Guyana’s Global Turn and the Quiet Risk of a Fracturing Caricom

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OPINION

Staff Writer

The confrontation between Trinidad and Tobago and Caricom over the reappointment of Secretary-General Dr Carla Barnett is being framed as an internal dispute. It is not. It is a reflection of a deeper transition now underway across the region—one that carries particular significance for Guyana.

Because at the very moment Caricom shows signs of strain, Guyana itself is moving in the opposite direction: outward, rapidly and decisively, into the global arena.

Oil has changed the equation.

 In less than a decade, Guyana has shifted from a peripheral economy within Caricom to one of the fastest-growing energy producers in the world. Its economic trajectory now commands attention not just within the Caribbean, but in Washington, Brussels, Beijing, and beyond. Investment flows, security partnerships, and diplomatic engagement are all expanding at a pace the region has never before seen.

Guyana is no longer operating primarily within a regional frame. It is now navigating a global one.

That shift is already reshaping policy instincts. Decision-making is increasingly influenced by global capital markets, multinational energy interests, and strategic alliances with major powers. The scale of opportunity—and risk—has changed fundamentally.

But this global turn creates a subtle danger.

As Guyana’s economic center of gravity shifts outward, the perceived relevance of Caricom may begin to diminish. Regional integration, once a central pillar of economic and diplomatic strategy, can start to appear secondary—useful, but no longer essential.

That perception would be a mistake.

Because Guyana’s rise is not occurring in a vacuum. It is unfolding within a complex geopolitical environment defined by energy competition, great-power rivalry, and an active territorial controversy with Venezuela that has already drawn in international actors.

In such an environment, regional alignment is not a luxury. It is a layer of strategic insulation.

A cohesive Caricom strengthens Guyana’s diplomatic position by reinforcing legitimacy, amplifying its voice, and providing a collective buffer against external pressure. It transforms what could be a bilateral vulnerability into a multilateral concern.

Conversely, a fragmented Caricom weakens that shield.

If regional unity erodes—if member states increasingly pursue narrow, transactional agendas—then the Caribbean becomes more susceptible to external division. Global powers will engage states individually, leverage asymmetries, and shape outcomes in ways that may not always align with regional interests.

For Guyana, that is not a theoretical risk. It is a foreseeable consequence.

The dispute involving Trinidad and Tobago underscores precisely this shift. What was once managed quietly within the architecture of regional diplomacy is now being contested in the open, with national positioning taking precedence over collective discipline.

This is the new reality Guyana must navigate.

There will be a growing temptation to mirror that approach—to prioritize bilateral deals, maximize immediate returns, and treat regional commitments as negotiable rather than foundational. Given the scale of Guyana’s new economic leverage, that path may appear not only viable, but rational.

It is neither sufficient nor sustainable.

Because Guyana’s long-term national interest is not defined solely by oil revenues or external partnerships. It is also defined by stability—regional, political and institutional. And that stability has historically been underwritten, in part, by Caricom.

What is at risk is not simply an organization, but an enabling environment.

Caricom has provided Guyana with more than market access. It has offered diplomatic alignment, legal familiarity, and a framework through which small states could act with coordinated purpose. These are not easily replicated in purely global engagements, where asymmetries of power are far more pronounced.

The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between global engagement and regional commitment. It is to understand that the two must operate in tandem.

Guyana’s emergence as a global energy player makes Caricom more important, not less. It increases the need for a stable regional platform through which its growing influence can be anchored and legitimized.

At the same time, Caricom itself must adjust to this new reality. The rise of Guyana introduces new dynamics into the regional balance—economic, political and strategic—that cannot be ignored. Leadership within the Community will need to evolve accordingly.

But evolution requires coherence.

If the current trajectory—marked by open confrontation and increasingly transactional engagement—continues unchecked, Caricom risks becoming less a strategic bloc and more a loose collection of states pursuing parallel, and sometimes competing, agendas.

For Guyana, that would represent a strategic loss at precisely the moment of greatest opportunity.

The country is stepping onto the global stage. But global visibility does not eliminate the need for regional grounding. If anything, it makes it more urgent.

Because in a world of expanding ambition and intensifying competition, even rising states benefit from standing within something larger than themselves.

The question is whether the Caribbean will remain that structure—or allow it to weaken just as one of its members begins to outgrow the confines that once defined it.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮, 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—

 

A Nation Left Stranded –The Fort Island Independence Debacle and the Collapse of State Logistics

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 EDITORIAL

Staff Writer

When World- Class is no longer a “SLOGAN”

 

Guyana’s Independence celebration at Fort Island will be remembered not as a triumphant national observance, but as a case study in governmental disorganization, poor planning, security recklessness, and administrative arrogance. 

 

What should have been an occasion of pride instead descended into confusion, embarrassment, and avoidable danger. And what makes it worse is that none of it was unforeseeable. Every failure that evening was the product of choices — or the deliberate absence of them.

The most troubling aspect of the evening was not any single mistake. It was the systemic nature of the incompetence on display. When failures are isolated, they can be attributed to oversight. When they are layered, interlocking, and spread across every dimension of an event’s execution, they speak to something more fundamental: an institutional culture that does not take governance seriously enough to sweat the details — even when the occasion demands nothing less.

1.The Citizens Left Behind

Let us begin where the evening ended — with thousands of Guyanese stranded in the dark, waiting for vessels that were not coming quickly enough, on an island they had been invited to celebrate upon.

The transportation failure to and from Fort Island was not the consequence of bad weather, mechanical emergency, or some unforeseeable crisis. It was the consequence of elementary miscalculation. Planners organized a national public event on an island — a geographically enclosed venue with a single mode of mass egress — and failed to provision adequate maritime transport for the return journey. This is not a logistical nuance. It is the first question any competent event planner asks: how do we get people home?

The answer, apparently, was not asked loudly enough, or not answered honestly, or not acted upon at all.

What followed was entirely predictable. 

Exhausted citizens — many of whom had made the effort to attend out of genuine patriotic feeling — scrambled for passage back to the mainland in conditions that ranged from disorganized to dangerous. 

Unforgettable Moment

Officials who should have been coordinating were apparently unprepared for the entirely predictable reality that the ceremony would end and people would need to leave.

There is something particularly corrosive about this kind of failure. It is not the failure of ambition. It is the failure of basic care. The state invited citizens to participate in a national celebration and then abandoned the operational responsibility of ensuring they could return safely. That is not a logistical shortcoming. It is a statement about whose comfort, time, and safety the state considers worth planning for.

11.The Security Question No One Should Have to Ask

While citizens scrambled on the docks, a more quietly alarming tableau was unfolding above them.

Reports indicate that Cabinet members — senior figures of the Guyanese executive — were clustered together in the top VIP section of a single vessel during transport. In ordinary circumstances, this might be unremarkable. These are not ordinary circumstances.

Guyana is presently navigating one of the most consequential and sensitive geopolitical situations in its history. The territorial controversy with Venezuela over the Essequibo region has elevated the country’s strategic exposure in ways that carry real, not theoretical, risk. Against this backdrop, the decision to concentrate a significant portion of senior state leadership in one exposed maritime environment — without apparent security zoning, contingency separation, or layered emergency protocols — is not merely poor optics. It is a failure of basic statecraft.

Serious states, particularly those operating under conditions of heightened geopolitical tension, do not casually centralize their executive leadership in vulnerable transit settings. 

The principles of state continuity — ensuring that no single incident can decapitate a government’s command and decision-making capacity — exist precisely because history has demonstrated, repeatedly, that risk does not announce its arrival.

This is not paranoia. It is not theatrical caution. It is the fundamental obligation of those who manage state security to plan not for the probable, but for the possible. The question is not whether anything happened that night. The question is whether anything was in place if something had. The silence on that question is, itself, an answer.

