Brazil's Minister of Mines and Energy Alexandre Silveira. Photo: Sputnik.
This Monday, Brazil’s Minister of Mines and Energy Alexandre Silveira stated that Guyana is exploiting oil deposits in a region of the Atlantic Ocean that belongs to Brazil.
“Our brothers from Guyana are sipping Brazil’s riches with a straw, they are exploiting the border in a block acquired during the administration of Dilma [former President Dilma Rousseff, 2011-2014],” said Silveira in statements to the Brazilian press reported by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo.
He also stated that he is in favor of oil exploitation of the so-called “equatorial margin” by Petrobras, Brazil’s partially state-owned oil company. This margin is an area of the sea in which there may be significant petroleum deposits.
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The Brazilian Environment Institute (IBAMA), a technical body dependent on the Ministry of the Environment, recommended last year that oil exploitation in that area not be pursued due to its risks to biodiversity, a decision that caused division in the government.
The head of the Mines and Energy portfolio also criticized the “dogmatic” actions of sectors that “pose obstacles to national development.”
Likewise, he confirmed that the new president of Petrobras, Magda Chambriard, is also in favor of oil exploitation on the equatorial margin and that the two remain in harmony on this issue.
Guyana was the first country to discover oil in this part of the Atlantic, in 2015, with the help of the US oil company ExxonMobil.
Since then, Guyana’s economy became one of the fastest growing in the world. In 2023, its GDP increased by 37%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
(Sputnik)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/KW/SL
