on their own terms, not through the eyes of empire.Yes, the article drops real markers: over 600,000 barrels of crude flowing daily by 2024, with projections to cross the million-barrel mark by 2027. It trumpets Guyana’s wild GDP figures—63.3% growth in 2022, 33.8% in 2023, over 40% in 2024—numbers that make headlines but not meals. It admits the Essequibo case sits before the International Court of Justice, even if Caracas won’t recognize its jurisdiction. It notes the HMS Trent anchoring off the coast of Georgetown and U.S. SOUTHCOM’s growing footprint. None of that is fiction. It’s curated reality, tilted for effect.What gets buried? The core engine of this “miracle” is not geology but a 2016 contract with ExxonMobil and friends that gives away the store: a 2% royalty, 75% cost recovery, and stabilization clauses that handcuff future governments. Translation: Exxon eats steak while the people fight for scraps. This deal chains Guyana’s future to signatures inked nearly a decade ago. CNN sells prosperity, but the receipts tell a story of plunder.
Same with the law. The Essequibo quarrel isn’t some fever dream of Maduro’s—it’s a colonial hangover from the 1899 Paris Award, contested under the 1966 Geneva Agreement. The ICJ only confirmed jurisdiction in 2023, with rulings years away. But the article turns this long legal slog into a countdown clock for conflict. History is flattened, because panic is better copy than process.
On “growth,” the story stops at GDP fireworks. But as the Inter-American Development Bank’s technical note on Guyana warns, the economy faces a real threat of Dutch Disease. Drawing on Trinidad & Tobago’s cautionary path, the IDB underscores how resource booms can hollow out agriculture and manufacturing, overheat real estate and service sectors, and bind policy to extractive dependencies—all while leaving most people poorer. That’s what prosperity looks like if it’s siphoned through weak institutions and one-sided contracts.
And broader empirical lessons reinforce the worry. A 2024 systematic review by University of Guyana scholars finds Guyana already showing the early signs: manufacturing’s share is waning, agriculture is under pressure, and exchange-rate and wage patterns signal “pre-disposition” to Dutch Disease once oil really rains in. This isn’t theory—it’s déjà vu from every resource frontier that didn’t seize control of its boom. Livelihoods and futures depend on whether Guyana avoids that trap.
Militarization? Framed as partnership. When Britain sent a warship in late 2023, Venezuela mobilized troops. SOUTHCOM drills are sold as “humanitarian,” but anyone who’s studied Latin America’s history knows what they rehearse. This is intervention training, not neighborly goodwill. CNN calls it cooperation; we call it rehearsal for recolonization.
And China? CNN flattens it into a ghostly hand of “influence,” as if bridges and ports are sinister plots while Exxon’s rigs are just “the market.” But the new Demerara River Bridge is not a rumor—it’s concrete and steel linking communities, a project that makes daily life easier for working people. This doesn’t make Beijing a savior, but it does show a different pattern: where U.S. power arrives with Marines and contracts written in blood, China arrives with loans, engineers, and bulldozers. Both bring contradictions. One enforces recolonization through lawfare and gunboats, the other opens space for countries like Guyana to diversify partners and bargain for better terms. The challenge for Guyana is not to treat China as a new master, but to leverage multipolar openings so the oil boom is bent toward sovereignty instead of dependency.
Step back and the contradiction is clear. Rystad Energy projects 1.6 to 1.7 million barrels a day by the 2030s, putting tiny Guyana among the top producers just as the world claims it’s moving off fossil fuels. A handful of court cases and naval drills sit on the surface; underneath lies the real struggle—between neocolonial contracts, imperial militarization, and the people’s demand for sovereignty over their land and labor.
This is the record stripped bare. The facts CNN parades, the truths it buries, the history it erases. Once repossessed, the picture flips: “instability” is nothing but imperial management; “partnership” is dependency in uniform; “growth” is wealth siphoned abroad. With the terrain mapped, we move now to break down the empire’s language and rebuild it through a revolutionary lens.
Guyana: A Chokepoint in the New Cold War
Let’s stop pretending Guyana is some backwater sideshow. It’s a chokepoint in the new cold war—a hinge in the fight over who controls the world’s resources and who writes the rules of the game. That’s why CNN frames the story as “oil, war, and China.” It’s not reporting; it’s a playbook. The U.S. wants to drag Guyana back under the old plantation order, dressed up in modern clothes—contracts, courts, and warships. What they call “stability” is really counterinsurgency: disciplining a small nation so Exxon’s profits don’t skip a beat.
Look at the machinery. First, this is Hyper-Imperialism, the empire in its decadent stage, flailing around with every weapon at once—media propaganda, lawfare, sanctions, and militarized posturing—to make up for its crumbling dominance. Guyana’s oil isn’t just barrels in the ground; it’s leverage in Washington’s battle to keep the dollar and the gun at the center of the world. Instability isn’t coming from Georgetown—it’s bleeding out of a decaying empire trying to hold on.
Then there’s the Sanctions Architecture, the iron cage that disciplines any state that steps out of line. Guyana hasn’t felt the lash yet, but the lesson is written across the border in Venezuela: billions in gold seized, oil choked off, leaders slapped with bounties like Wild West outlaws. The message to Guyana’s ruling class is clear—play nice with investors, keep the royalties insultingly low, and don’t even think about national control, or the cage will slam shut.
Layered on top of that is Lawfare. The Essequibo dispute at the ICJ is not just a legal case; it’s a weapon. Courts become battlegrounds where imperial powers write the script and then point to the stage as if it’s neutral arbitration. A hundred years of colonial theft gets repackaged as a countdown clock to war, and suddenly U.S. and British warships look like guardians of order rather than enforcers of plunder.