III. What the World Saw

Nations are judged, in part, by the small moments — the details that reveal whether a state is genuinely capable of executing what it claims to represent. Fort Island offered the world a revealing detail.

The United States Ambassador to Guyana, one of the most senior diplomatic representatives present at the occasion, was reportedly left to navigate her way onto a vessel using unstable boards placed haphazardly between the dock and the boat — largely unassisted, in conditions of darkness and confusion. She managed. That is not the point.

Diplomacy is theatre as much as it is policy. Visiting ambassadors and foreign dignitaries are not merely guests at national events. They are, whether we acknowledge it or not, observers and reporters. What they experience becomes part of the informal record of a country’s institutional character — the stories that circulate in embassies, foreign ministries, and diplomatic cables. 

What was communicated to Guyana’s international partners that evening was not the image of a confident, capable, oil-rich emerging state asserting its place among the nations. It was the image of a country that could not organize safe boarding conditions for one of its most important diplomatic guests.

Guyana is, at this precise moment in its history, seeking to project itself as a serious and sovereign actor — a nation whose governance infrastructure is equal to its extraordinary natural wealth. Fort Island did not reinforce that projection. It undermined it, quietly but unmistakably, in front of an audience that will remember.

IV.The Flag That Faltered

None of the above failures occurred in isolation. They shared the evening with a moment that, in the context of national ceremony, carries particular symbolic weight.

The midnight flag raising — the ceremonial centerpiece of Independence observance, the act around which the entire gathering was organized — faltered. Visibly. In a manner that communicated, without ambiguity, a lack of adequate rehearsal and coordination.

This matters more than it may appear. National ceremonies are not casual social events. They are deliberately constructed expressions of sovereignty — rituals that project the discipline, precision, and institutional competence of a state to its own citizens and to the world. They derive their emotional and symbolic power from flawless execution. When they fail, even partially, they do not merely embarrass. They communicate something about the state itself — about whether its institutions are capable of commanding the details that collective identity demands.

 

A flag raised clumsily on Independence Night is not just an aesthetic blemish. In a country navigating the weight of its history, the complexity of its present, and the uncertainty of its geopolitical future, it is a signal. And signals, once sent, cannot be unsent.

V.A Pattern, Not an Incident

Individually, each of the failures at Fort Island might be dismissed as an aberration — a bad night, a miscommunication, an unfortunate oversight. But they did not occur individually. They occurred together, on the same evening, at the same event, organized by the same state apparatus. That simultaneity is not incidental. It is diagnostic.

What Fort Island revealed is not merely that event planners made mistakes. It revealed that the state’s approach to high-visibility public obligations is not underwritten by the rigor, accountability, and systematic preparation that such obligations require.

The citizens were an afterthought. The security calculus was casual. The diplomatic protocol was inadequate. The ceremonial execution was unrehearsed.

These are not the failures of a government that was unlucky. They are the failures of a government that was underprepared — and, more troublingly, of a government that may not have considered that preparation necessary.

Guyana is a nation at a crossroads of enormous historical consequence. Its oil revenues, its territorial disputes, its emergence onto the international stage — all of it demands a state that is not merely present, but capable. Fort Island showed us, in miniature and in real time, what an incapable state looks like when it dresses itself in the clothes of national celebration.

There are no easy answers here. There is no single official to blame, no single department to restructure, no single reform that addresses what was on display that night. What happened at Fort Island is the product of a broader institutional culture — one in which accountability is deferred, standards are negotiated downward, and the performance of governance is permitted to substitute for its substance.

The celebration is over. The stranded citizens made it home. The ambassador boarded her vessel. The flag, eventually, was raised.

But the questions that Fort Island asks of this government have no expiry date. And they have not yet been answered.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮, 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—

One Guyana or One Party Rule? The Quiet Unraveling of Accountability

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A Constitutional Silence: Legislative Inactivity, Executive Concentration, and the Erosion of Accountability in Guyana

BY: Hem Kumar                               

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣

The present state of Guyana’s parliamentary system raises a narrow but consequential question: can the sustained non-sitting of the National Assembly, absent a formal constitutional mechanism, coexist with the requirements of responsible government?

On the facts as they stand, the answer is increasingly difficult to sustain.
For approximately 104 days, the National Assembly has not convened. There has been no prorogation. There has been no dissolution. There is no publicly articulated recess resolution grounded in Standing Orders or constitutional practice. In constitutional terms, the Assembly appears neither lawfully suspended nor operational—it is simply inactive.

This is not a procedural triviality. Guyana’s Constitution establishes a system of parliamentary democracy grounded in the principle of executive accountability to the legislature. That principle is not symbolic—it is operational. It requires regular sittings, questioning of ministers, and the functioning of parliamentary committees.
The absence of sittings, therefore, engages more than political optics. It raises the issue of whether the executive is, in practice, avoiding the very forum to which it is constitutionally answerable.

The position is compounded by the apparent non-functioning of parliamentary committees since the election. Committees are not ancillary; they are extensions of the Assembly’s oversight jurisdiction. Through them, the Assembly exercises scrutiny over public expenditure, administrative conduct, and statutory implementation.
Where committees do not convene, oversight does not merely weaken—it collapses into formality without substance.

In Commonwealth constitutional jurisprudence, responsible government depends on two interlocking conditions: (1) the continuous availability of the legislature to hold the executive to account, and (2) the clear attribution of executive authority to identifiable ministers who are answerable to that legislature.
Both conditions now warrant scrutiny.
The expanding operational role of the Vice President introduces a second axis of constitutional concern. While the Constitution of Guyana provides for a Vice President, it does not contemplate an office exercising diffuse, cross-sectoral executive authority unmoored from explicit ministerial responsibility.

Under orthodox Westminster-derived principles, executive power must be traceable. Decisions must be attributable to ministers who can be questioned, censured, or removed through parliamentary mechanisms. Authority without accountability is not merely inefficient—it is constitutionally suspect.
If policy direction across major sectors is being exercised by an office that does not fully accept corresponding ministerial responsibility to the Assembly, then the chain of accountability is interrupted. The result is not simply concentration of power, but diffusion of responsibility—a condition fundamentally at odds with responsible government.

It is also material that the government commands a working parliamentary majority. This is not a case of legislative paralysis arising from instability or lack of numbers. The executive possesses the capacity to convene the Assembly, sustain its legislative agenda, and withstand scrutiny through established procedures.
The decision not to do so must therefore be understood as elective rather than compelled.

Comparative constitutional practice offers guidance. Across Commonwealth jurisdictions, prolonged legislative inactivity without formal prorogation or dissolution is rare and typically subject to political and legal challenge. Courts have increasingly recognized that procedural devices—or their absence—cannot be used to frustrate the core functions of the legislature. While Guyana’s courts have not yet been invited to pronounce on a fact pattern of this kind, the underlying doctrine is clear: constitutional forms cannot be used to defeat constitutional substance.

None of these observations, standing alone, establishes illegality or corruption. That is not the present claim.
The issue is structural risk.
A legislature that does not sit cannot exercise oversight. Committees that do not meet cannot examine the use of public funds. Executive authority that is not clearly tethered to accountable ministers cannot be effectively scrutinized.

Taken together, these conditions create what may be described, in constitutional terms, as an accountability deficit.
It is precisely this deficit that international governance frameworks are designed to detect. Organizations such as Transparency International and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project do not rely solely on proof of wrongdoing; they assess enabling environments—patterns of opacity, weakened oversight, and institutional imbalance. Similarly, assessments by the U.S. Department of State and diplomatic missions, including those of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, routinely consider the functionality of democratic institutions as a core indicator of governance integrity.
Guyana’s emergence as a significant oil-producing state heightens, rather than diminishes, the importance of these considerations. Resource-driven economies are particularly vulnerable to governance slippage where oversight mechanisms are weakened or bypassed.

