“Any initiative involving that area should avoid assuming a settled territorial status and should respect the existence of an ongoing controversy,” Venezuela’s Vice Foreign Affairs Minister for the Caribbean, Raúl Licausi, told a panel discussion here as part of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Barbados-based Caribbean Development Bank (CDB).

Venezuela is a non-borrowing member of the region’s premier financial institution and Licausi objected to references being made to infrastructure projects that might pass through the Essequibo Region, which is home to 125,000 of Guyana’s 800,000 citizens. It is also located close to massive offshore oil deposits, with current production averaging some 650,000 barrels per day.

Speaking during the panel discussion on the topic ‘Improving Physical Connectivity between Brazil and the Caribbean’ Licausi, who was sitting among the audience said, “I must respectfully express a concern and a more formal objection is that the Guiana island corridor or route shown in the presentation crosses the territory of the Essequibo which is subject to a longstanding and unresolved territorial dispute between Venezuela and Guyana.  “Any initiative involving that area should avoid assuming a settled territorial status and should respect the existence of an ongoing controversy,” he said, insisting however, that the South American country strongly supports regional integration and connectivity, adding that his country would even like to be “engaged” in most of those initiatives.

But head, Project Cycle Management Division of Guyana’s Ministry of Finance, Tarachand Balgobin, who spoke immediately after Licausi, told the audience “This is a very exciting conversation and I’m sorry that it has been dampened a little bit.

“I’m from Guyana and I’m not intentioned to raise diplomatic issues at this forum,” he said, referring to two major projects – the Linden-Lethem Road and a railway system that would be running parallel to that road – that would be passing through the Essequibo county. (Jamaica Gleaner)