Guyana at the Crossroads: Oil, Empire, and the Struggle for Sovereignty

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.

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.

ExxonMobil Suffers a Strategic Loss in Guyana

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.