The constitutional question, therefore, is not whether wrongdoing has been proven.
It is whether the current configuration of legislative inactivity and executive concentration is consistent with the minimum requirements of accountable government.
On that question, the burden does not lie with critics to prove collapse. It lies with the State to demonstrate that constitutional governance remains intact in both form and function.

Until that demonstration is made—through the resumption of sittings, the activation of committees, and the clarification of lines of executive responsibility—the present silence of the Assembly will continue to speak louder than any official assurance.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮, 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—

Ambition and Infrastructure: A Necessary Alignment

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THE 592 GUARDIAN OPINION

Recent developments in Kenya offer a timely and instructive lesson for emerging economies seeking to position themselves within the global digital and artificial intelligence landscape. The suspension of a proposed US$1 billion Microsoft-backed data center—on the grounds that it would place unsustainable pressure on the national electricity grid—underscores a fundamental principle of modern development: ambition must be matched by infrastructure.

Kenya, with an installed electricity capacity of approximately 3,000 megawatts and a comparatively advanced renewable energy portfolio, was compelled to acknowledge that a single hyperscale data facility could consume a substantial share of its national supply. The implications were clear. Without adequate surplus capacity and grid resilience, even the most prestigious investments become untenable.

This reality bears direct relevance to Guyana.

In recent public pronouncements, President Irfaan Ali has advanced the vision of establishing a “Silicon Valley” in Guyana—a concept that, while aspirational, appears disconnected from the country’s present infrastructural conditions. Guyana remains in the process of bringing its 300 MW Gas-to-Energy (GtE) project to operational status, a development that is itself critical to stabilizing domestic supply and reducing energy costs. Yet this project, foundational as it is, does not represent surplus capacity; it represents a long-overdue baseline.

Hyperscale data centers—the backbone of any genuine technology hub—are among the most resource-intensive facilities in existence. Their demands extend well beyond electricity. A single large-scale facility can require between 100 MW and 300 MW of continuous power, alongside extensive cooling systems that depend on significant volumes of water. These are not marginal increases in demand; they are industrial-scale requirements that must be sustained without interruption.

Guyana’s current realities raise serious questions about readiness on both fronts.

Electricity supply, while improving, remains constrained and in transition. The completion and integration of the GtE project are prerequisites for stability, not indicators of excess. Equally pressing is the issue of water. Across Georgetown and other regions, citizens and businesses continue to face persistent challenges with water pressure, reliability, and distribution. The notion of diverting large volumes of treated water to support energy-intensive data infrastructure—while sections of the population experience daily shortages—demands careful scrutiny.

Modern data centers often rely on water-based cooling systems that can consume millions of gallons annually, depending on scale and technology. In jurisdictions where such facilities are successfully deployed, water management systems are robust, redundant, and carefully regulated to prevent competition between industrial and domestic needs. 

Guyana has yet to demonstrate that such systems are in place or even in advanced planning.

The broader issue, therefore, is not whether Guyana should aspire to participate in the global digital economy. It should. The issue is sequencing.

Sustainable technological development is built on a hierarchy of prerequisites: reliable and expandable energy generation, resilient transmission networks, secure and sufficient water supply, regulatory clarity, and a skilled workforce. These elements are not optional; they are foundational. Without them, high-level visions risk becoming detached from operational reality.

Kenya’s recent decision illustrates the importance of confronting these constraints early and transparently. It is a reminder that credibility in development policy is earned not through declarations, but through demonstrated capacity and disciplined execution.

Guyana stands at a pivotal moment in its economic trajectory, buoyed by significant resource revenues and international attention. This moment demands not only vision, but precision. Grand announcements must be anchored in verifiable infrastructure plans, with clear timelines, financing strategies, and independent oversight.

A technology-driven future for Guyana is achievable. However, it will not be realized through rhetoric alone. It will require sustained investment in energy and water systems, careful prioritization, and a commitment to aligning national aspirations with material capabilities.

Until such alignment is achieved, proposals of a “Silicon Valley” remain premature. What is required now is not the language of transformation, but the work that makes transformation possible.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

Two Ambassadors, One Prize:

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EDITORIAL

Guyana as Battleground in the US–China Great Power Contest

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

May 2026

I.  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TIMING WHEN TWO EMPIRES SPOKE

Within days of each other in May 2026, two of the world’s most powerful nations addressed Guyana directly — not through back channels or diplomatic cables, but through the public press, in signed op-eds crafted with evident care and deliberate purpose.

US Ambassador Nicole Theriot marked sixty years of bilateral relations with a warm tribute to partnership, shared history, and the promise of “deeper democracy.” Nine days prior, Chinese Ambassador Yang Yang published a sweeping defense of Beijing’s relationship with Georgetown, titled “Facts Speak Louder Than Words: The Real Story of China–Guyana Cooperation” — using detailed data and pointed language to firmly refute what she called “groundless accusations” by a US congressman about so-called “Chinese influence” in Guyana.

Two ambassadors. Two op-eds. One small nation sitting atop one of the most significant oil discoveries of the twenty-first century.

Coincidence is not a concept that applies to great power diplomacy. What Guyana witnessed in May 2026 was not two friends sending greetings. It was two empires — each with a hundred-year strategic horizon — publicly competing for the allegiance of a nation that has suddenly become indispensable.

Georgetown must read both documents not as tributes, but as bids. And it must read them with eyes wide open.

II.  THE AMERICAN BID: WARMTH WITH CONDITIONS

Ambassador Theriot’s op-ed is eloquent, warm, and genuinely appreciative of a partnership that has delivered real benefits to the Guyanese people. But diplomacy, like oil contracts, requires reading the fine print.

Just weeks before her anniversary tribute, Ambassador Theriot sat before a Guyanese television audience and delivered what can only be described as a threat dressed in diplomatic clothing. As the representative of the US Government, she declared it “incredibly dangerous” to start talking about renegotiation of the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil — warning that doing so “sends a terrible signal to international investors all over the world.”

The numbers make the stakes plain. In 2024 alone, ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC collectively earned US$8.4 billion in profits from Guyana’s Stabroek Block, while Guyana — despite owning the resource — received just US$2.6 billion. Under the 2016 PSA, 75 percent of oil produced is set aside for the international oil companies to recoup their investments, with only the remaining 25 percent split equally between Guyana and the consortium, alongside a mere 2 percent royalty.

The 2016 agreement prohibits the Government from imposing any windfall tax — and requires Guyana to pay Exxon’s corporate income tax liabilities out of its own share of profit oil.

What makes this position especially extraordinary is its sharp departure from prior US diplomatic posture. In April 2019, then-Ambassador Sarah Ann Lynch stated clearly that “it is within Guyana’s right to renegotiate the controversial Production Sharing Agreement” and that the US “certainly wouldn’t interfere with that.” Ambassador Theriot in April 2026 calls even thinking about renegotiation “incredibly dangerous” and “a very bad idea.” Same flag. Dramatically different instructions.

What changed? The scale of the discovery. With Guyana now producing nearly 900,000 barrels per day and the block proven to hold over 11 billion barrels, the stakes for ExxonMobil — and by extension for Washington — are existential. So serious is the US position that when Undersecretary for Economic Affairs Jacob Helsberg visited recently, though he chose softer language than the Ambassador, his meaning was identical: Washington will not countenance any maneuver that upsets the current arrangement.

III.  THE DOUBLE GAME IN PLAIN SIGHT

Ambassador Theriot assures Guyana that Washington stands “firmly” behind its territorial integrity, invoking Secretary Rubio’s 2025 visit to Georgetown as evidence of commitment. And yet, simultaneously, the United States has been engaged in one of the most consequential geopolitical pivots in the Western Hemisphere — a systematic re-engagement with Venezuela, the very nation whose territorial aggression against Guyana the Ambassador so eloquently condemns.

