This will be a long, bloody border war that Venezuela can’t afford as it desperately tries to distract its people from their poor material conditions.
This will only end poorly. The jungle is the last place you want to fight.
This conflict is about more than just “distracting people”. Guyana reportedly wanted to build US military bases around its border with Venezuela. Since the US can’t use Colombia or Brazil to launch a ground invasion of Venezuela, it wants to use Guyana in exchange for money and oil exploitation.
Also, Guyana has never cared about this territory, which is why the native peoples who live there tried to join Venezuela in 1968.
“Native people”?
They were white capitalist ranch owners who thought that the new indigenous leadership would strip them of their land rights, and give all their “hard earned land” to black people which they despised. They even explicitly stated that the leadership of Guyana was to “Afrocentrist”.
Two of the three leaders of the rebellion were Americans
The indigenous leadership wanted to grant land certificates to native indigenous peoples to protect them from encroachment on their land. Those ranchers were threatened by this.
Those are not native people. Those are greed driven capitalists who tried to defect to a (then) fascist Venezuela who they thought would protect them.
The native population stamped out that capitalist rebellion.
Also the claim that the US was going to build military bases came from the Venezuelan foreign ministry in September. Where is this base? There was no move to build bases or increase support from the US.
Ironically, Brazil has begun mobilization to defend Guyana, and Guyana will also likely turn to the US for aid. What did you think they would do? Let themselves get run over?
Guyana doesn’t even have an army, and the size of their defense forces is of 3000 men, Venezuela’s active personnel is something around 300.000, furthermore Venezuela has complete air superiority. If this becomes a battle of attrition it is simply because Guyana decides to align itself with imperial power that may give them some support, if they do this, it will be a blood bath carried out by their leaders in a war that cannot be won, for land that was stolen and it is not theirs.
Guyana does not maintain a standing military, but has the ability to raise more people through conscription measures outlined in their constitution.
They also do not need to commit to total war, as Brazil has begun the mobilization of troops along the in support of Guyana.
Further, air superiority is all but completely useless in jungle settings, as the US painfully learned in Vietnam and Cambodia, or with the Japanese during WW2.
Venezuela will destroy Guyana and themselves in a pointless war of attrition over oil and gold.
Brazil mobilized troops so that Venezuela doesn’t invade Guyana through Brazil’s border, since it is the easiest way, it is not supporting Guyana at the moment. I highly doubt Guyana can conscript much troops, and even if they do they are untrained men without the proper equipment, even if Venezuela is less successful at conscription they could still get 100.000 men more and that’s already half the population of Guyana if we keep in mind the other 300.000. There’s not amount of support imperialist can give for this war to end in favour of Guyana.
Brazil also has no need to pointlessly escalate the conflict, and with Lula’s warning to avoid “foolish gestures”, it doesn’t look like they’d be very favorable to Venezuela if they attempt to seize the region by force. 130,000 men and an armored brigade is a massive and costly amount of troops to mobilize if it wasn’t supposed to be warning.
The battle lines don’t look very favorable either. Either Venezuela launches amphibious assaults into the most heavily defended and populated parts of Guyana, goes through Brazilian land along the floodplains, or marches through hell on earth by pushing through endless mountainous, inhospitable jungle.
That last one is a defensive army’s wet dream. Guerrilla fighters do not need a massive amount of training, manpower, and weaponry to wreck havoc on an enemy in that sort of terrain.
