Guyana Where and What 2023-2024 for website_compressed

British - colonies that were
united in 1831 as British Guiana.
Spain and Venezuela were
nowhere on the ‘wild’ Guiana
coast.
But that scene would draw
admirers. As British Guiana
began the century long process
of unification and development,
Venezuela, in particular, cast
aspiring eyes beyond the
Orinoco. In the 1840s it took
issue with a worthy British effort
to identify and ultimately
demarcate the Colony’s
boundaries. They had
commissioned a distinguished
German geographer and
naturalist, Robert Schomburgk,
to begin the process of survey.
Venezuela’s reaction was one of
hostility , not welcome. –
hostility that has reached – with
rising intensity – nearly 200
years: despite what, in totality,
follows.
Why? It was the second half of
the 19th Century and Venezuela
was spreading its national wings
– west with Colombia and east
with Essequibo. Its credo was
expansion. It failed with
Colombia, but got the US to be
its patron with ‘BG’ – because of
the ‘Monroe Doctrine’- and US
politics. Under threat of ‘war’, no
less, the United States forced
Britain to have the border
settled by a ‘treaty-based
Commission’ – as Venezuela
wanted.
It would be a Commission – an
Arbitral Tribunal - on which
Venezuela’s choice of Member
would be the Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court of the United
States. His fellow arbitrators
were from the pinnacle of the
British and American judiciaries
– the very apex of the ‘Common
Law’ world - and they chose as
their Chairman, a Russian
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