Following the capture of Nicolás Maduro by US forces in January 2026, a 50-million-barrel oil supply deal was announced with the remaining Venezuelan government, new hydrocarbons privatization laws were passed, and the US lifted sanctions on Venezuelan oil trade. By February 2026, OFAC had issued the broadest easing of Venezuela-related sanctions in years. Chevron mentioned Venezuela twelve times in its 2025 lobbying filings. White House meetings with oil executives about Venezuelan reconstruction investment followed days later.

Let the significance of this sink in. Washington’s security guarantee to Guyana and Washington’s commercial re-engagement with Venezuela are not contradictory policies in the minds of American strategists. They are complementary ones. The United States wants stable oil flows from both nations, leverage over both capitals, and the indispensable role of arbiter between them.

This is not cynicism. It is the most rational foreign policy imaginable — from Washington’s perspective. It is only naïve from Georgetown’s.

Washington’s ideal outcome is a Western Hemisphere in which it controls access to two of the region’s most significant oil jurisdictions — Guyana through commercial dominance and security partnership, Venezuela through post-Maduro reconstruction and investment. In that scenario, the United States is not Guyana’s partner. It is Guyana’s landlord

1v.THE CHINESE BID: INFRASTRUCTURE WITH STRINGS UNACKNOWLEDGED

Ambassador Yang Yang’s op-ed is a masterpiece of soft power framing. The facts she presents are largely accurate, and genuinely impressive. By the end of 2025, cumulative Chinese investment in Guyana had reached approximately US$13 billion, while bilateral trade totaled US$2.89 billion — more than double the previous year. Chinese companies built the Bharrat Jagdeo Demerara River Bridge, six regional hospitals now fully operational, and the China–Guyana Joe Vieira Friendship Park. Since 1993, over 300 Chinese medical professionals have treated more than 1.3 million Guyanese patients.

These are not phantom achievements. They are tangible contributions to Guyanese life, and they deserve honest acknowledgment just as the US contributions do.

But Ambassador Yang’s eloquence carefully omits what her government’s global track record makes impossible to ignore. In 2025 alone, developing countries owed China US$35 billion in BRI-related repayments — a record — with US$22 billion of that burden falling on the world’s 75 poorest nations. China’s outstanding overseas BRI debt has surpassed US$1 trillion, with infrastructure projects across multiple regions struggling to meet even interest payments.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port was also built under principles of “mutual benefit and win-win cooperation.” It was leased to China for 99 years after debt default.

Guyana is not Sri Lanka. Its oil revenues provide a cushion that most BRI recipients do not have. But a nation flush with new wealth is also a nation newly attractive to predatory partnership structures — and US$13 billion in cumulative Chinese investment, against a Guyanese GDP that was barely US$14 billion as recently as 2022, represents a level of economic penetration that warrants serious scrutiny.

Ambassador Yang’s article was triggered not by goodwill alone, but by a specific challenge: US Congressman Gabe Evans had publicly raised concerns about Chinese influence in Guyana. The fact that a sitting US congressman felt compelled to write about Chinese influence, and that the Chinese Ambassador responded within days through the Guyanese press, tells you everything about what Georgetown has become: a theatre of great power competition being conducted, politely but intensely, on Guyanese soil.

V.  CNOOC: THE SILENT PLAYER IN THE ROOM

There is a dimension of the China–Guyana relationship that Ambassador Yang’s lyrical op-ed does not address, and which Ambassador Theriot’s partnership language deliberately obscures: CNOOC — China National Offshore Oil Corporation — is a direct partner in the very Stabroek Block that Washington is so anxious to protect.

CNOOC holds a 25 percent stake in the Stabroek consortium alongside ExxonMobil and Chevron. This means that every barrel produced from Guyana’s most valuable oil asset flows simultaneously to American and Chinese state interests. The two powers publicly competing for Guyana’s geopolitical allegiance are already, quietly, business partners in Georgetown’s oil field.

The battle for Guyana’s allegiance is not merely political. It is a battle over who controls — and who profits from — the extraction of a finite and extraordinary natural resource.

VI. THE PROPOGANDA PARALLEL : READING BOTH OP-EDS TOGETHER

Placed side by side, the Theriot and Yang op-eds reveal a structural similarity that is both instructive and troubling for Guyanese readers.

Both ambassadors lead with history and friendship. Both marshal specific projects and achievements as evidence of benevolent partnership. Both invoke shared values — democracy and sovereignty in Theriot’s case, mutual respect and the Global South in Yang’s. Both are responding, at least in part, to the other power’s moves. And crucially, both are silent about the ways their respective nations’ interests diverge from Guyana’s own.

Theriot does not mention the lopsidedness of the Stabroek contract. Yang does not mention BRI debt diplomacy. Theriot celebrates Exxon’s community investment signs in Mabaruma without noting that Exxon earned US$4.7 billion from Guyana in 2024 alone. Yang celebrates the Demerara River Bridge without disclosing the full terms of the financing that built it.

Both documents are truthful in what they include. Both are strategic in what they omit. That is the definition of propaganda — not fabrication, but selective presentation in service of national interest.

VII.  THE GEOPOLITICAL TRAP: CHOOSING SIDES IN SOMEONE ELSE’S WAR

The deepest danger facing Guyana in this moment is not Venezuela’s territorial aggression, though that is real. It is not the lopsided oil contract, though that requires correction. It is the gravitational pull toward choosing sides in a US–China rivalry that Guyana did not start, does not control, and could be badly damaged by.

Washington wants Guyana firmly in the Western camp — a reliable partner against Chinese influence in the Caribbean and a secure platform for American energy interests. Beijing wants Guyana as a Belt and Road success story, a CNOOC-holding ally, and a demonstration that the Global South can build prosperity outside the US-dominated financial architecture.

Both wants are legitimate from their respective perspectives. Neither is primarily about Guyana’s wellbeing.

The nations that have fared best in this rivalry are those that have refused to be captured by either pole — that have taken infrastructure from China while maintaining security ties with the West, extracted investment from both without surrendering sovereign decision-making to either. Vietnam. Indonesia. Brazil, under its more strategically coherent moments. These are the models Georgetown should study.

Lord Palmerston settled the matter in 1848: nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Both Washington and Beijing operate on that doctrine. So must Georgetown.

VIII.  WHAT SOVEREIGN GUYANA LOOKS LIKE

Genuine sovereignty in Guyana’s current position looks like this:

It takes the US security guarantee seriously while refusing to become a wholly owned subsidiary of American foreign policy. It welcomes Chinese infrastructure investment while insisting on transparent loan terms, competitive bidding, and contractual protections against asset seizure. It renegotiates the Stabroek Block agreement toward terms that reflect the now-known scale of the discovery — not because it is anti-American, but because it is pro-Guyanese. It builds military and intelligence relationships with Brazil, the United Kingdom, India, and CARICOM alongside its American MOU. And it uses its Natural Resource Fund as a genuine sovereign wealth instrument, not a political tool.

It reads every op-ed published by a foreign ambassador — however eloquently written, however warmly intended — as what it is: a bid, not a gift.

One American ambassador said Guyana had every right to renegotiate its oil contract. Another called it “incredibly dangerous” even to raise the subject. One Chinese ambassador builds hospitals and bridges while her government’s BRI architecture has placed dozens of developing nations in unsustainable debt. The world’s most powerful nations have revealed, through these contradictions, that their relationship with Guyana is fundamentally transactional.

There is no shame in that. Transactional relationships can be enormously beneficial — if both parties understand the transaction clearly. Guyana must understand the transaction clearly.

IX.  A MESSAGE TO BOTH AMBASSADORS

To Ambassador Theriot: We value the sixty-year relationship. We honor the highway, the vaccines, the security partnership, and the genuine commitment to our sovereignty against Venezuelan aggression. We ask only that you extend to us the same honest respect you would give a true sovereign partner — including the acknowledgment that Guyana has every right, as your predecessor confirmed, to seek fair terms for its own natural resources.

