Poster for the Orinoco Tribune's interview with Guyanese revolutionary Gerald Perreira. Photo: Orinoco Tribune.
Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com)—The US already has military bases in Guyana, with the aim of not only controlling Guyana’s resources but also threatening Venezuela, according to Guyanese revolutionary Gerald Perreira in an interview with the Orinoco Tribune.
“The Americans just recently went to Trinidad and Tobago, with all this talk about fighting the trafficking of arms and persons, and to be prepared for natural disasters and all that, but that is a camouflage for military intervention,” he explained. “The Americans set the base there, so that they are ready whenever they want to intervene in Venezuela… And I believe that they already have some [other] sort of base somewhere in Guyana. The idea is to encircle Venezuela, and to attack [Venezuela] from Guyana, from Trinidad, and, if possible, from Colombia.”
Gerald A. Perreira is a Guyanese theologian, educator, and political activist. He has written on a wide range of topics, and his articles/essays can be found on international sites, including Modern Ghana, Internationalist 360, Black Agenda Report, Countercurrents, Just World, Pambazuka News, and Monthly Review. He is chairperson of Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP) based in Guyana (www.ovpguyana.org), and is an executive member of the Caribbean Pan-African Network (CPAN). He lived in the Libyan Jamahiriya for many years, and was a founding member of the World Mathaba.
In interview with the Orinoco Tribune, he discussed the current political landscape in the Cooperative Republic of Guyana, US interventionism and US military bases in the country, ExxonMobil’s oil exploration and its impact on the lives of the people of Guyana, the Essequibo territorial dispute with Venezuela, and the image of Venezuela in the minds of the Guyanese people.
Guyana is a “captured neocolonial state”
Although Marxist-Leninist politicians were key figures in the Guyanese independence movement and in the early governments of independent Guyana, almost all political parties in the country took a rightward turn starting from the 90s. Currently, all the major parties in national politics uphold and implement neoliberal policies, Perreira explained.
“After the collapse of what was referred to as actually existing socialism or the Soviet bloc, many political parties, not just in Guyana, the Caribbean, but also in Africa, lost their bearings,” he stated. “They abandoned Marxism and moved towards neoliberal economics. Because at that time, there was this talk about TINA: ‘There Is No Alternative,’ and these parties opted for what is called Reaganomics or Thatcherism, the Washington Consensus, New Liberal Economics.”
“The independence that we got in 1966, we in the Organization for the Victory of the People call it ‘flag and anthem independence,’” he continued. “It is not an independence of substance. We have our own head of state who replaced the colonial governor and the queen. We have our own anthem and our own parliament, but we are a captured neocolonial state. Strategic decisions in Guyana are decided from outside and imposed on us… It doesn’t matter which party gets into office because being in office and having power are two different things. You can be in office, but the important decisions about our country in terms of our foreign policy and our economy are dictated to us.”
Perreira further emphasized that voting does not bring about significant changes in Guyana. “There is a substantial difference between democracy and electocracies,” he noted. “You can vote out political parties, but you cannot vote out those who control the wealth of the country. We inherited this system from the British, and we have that farce every five years when we choose a political party, but there is no commitment to transformational politics.”
In this regard, Perreira highlighted the fact that the major political parties in Guyana use the race issue for political purposes because “they are committed to neoliberalism, so none of them is in a position to mobilize the people along any revolutionary ideology. So, you get the Indo-Guyanese voting for the People’s Progressive Party that is predominantly led by the Indians, and you have the same thing on the other side, the People’s National Congress Reform that gets the Afro-Guyanese vote. Yet, when these two parties get into office, their supporters remain in poverty. It is the comprador class—the Indian comprador class and the African comprador class—that gets into office… The policies that they pursue, all it is doing, all that it has done over the years is to widen the gap between the haves and the have nots.”
“Politics was meant to be everybody’s business,” Perreira stated. “But the liberal democratic tradition turned the politician into a professional, to separate him from the masses. That is a bourgeois construct, because every citizen in society should be a politician.”
ExxonMobil and US imperialism
When consulted about the role of the infamous US-based oil multinational ExxonMobil in Guyana, Perreira explained that the corporation is so heavily involved in Guyana’s internal affairs that the country may be branded “ExxonGuyana.”
“ExxonMobil is not an ordinary company, it is an arm of US imperialism,” he added. “Exxon always supports right-wing political parties and governments that will allow them to plunder the oil and gas resources of the country that they are operating in. That is a track record… In Guyana, Exxon has its fingers in every pot.”
