Associate Professor of Africana Studies Nigel Westmaas was a guest on WRFG Radio Atlanta on Oct. 3 to discuss the Guyana-Venezuela border dispute. It recently escalated when Venezuela made aggressive statements and troop buildups on Guyana’s western border in the wake of the recent discovery of oil in Guyana’s territorial waters.
The boundary between the two countries was considered a ”full, perfect and final settlement” by an international Court of Arbitration in 1899 but has been an issue of contention since the 1940s with the publication of a posthumous memorandum of dissent by an American lawyer Severo Mallet-Prevost with the original settlement.