To Ambassador Yang: We are grateful for the hospitals, the bridge, the medical brigades, and the trade relationship that has grown impressively. We ask only that you accompany those gifts with full transparency about loan terms, contract conditions, and the documented experience of other nations that walked the Belt and Road before us.

To both: Guyana is not a prize. It is not a theatre. It is not a demonstration project for your competing visions of world order.

It is a sovereign nation, newly wealthy, historically overlooked, and finally in a position to demand that the world treat it accordingly.

We intend to collect on that demand — from Washington and Beijing alike.

The 592 Guardian — Editorial Board

Georgetown, Guyana  |  May 2026

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

# A Man Who Has Forgotten: Ali, the Nimitz, and the Betrayal of Memory

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Opinion | The 592 Guardian

There is a particular kind of political sin that does not announce itself with scandal or corruption. It arrives quietly, dressed in the language of progress and partnership, wearing a smile cultivated for cameras and handshakes. It is the sin of ingratitude — and President Irfaan Ali committed it in full view of the world when he stood aboard the USS Nimitz and beamed.

Let us be precise about what that image represents. The Nimitz is not a diplomatic vessel. It is not a hospital ship or a vessel of goodwill. It is among the most lethal instruments of power ever constructed by human hands — a floating airfield capable of projecting destruction to any corner of the earth. It is the embodiment of the very military-economic architecture that has strangled Cuba for over six decades, enforcing a blockade that has denied ordinary Cuban people medicine, food, and the basic dignities of modern life. To stand aboard it — not quietly, not reluctantly, but with visible pride and enthusiasm — is to make a statement. Whether Ali intended it or not, the statement was made.

And that statement lands like a slap across the face of every Guyanese who was kept alive, educated, or healed by the hands of a Cuban.

 What Cuba Did When No One Else Would

This is not nostalgia. This is not romanticism. This is recorded history.

When Guyana’s hospital wards were understaffed and its patients were dying for want of qualified physicians, it was not Washington that answered the call. It was Havana. Cuban doctors arrived in communities that had never seen a specialist, in regions where the nearest clinic was a day’s journey away. They did not come on short-term contracts with generous compensation packages. They came under the banner of solidarity — a word that has grown unfashionable in an era of transactional diplomacy, but which once meant something real.

When classrooms across this country sat empty for want of teachers, Cuban educators filled them. When Guyanese students had neither the finances nor the connections to access quality higher education, Cuban scholarships opened doors that would otherwise have remained permanently shut. The professionals produced by those opportunities — the doctors, engineers, teachers, and public servants who have contributed to this country’s development — are a living monument to what that partnership meant.

That relationship was built not on oil or military strategy or leverage. It was built on the simple, radical idea that a small nation should help another small nation because it is right to do so. Cuba asked for nothing that Guyana could not give. And for decades, Guyana benefited enormously from that generosity.

Now, the man who leads this country stands on the deck of the vessel most associated with the power that has tormented Cuba, and he poses for photographs.

 The Captured Head of State

There is a phrase in the language of postcolonial political analysis: state capture. It typically refers to the corruption of institutions by private interests. But there is another form of capture — subtler, more insidious — in which a leader becomes so thoroughly absorbed into the worldview, the ambitions, and the validation framework of a more powerful foreign patron that he loses the ability to see himself, his country, and its history through his own eyes.

Irfaan Ali has the look of a man so captured.

Watch how he performs on the international stage. Watch the eagerness to be seen in proximity to American military and economic power. Watch the carefully calibrated language that never discomforts Washington, never challenges the prevailing orthodoxies of the hemisphere’s dominant power. Watch how his government’s rhetoric has quietly drifted from the Non-Aligned tradition that once defined Caribbean and Caricom foreign policy, toward something that increasingly resembles client-state diplomacy dressed up as strategic partnership.

A leader grounded in his own history does not need to perform allegiance to the powerful. A leader who remembers where he came from does not need to be told that gratitude is a political value, not merely a personal virtue. A leader with a genuine foreign policy vision would know that the strength of small nations lies precisely in their ability to maintain relationships across ideological lines — to be friends with everyone without being owned by anyone.

But Ali does not appear to know this. Or if he knows it, he does not appear to care.

 Pragmatism Is Not the Alibi It Pretends to Be

The apologists will invoke pragmatism. They always do. They will say that Guyana must protect its oil wealth, that it faces real security threats, that aligning with the United States is a matter of national survival. They will speak of Venezuela, of regional instability, of the need for a powerful friend.

All of this contains a measure of truth. No serious analyst denies that Guyana’s security environment has changed dramatically with the discovery of oil, or that the country requires credible defence arrangements. The United States is a natural partner in that equation, and engagement with American military forces is not, by itself, a matter for condemnation.

But pragmatism is not a moral blank cheque. It does not erase obligation. It does not permit a government to court a new patron with such theatrical enthusiasm that it implicitly signals contempt for an old friend. It does not excuse the complete absence of any balancing gesture, any acknowledgment, any word of continued respect for the nation that staffed Guyana’s hospitals when Washington was indifferent to their condition.

If Ali’s government had paired its American engagement with even a quiet reaffirmation of Guyana’s relationship with Cuba — a statement, a visit, a diplomatic expression of continued solidarity — the Nimitz photograph would have read differently. It would have read as the act of a confident, balanced statesman navigating a complex world. Instead, it reads as the act of a man who has decided which side his bread is buttered on, and who no longer feels the need to pretend otherwise.

That is not pragmatism. That is opportunism. And in a region with a long memory of what opportunism costs small nations, it is a dangerous and shameful thing.

 Memory as a Political Obligation

There is a broader principle at stake here, one that extends beyond Guyana’s relationship with any single country

A nation that allows its foreign policy to be dictated entirely by present-tense power calculations — that discards old alliances the moment they become inconvenient, that forgets the names of those who stood with it in its hour of need — is a nation that cannot be trusted. It signals to every future partner: we will abandon you too, when the calculus changes. It hollows out the very concept of international solidarity, replacing it with pure transaction.

For Guyana — a small, developing nation navigating a world in which it is perpetually at risk of being overwhelmed by larger powers — this is not merely an ethical failure. It is a strategic one. The nations that earn respect in the international community are not those that grovel most effectively before the powerful. They are those that demonstrate consistency, principle, and the kind of moral seriousness that makes them reliable actors. Guyana once had a claim to that reputation. The Nimitz photograph puts it in question.

 The Image He Should Carry

President Ali would do well to remember a different image than the one now circulating from the Nimitz.

He should remember the image of a Cuban doctor in the Guyanese interior, treating patients who had no other option. He should remember the image of a Cuban teacher in a Guyanese classroom, shaping minds that would go on to build this country’s institutions. He should remember the image of a Guyanese student arriving in Havana on a scholarship, with nothing but promise and the generosity of a small island nation that asked nothing in return but solidarity.

Those images built Guyana. They deserve more than to be quietly retired the moment a more glamorous partnership becomes available.

A head of state who has forgotten this has not merely made a diplomatic misstep. He has revealed something about his character — about what he values, what he remembers, and what he is willing to discard when the lights are bright and the cameras are rolling.

In the end, how a leader treats those who helped him when he was weak tells you everything about who he is when he is strong.

On the deck of the USS Nimitz, Irfaan Ali told us exactly who he is

The 592 Guardian publishes independent commentary on Guyanese civic and political affairs.*

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THE 592 GUARDIAN  

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS♦ EKAA QUARRY SERIES ♦ PART II 

The Price 

of Silence

 Protecting migrant workers in Guyana is not a moral nicety — it is an economic and reputational non-negotiable. As the

Ekaa Quarry workers retain legal counsel, and the world begins to watch, the window to get this right is closing. What Guyana does next will define its developmental trajectory for a generation.