In 2015, ExxonMobil, which had oil exploration permits granted by the government of Guyana, discovered light crude reserves in the deep waters of the Guyanese maritime zone and the undelimited waters of the Essequibo projection, disputed between Guyana and Venezuela. Thereafter, ExxonMobil signed a commercialization contract with the Guyanese government and paid a signing bonus of $18 million. However, the contract and the signing bonus was kept a secret until 2018, when the PPP, which was then in the opposition and is now the governing party, discovered it. “Yet, when the PPP arrived in the government, it never renegotiated the contract,” Perreira pointed out. “And now it is the PNC that is calling for a renegotiation of the contract—those who signed the lopsided contract in the first place! This is like a comedy, but it shows that none of the parties in Guyana can bring Exxon to the table and make Exxon renegotiate. Because it is not just Exxon you are bringing to the table, you are bringing US imperialism. Exxon is about monopoly capitalism, and monopoly capitalism is imperialism in its highest form, as Lenin pointed out.”
According to the activist, ExxonMobil has “infiltrated” Guyana, “not only the political parties, but also civil society groups, the NGOs which pretend to be apolitical but are not so… Exxon is sponsoring sports. It is even making huge donations to the Department of Environmental Science in universities.” Meanwhile, it was Exxon itself that made the environmental impact assessment of its own off-shore oil project, without any public oversight.
“I doubt if those who signed the contract really read it through,” he continued. “And what they did should be considered as treason, because they have given away our national patrimony, the wealth of the people, to a foreign entity that is an arm of the US Leviathan.”
Guyana Strengthens its Servitude to ExxonMobil’s Energy Plunder
Essequibo dispute: the US excuse to militarily encircle Venezuela
Perreira also expressed his views on the recent escalation of the Essequibo territorial dispute between Guyana and Venezuela, holding the US empire and its operational arm in Guyana, ExxonMobil, responsible for it.
He referred to the meeting between Guyanese President Irfaan Ali and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that took place in Kingstown, capital of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, in December 2023, just days after the consultative referendum on the Essequibo in Venezuela, in order to reduce the tensions surrounding the issue. “A diplomat told me that a lot of pressure was applied on certain Caribbean heads of state to make sure that the meeting did not come off,” Perreira commented. “But when the meeting indeed happened, a British warship showed up in Guyana, even before the president could fly back to Guyana!”
“The British and the Americans do not want any peaceful resolution to this territorial controversy,” he emphasized. “[This tactic] has always been used by [forces of] imperialism against any government that it doesn’t like, whether that government is in Venezuela or in Guyana. When [Guyanese] President Forbes Burnham was pursuing an anti-imperialist course, the United States pushed Venezuela to invade Guyana. The US even sold F-16 fighters to Venezuela.”
However, with the political changes in both the countries in the late 1990s, with Guyana turning to the right while the Bolivarian Revolution came to power in Venezuela, the US has changed sides, Perreira noted. “Now the US claims that it stands with Guyana; it is imposing a militarization because ‘Maduro wants to invade Guyana,’ but the US is not interested in Guyana. The US is interested in Guyana’s oil and in Venezuela’s oil,” he explained. “The objective is to push Guyana to take the situation to such a point where we get into a conflict with Venezuela, and then the US will utilize its bases in Guyana and Trinidad to destroy Venezuela, and then take control of both countries.”
Perreira warned against the increasing militarization of the region, citing the example of the US attempt to encircle Russia, which has resulted in the war in Ukraine. “The US keeps expanding NATO to the east to encircle Russia, and Putin would not just sit there and allow NATO to expand and encircle to the point of where Russia would be destroyed,” he remarked. “It is the same situation with Venezuela. The government of Venezuela, the people of Venezuela, cannot sit by and allow the United States to encircle them.” He also commented that the average Guyanese “does not believe that Venezuela wants to invade Guyana.”
Perreira added that the Geneva Agreement of 1966 remains the only mechanism to resolve the dispute peacefully, through diplomatic means. “Venezuela is our neighbor, and that is not going to change,” he said. “We should sit down to talk to each other without interference from the colonial powers. Those who committed genocide against indigenous peoples, those who enslaved Africans, those who indentured Indians, they have no moral authority to tell us what we should or should not do.”
Special for Orinoco Tribune by Saheli Chowdhury
OT/SC/JRE/AU
Saheli Chowdhury
Saheli Chowdhury is from West Bengal, India, studying physics for a profession, but with a passion for writing. She is interested in history and popular movements around the world, especially in the Global South. She is a co-editor and contributor for Orinoco Tribune.