The wealth grab runs through Financial Piracy. Exxon’s 2016 contract is the blueprint: 2% royalties, 75% cost recovery, stabilization clauses that lock future governments into servitude. This isn’t prosperity—it’s daylight robbery with the World Bank smiling in the background. CNN throws around GDP fireworks, but they never mention the siphon bleeding the country dry. The people get promises; the corporations get the cash.
And let’s not forget Necro-Extractivism: the model where profit is wrung out of death. Offshore flares poisoning the air, spills wrecking fishing grounds, seas already breaching Georgetown’s seawall—yet we’re told the economy is “booming.” Growth for who? Not for the hungry kid, not for the farmer watching his land drown. For them, growth is a cruel joke: their lives treated as collateral damage in the oil boom’s balance sheet.
In this setup, Venezuela and China are painted as the “threats.” Venezuela because it refuses to bow, hit with every trick in the imperial playbook: sanctions, asset seizures, even a bounty on Maduro’s head. China because it builds bridges and finances infrastructure, which Washington spins as sinister “influence” while its own oil majors strip the seabed. The empire uses carrot and stick—anti-Chinese propaganda on one hand, photo-ops and threats on the other—to keep Guyana from straying too far.
But from the standpoint of the people—the workers, peasants, Indigenous communities, and the Global South struggling for dignity—Guyana is not a pawn. It’s a frontline. It’s where Anti-Imperialist Sovereignty has to be fought for, where multipolar openings must be leveraged, where contracts must be wrestled back to serve human needs. The challenge is not to pick a new master but to bend the rivalry of empires into space for delinking and real development.
That’s the reframing. Guyana’s “instability” is a myth; the real instability is empire itself, desperate to secure one more outpost. Essequibo is not a flashpoint—it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the crisis of imperialism: a system that can no longer dominate smoothly, lashing out at every corner where multipolarity breaks through. To see it clearly, we don’t need think-tank pundits or CNN headlines. We need the eyes of Rodney: grounded in the soil of Guyana, sharp enough to see the cycle of plunder, and bold enough to insist the cycle can be broken.
We’ve stripped away the CNN gloss and shown what’s really at play: oil wealth shackled by colonial-style contracts, an imperial security umbrella dressed up as “partnership,” and a border dispute repackaged as crisis theater to disguise the deeper issue of sovereignty. The actors are obvious—ExxonMobil and its friends, the U.S. Navy and its British auxiliaries, Chinese financiers building bridges, and Washington’s think tanks translating imperial orders into “expert consensus.” But against them stand the real forces of history—workers, peasants, Indigenous communities, and revolutionary currents in Guyana, Venezuela, and across the Caribbean—who have never stopped struggling to make sovereignty real, not just a slogan.In Guyana, labor federations and grassroots organizers keep hammering away at the lopsided production-sharing agreements, demanding that oil money be ring-fenced for hospitals, schools, and roads rather than shipped overseas as shareholder dividends. Indigenous communities in the Essequibo continue to fight land grabs, insisting on their right to decide the fate of their territories where forests, gold, and oil now attract the appetite of foreign firms. These are not symbolic fights. They are concrete campaigns, ignored by CNN but central to the country’s future. To echo them is not charity; it is solidarity—the solidarity of workers and the oppressed across borders.Venezuela’s mobilization around Essequibo, too, is more than nationalist reflex. It is part of a longer war of position against Hyper-Imperialism—against sanctions, financial piracy, and military encirclement. The same movements that organize food distribution under blockade and build communal councils under siege are the ones that refuse to let Washington dictate borders, resources, or futures. To reduce them to Maduro’s speeches is to erase the people’s voice—a voice that insists the hemisphere will not be recolonized without resistance.
Regionally, formations like CARICOM and CELAC keep alive the project of multipolar dialogue and cooperation in the Americas. Their diplomacy is cautious, yes, but it opens space for popular forces to push harder, to say clearly that the only real stability comes from peace without imperial tutelage. And on a wider scale, the architecture of BRICS+ and South–South cooperation points to exits from the chokehold of dollar dependency. Uneven, fragile, and contradictory—yes. But also vital, because it cracks open space for delinking and new alignments.
For comrades in the North, the task is not to design campaigns from afar but to plug into these living struggles. Stand with the Indigenous communities of the Essequibo who refuse to trade life for oil. Echo the calls of Guyanese workers for contracts that actually serve the people. Amplify Venezuelan voices exposing sanctions and asset seizures as the real theft destabilizing the region. Break the propaganda script by lifting up the regional alternatives—CARICOM, CELAC, BRICS—that already stand as counterweights to U.S. gunboat diplomacy.
This isn’t charity. It’s revolutionary duty. The ruling class has its networks—Exxon’s boardrooms, the Pentagon’s war games, the think tanks’ white papers. Our side must weave ours—the unions, Indigenous councils, communal organizations, and multipolar alliances. They are already in motion, already building the scaffolding of another future. Our role is to join, amplify, and strengthen. Nothing from above, only solidarity from below.
CNN tells us small nations are pawns on an imperial chessboard. We say the pawns can flip the table. The people of Guyana and Venezuela are not pieces to be moved; they are players in their own right. To be in solidarity is not to watch from the sidelines but to take our place beside them, in the fight for sovereignty, dignity, and a world no longer run on plunder. The time isn’t someday—it’s now, with those already reshaping the horizon of possibility.