WORKERS RETAIN LEGAL COUNSEL♦

INTERNATIONAL SCRUTINY INTENSIFIES♦ 

THE FOUNDATION.  

Guyana’s

oil boom is real, its ambitions are legitimate, and its development trajectory is, by most economic measures, extraordinary. But a boom is not a foundation. A foundation is built from institutions, trust, and rules that function even when they are inconvenient — especially when they are inconvenient. The Ekaa Quarry crisis is not a distraction from Guyana’s economic story. It is a chapter in it.

The arithmetic of Guyana’s labor market leaves no room for ambiguity. Oil extraction, infrastructure construction, quarrying, agriculture, and services are all expanding simultaneously. The domestic workforce — constrained by decades of emigration, skills gaps, and population size — cannot fill this demand. Foreign labor is not a policy option; it is a structural necessity. Migrant workers are the human capital bridge between Guyana’s ambitions and its capacity to deliver them. 

This reality makes migrant worker protection an economic imperative, not simply an ethical one. A country that cannot reliably protect the workers it recruits from abroad will, over time, find it harder to recruit them. Labor follows reputation. When the Ekaa Quarry case is filed in India’s diplomatic memory, when it circulates among the networks that connect Indian contractors to foreign work sites, it does not disappear. It informs decisions about whether Guyana is a safe destination. The cost of that damaged perception accrues quietly, in vacant positions and stalled projects, long after the original story has left the front pages. 

37— DIRECTLY AFFECTED♦  1– DECEASED SHEKAR CHHETRI— INVESTIGATION ONGOING ♦ REPUTATIONAL EXPOSURE — NO CEILING ONCE LEGAL PROCEEDINGS BEGIN 

THE LEGAL THRESHOLD 
The moment the Ekaa Quarry workers retained legal counsel, this crisis crossed an irreversible threshold. What had been a labor dispute — resolvable, in principle, by swift ministerial action — became a matter of legal record. Documents will be filed. Testimonies will be taken. Proceedings will be public. The Indian High Commission is already engaged. Every day that passes without resolution adds another layer of institutional exposure for the Guyanese state. 

This is what distinguishes this case from others that have been successfully buried beneath political noise. Legal proceedings have their own momentum. They do not respond to deflection. They cannot be resolved by ministerial press releases or accusations that the opposition is “manipulating” victims. They require facts, evidence, and accountability — the precise currency this government has been most reluctant to produce. 

“What Guyana does in the next few weeks will be read as policy — not just by these thirty-seven men, but by every foreign worker, every

diplomatic mission, and every international investor watching from a distance.

5 9 2 G UA R D I A N A N A LYS I S — E C O N O M I C &   L A B O U R 

The international dimension compounds this dramatically. India is a major and assertive diplomatic power. Its missions abroad operate with robust mandates to protect Indian nationals, and the Indian diaspora and contractor networks that have followed Guyana’s development story will be paying close attention to how these resolves. A judgment, a finding, or even a prolonged and embarrassing legal process in a Guyanese court will carry weight far beyond Georgetown. It will be read in New Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai as a signal about whether Guyana honors its obligations to those who come to build its future. 

TWO TRAJECTORIES 

Guyana sits at a genuine fork. This is not rhetorical — the decisions made in the next weeks will trace one of two very different paths for the country’s reputation as an emerging economy and a destination for skilled and semi-skilled foreign labor. 

DEVELOPMENTAL TRAJECTORY — THE FORK 
PATH A — SWIFT RESOLUTION
Passports returned immediately; wages paid in full
Independent investigation into Chhetri’s death, findings published
Labor Ministry conducts nationwide audit of remote foreign-worker sites
 Government signals zero tolerance for passport retention and wage theft
 Guyana establishes a migrant worker protection framework ahead of legal mandate foreign labor markets read Guyana as reliable, law-abiding, and investible
PATH B — CONTINUED EVASION
Legal proceedings drag on — case becomes international news
Indian diplomatic mission files formal complaint; bilateral tension escalates ILO flags Guyana for convention non-compliance
Foreign investors in extractive sectors face ESG due-diligence questions
Skilled foreign workers in Guyana’s target recruitment pools grow wary
Development partners raise labor standards as conditions for financing
THE STAIN THAT DOES NOT WASH

Reputational damage in development economics is not abstract. It is priced into sovereign credit ratings, into the risk premiums that foreign investors demand, into the willingness of skilled workers to migrate to a country, and into the conditions that multilateral development banks attach to financing. Guyana is currently the beneficiary of enormous reputational goodwill — the oil discovery, the GDP growth figures, the narrative of a small country transforming itself — but goodwill is not a fixed asset. It is depleted by events exactly like this one. 

The stain that this case risks leaving is not only about thirty-seven workers at one quarry. It is about what kind of state Guyana is revealing itself to be at the precise moment the world is forming its first serious impression. A country that allows — or is perceived to allow — trafficking-adjacent practices against foreign nationals while its ministers snipe at the opposition is not a country that international capital trusts with long-term commitments. It is a country that gets short-term extraction deals and nothing more. 

FIVE IMPLICATIONS GUYANA CANNOT AFFORD 
01 Labor Supply Erosion 
Countries and networks from which Guyana recruits skilled workers will downgrade their risk assessment. The pipeline of willing foreign labor — essential to Guyana’s construction and extractives boom — narrows when origin countries “ag destination risk. 
02 Bilateral Diplomatic Cost 
India’s diplomatic engagement in this case is already active. A failure to resolve this swiftly and transparently elevates a labor dispute into a bilateral incident — with costs that extend well beyond the immediate crisis into trade, cooperation, and political capital. 
03 ESG Exposure for Foreign Investors 
International companies operating in Guyana — particularly in extractive industries — face environmental, social, and governance scrutiny from their own shareholders and regulators. A host country with documented labor violations creates due-diligence liability that can deter investment or complicate! nuancing.
04 ILO and Multilateral Exposure 
Guyana’s obligations under International Labor Organization conventions are not aspirational — they are binding. Documented violations of those conventions, especially in a case now heading toward legal proceedings, invite formal review, public findings, and conditions attached to development assistance. 
05 The Precedent Effect 
How Guyana handles this case becomes the template for how every subsequent migrant labor crisis is handled. If evasion succeeds here, the incentive for employers to exploit foreign workers is strengthened. If accountability prevails, a deterrent is established. The country is choosing, right now, which precedent it sets. 
EDITORIAL POSITION 
Guyana does not have the luxury of learning this lesson slowly. The oil era has compressed Guyana’s development timeline and, with it, the timeline within which its institutions must mature. Countries that manage resource booms successfully do so by building credible, enforceable rules — and enforcing them visibly, even when it is politically inconvenient. 
The Ekaa Quarry case is happening in the infancy of Guyana’s emergence as an international economic player. The workers have legal counsel. The Indian High Commission is engaged. The world — however briefly — is paying attention. This is precisely the moment at which a government can establish, cheaply and decisively, that Guyana protects the people who come here to work. Or it can squander that moment.
Migrant workers are not a risk to be managed. They are the human infrastructure of Guyana’s growth. Treat them accordingly — because the world is watching, and what it sees now, it remembers later. 

E N D  O F  A N A LYS I S 

 

The Outstretched Hand: Guyana’s Diaspora Bond Is a Patriotism Trap

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When oil billions, carbon windfalls, and mining revenues aren’t enough
— the government comes for your savings

Opinion | The 592 Guardian

There is a particular kind of audacity reserved for those who collect a fortune, spend it without accounting to anyone, and then return to the people they already squeezed —this time with a glossy prospectus and a flag.
That is, in essence, what President Irfaan Ali’s proposed diaspora bond represents.

Not vision. Not partnership. Not an invitation to shared prosperity.
A masterclass in salesmanship — and a financial trap dressed in national colors.

The Sales Pitch
“Here is your opportunity to help in the development of your country.”

