- Venezuela starts offering IDs to Essequibo residents
Even as CARICOM leaders hold high-level discussions in St Vincent to deescalate tensions over the Essequibo Region of Guyana, Venezuela has started offering IDs to Essequibo residents.
Venezuela has opened a civil registry office in a remote mining border town that it has declared will be the new “capital” of Essequibo.
After a controversial December 3 referendum in which 95 percent of voters allegedly supported Venezuela being declared the rightful owner of Essequibo, Maduro appointed a “sole authority” for a future Caracas-run state.
He also declared that the small border town of Tumerero, home to around 35,000 people, would be the “provisional capital” of the region.
“From Tumeremo, we are giving identity documents to our people. People of Essequibo, we have arrived and are here to stay and assert our historic right,” Bolivar State governor Angel Marcano wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday.
The civil registry office opened on Saturday and is aimed at “the population of Tumeremo and Essequibo,” according to an earlier statement from Marcano’s office.
Essequibo has been under Guyana’s administration for more than a century and is the subject of border disputes before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
It is home to 125,000 of the country’s 800,000 citizens.