Read that sentence again. Absorb its breathtaking construction. In one line, the administration reframes the absence of fiscal discipline as a test of civic virtue. It converts an accountability failure into an investment opportunity. And it enlists the very people who were never given a fair share of Guyana’s wealth to now fund the infrastructure that
oil revenues, carbon credit windfalls, and mining royalties were supposed to build.

It is a magnificent piece of emotional engineering. And Guyanese abroad — who have already given enormously — would be wise to see it for exactly what it is.

What the Government Is Already Collecting
Before a single diaspora dollar is mobilized, every overseas Guyanese deserves a full accounting of what this government is already earning on their behalf.

Petroleum revenues are staggering. In 2024 alone, Guyana’s offshore Stabroek Block— operated by ExxonMobil alongside Hess and CNOOC — generated an estimated US$17.9 billion in total production value. Deposits into the Natural Resource Fund for that year amounted to US$2.6 billion, drawn from profit oil payments across the Liza
Destiny, Liza Unity, and Prosperity FPSOs. By September 2025, the NRF balance had grown to US$3.6 billion. Between September 2024 and September 2025 alone, oil revenue inflows totaled US$2.39 billion — with outflows of US$2.14 billion already withdrawn and spent.
That is billions of dollars in oil money — already collected, already disbursed — with no comprehensive public ledger of where it went, what it built, or who benefited.

Carbon credit revenues add another layer to this extraordinary windfall. Under the landmark agreement with Hess Corporation as part of the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) 2030, Guyana committed to selling 750 million carbon credits between 2022 and 2032 for a minimum of US$750 million — with upside sharing provisions if
prices rise. By January 2024, US$187.5 million had already been received from this first commercial sale. In 2023, revenues reached US$150 million. In 2024, they were US$87.5 million, and by late 2025, President Ali himself announced that total carbon credit revenues for 2025 would approach US$200 million — bringing the three-year total
under the revised LCDS 2030 to approximately US$400 million. Looking further out, Vice President Jagdeo has projected this sector could eventually generate US$2 billion for Guyana, and potentially US$4 to 5 billion at full scale.

That is hundreds of millions in carbon dollars — earned by selling the world access to Guyana’s standing forests — forests that belong to all Guyanese, not merely those connected to the administration’s inner circle.

And still, the government needs your money.

The question that demands an answer is not rhetorical. It is foundational: What, precisely, is all of this revenue financing — if not the public infrastructure the diaspora bond now proposes to build?

The Accountability Deficit

The opposition has raised alarm bells that should disturb every prospective investor.
Parliamentarian Dr. Terrence Campbell has flagged that withdrawals from the Natural
Resource Fund have amounted to approximately US$2.61 billion over three years —
US$607 million in 2022, over US$1 billion in 2023 alone — and has initiated legal
proceedings challenging the transparency of those withdrawals.

Between 2022 and late 2025, billions in oil and carbon revenue have flowed into
government accounts. Meanwhile:

•Infrastructure projects continue to be plagued by chronic delays and cost overruns.

•Procurement processes remain opaque, with contracts awarded under conditions
that resist independent scrutiny.

•Tax concessions, state subsidies, and government-backed financing
disproportionately benefit foreign and politically connected commercial interests.

•The IMF, in its 2025 country report on Guyana, noted that despite governance
improvements, the fiscal deficit remained at 7.3% of GDP in 2024 and was projected to stay near 4.9% of GDP in 2025 — even amid unprecedented resource revenues.

A government running structural deficits while sitting on billions in oil and carbon wealth
does not have a revenue problem. It has a discipline problem.
And it is asking you to paper over that problem with your savings.

Squandermania — A Pattern, Not an Accident

This is not the first time that extraordinary resource wealth has been captured and
poorly managed in this region. The term squandermania — coined to describe oil-rich
nations that fritter away generational wealth on patronage, vanity projects, and
bureaucratic bloat — was not invented for Guyana, but it applies with uncomfortable
precision.

Consider what is in play simultaneously:

•Billions in oil profit oil payments, with the government’s own withdrawal formula now
under legal challenge.

•Nearly US$400 million in carbon credit sales over three years, with hundreds of
millions more projected, under a deal that monetizes Guyana’s forests — a national
patrimony — at rates critics argue are below their true value.

•Record budget allocations, including GY$100.3 billion for the security sector alone in
2026.

•A fiscal deficit that persists regardless of inflows.

Now add a diaspora bond.

If the NRF cannot finance roads, hospitals, energy grids, and digital infrastructure —
what has US$2.6 billion in withdrawals been spent on? If carbon credit revenues
approaching half a billion dollars cannot address public infrastructure gaps — who
exactly is benefiting from those funds?

These are not opposition talking points. They are arithmetic.

The Diaspora Has Already Paid

For decades — through economic collapse, political persecution, and the long years of
underdevelopment that drove hundreds of thousands abroad — the Guyanese diaspora
kept this nation alive. Remittances stabilized foreign exchange. They funded surgeries,
school fees, and funeral costs. They built houses and buried parents. They kept entire
villages economically viable when the state had abdicated its responsibilities.

That generation of sacrifice has never been formally acknowledged by this government.
There has been no serious reparative policy, no preferential investment framework, no
genuine institutional effort to bring diaspora capital home on fair terms — not until now,
when it is convenient.

President Ali, speaking at Rice University’s Baker Institute in May 2026, framed it
plainly: “How do we unlock their financing? How do we create opportunities for their
investments?”

Note the architecture of that sentence. The diaspora is not a constituency to serve. It is
a financing pool to unlock.

What a Legitimate Instrument Would Look Like

A diaspora bond is not inherently objectionable. Israel’s State of Israel Bonds and India’s
various NRI bond issuances have raised billions legitimately — but they rested on a
foundation that Guyana’s current administration has not established:

Full structural transparency. What specific projects will this bond finance? What are
the precise terms — interest rate, tenor, currency of repayment, redemption
mechanism? What legal protections exist for overseas investors if the government
defaults or changes the terms?

Independent oversight. Who audits the use of proceeds? Is there a third-party
mechanism — international or domestic — with genuine authority and public reporting
obligations?

Risk disclosure. What is the sovereign credit risk profile? What recourse exists? What
happens to these bonds under a change of government?
A prior accounting. Before asking for new money, account for the billions already
collected. A government that cannot explain where US$2.6 billion in NRF withdrawals
went has no credible standing to solicit fresh investment.

Parliamentary mandate. Has this bond been debated, structured, and authorized
through the National Assembly? Or is it another initiative launched by executive
declaration, bypassing the legislature that represents all Guyanese?

None of these conditions appear to have been met. What has been offered instead is a
sentiment — love of country — dressed up as a financial product.

The Bottom Line

This is not patriotism. It is opportunism wearing a flag pin.
The Guyanese diaspora is not a venture capital fund for a government that cannot
account for its existing revenues. They are not obligated to subsidize infrastructure that
oil money, carbon credits, and mining royalties should already be building. They are not
responsible for covering a fiscal deficit created by a combination of structural
mismanagement, patronage spending, and procurement irregularities.

Every Guyanese abroad who is tempted by this offer should ask one simple question
before signing anything: If Guyana cannot afford to build its own roads and hospitals on
petroleum revenues of US$2.6 billion a year, carbon credit revenues approaching
US$200 million a year, and a Natural Resource Fund balance of US$3.6 billion — then
where, exactly, has the money gone?

Until that question is answered — fully, publicly, and verifiably — the only responsible
position is caution.

Due diligence is not disloyalty. Demanding accountability is not a betrayal of Guyana.

It is the highest form of love for it.

The 592 Guardian holds no brief for any political party. We hold a brief for the Guyanese people–at home and abroad

US Ambassador on Guyana’s Independence

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BY: GHK Lall

I really thought that the script had changed.  I really have to stop making these mistakes.  I erred about America’s regret over its role in changing the history of this country.  What could have been but now can never be known.  US Ambassador, Excellency Nicole D. Theriot, did the honors.  In an OP: Ed piece in Kaieteur News, this is what the now energetic and increasingly vocal American plenipotentiary had to say on Guyana’s Independence Diamond Jubilee: “I am honored to reflect on six decades of friendship, partnership, and shared progress between our two nations.  President Lyndon B. Johnson, welcoming Prime Minister Burnham to the White House just weeks after Guyana’s independence in July 1966, captured the spirit of that moment.”  I am sorry, Excellency, to be the party pooper.  But clinically, this must be dissected, dealt with cards face-up on the table.

President Johnson welcoming Prime Minister Burnham so shortly after Guyana gained Independence was the icing on America’s cake.  Recognition and reward for Guyana holding the line against the spread of communism.  Guyana is not contributing as one more fallen domino in the heat of the Big Power faceoff.  America’s AFL-CIO did its part.  So did America’s CIA and those it cultivated in the local environment to thwart communism’s march.  The PPP was then heart and soul for communism, Marxism, and socialism.  Thus, it lost out on that first battle.  Today, it is proud to count among its own, right up there in the Office of the President, those who were among communism’s (and Jagan’s) vilest enemies.  My word shouldn’t be taken.  The archives are there.

Without giving him any inch than I do, LFS Burnham did what he had to do to cultivate that “friendship and partnership” of which Ambassador Theriot spoke so engagingly, so lushly.  It came at a price, which he wasn’t ready to pay.  Regardless of what was and is still thought of him, there was a line that Mr. Burnham couldn’t and wouldn’t cross.  Not when country and people have to be betrayed and sold down the drain.  He became an enemy.  So, the script was scrubbed.

The PPP of Dr. Jagan first, then Dr. Jagdeo, studied that same script.  In this context, Dr. Ali is of no value, merely a hanger-on, who is in the right place and right time to be a beneficiary, one of the biggest.  Dr. Jagdeo more than Dr. Jagan decided that since the Americans couldn’t be beaten in a head-on fight, then beat them with tricks at their own game.  Become bigger capitalists than the capitalists themselves.  What can be bigger, brighter and more beautiful than “sanctity of contract?”  Now, there’s “friendship and partnership” of the kind that neither Burnham nor Jagan would ever kneel before, come within 100 years of considering, much less approving.  Pres Ali is the one doing the parroting about “sanctity of contract.”  But the credit belongs to Dr. Jagdeo.  When power and its consolidation and retention are part of the equation, then “sanctity of contract” is what it will have to be.

It is fasconating to watch Excellency Theriot manifest some of that famed Louisiana fire, when she lit that Independence bonfire about 60 years of “friendship and partnership.”  To whose advantage, to whose loss?  There is Exxon, redder and whiter and bluer than America.  More Golden Arrowhead nowadays than Guyanese.  Take a bow, Ambassador of Oil, Mr. Alistair Routledge.  With friends and partners of this caliber, I will take my chances with Dr. Guillotin.  It is better to lose my head for standing for what is believed.  It would be a crime inconceivable to join with those who hang themselves by the nuts from their betrayals of people and patrimony.  And for what, but the harlotry of power?  I urge my fellow Guyanese to review what it is that harlots do.  What they surrender.  What they sell.  And to whom they sell.  Those who come and go.  Those who take, then leave.  Whether corporate or country, this is the friendship and partnership between Guyana and America, as I see it, appalled by it, and am sickened by it.  Thanks, Ambassador Theriot for speaking to truth in a funny, most likely unwitting way.

The EPA Joined Exxon’s Side — Now It Wants Credit for “Protecting” You

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Editorial

After siding with the world’s most profitable oil company to gut an unlimited environmental guarantee, Guyana’s regulator breaks its silence with a statement of breathtaking audacity. The 592 Guardian is not buying it.

592 Guardian. Opinion

There is a particular kind of institutional dishonesty that does not lie outright, but instead arranges carefully chosen truths into a structure designed to mislead. The Environmental Protection Agency’s statement welcoming the Court of Appeal’s ruling on financial assurance for offshore petroleum operations is a masterwork of exactly that genre. It is, in plain language, spin dressed in the clothing of principle — and the people of Guyana deserve to see it for what it is.

Let us begin with what the EPA’s statement conspicuously omits: the EPA was not a passive observer of this ruling. It was an active and willing participant in the effort to achieve it. When Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL) — the Exxon subsidiary that holds the environmental permit for Stabroek Block operations — appealed the High Court’s landmark ruling requiring an unlimited Parent Company Guarantee, the EPA did not stand aside in its duty as regulator. It did not file submissions defending the position that an unlimited guarantee was appropriate. It joined the appeal. Alongside Exxon and the Government of Guyana, Guyana’s own environmental watchdog argued in court to replace an unlimited liability mechanism with a capped financial assurance of $2 billion USD. That is the fact the EPA’s carefully worded statement never once states plainly.

“2 billion cap is not protection. It is a ceiling placed on what Guyanese citizens can ever recover when the worst happens.”

The High Court ruling that was overturned was not a technicality. It was a considered judicial determination that the scale of environmental risk posed by deepwater offshore operations in Guyana’s waters warranted the most robust financial protection available under law — an unlimited guarantee backed by Exxon’s parent company. That ruling was described as landmark precisely because it placed Guyanese law and Guyanese interests at the centre of petroleum regulation in a way that this country has rarely seen. The Court of Appeal has now reversed it. And the EPA, rather than offering any honest accounting of what has been lost, offers a press release telling us not to worry.

 THE DISTINCTION THAT DECEIVES
The EPA's statement makes much of the legal distinction between "financial assurance" and "liability." It is technically accurate. Liability is indeed the underlying legal obligation. Financial assurance is the mechanism that makes that obligation real and enforceable. But in making this distinction, the EPA reveals — whether it intends to or not — exactly why the High Court's original ruling mattered so profoundly.

Consider what it means in practice. Under Section 14 of the Environmental Protection Act, a company that causes environmental harm can be held “liable for the cost of any necessary restoration or remedial measures.” The EPA quotes this provision proudly, as though it settles the matter. It does not. A legal liability without a funded guarantee is a judgment against a company that may, when the catastrophe comes, restructure, withdraw, or simply be incapable of meeting an obligation of the scale that a Stabroek-level blowout would demand.

THE NUMBERS DO NOT LIE
The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico — a single blowout from a single well — ultimately cost BP in excess of $65 billion USD in cleanup costs, fines, settlements and economic damages. The Stabroek Block contains multiple active deepwater wells operating in one of the world's most ecologically sensitive marine environments, adjacent to Guyana's entire coastline and neighbouring Caribbean states.

The EPA and the Government of Guyana fought in court to limit the financial guarantee for this entire operation to $2 billion USD. Let that figure sit alongside $65 billion and ask yourself: whose interests were being protected?

Liability without enforceability is a promise written on water. It is precisely the function of financial assurance — an unlimited parent company guarantee — to ensure that if Exxon’s subsidiary in Guyana causes catastrophic harm, the parent’s full resources are legally committed to making Guyana whole. That is what was stripped away. The EPA’s statement that liability “remains” is true. The statement that Guyanese citizens are therefore protected is a misdirection of the highest order.

REGULATORY CAPTURE IN PLAIN SIGHT

This episode is perhaps the most explicit illustration yet of what independent analysts, civil society organisations and this publication have long observed: the regulatory framework governing Guyana’s oil sector has been structured not to maximise protections for the Guyanese people, but to minimise friction for the oil companies extracting Guyana’s wealth.

The EPA is not a neutral body that happened to share the same legal position as Exxon. It is the regulator — the institution specifically empowered by law to act as the guardian of Guyana’s environment against the risks posed by exactly this kind of industrial operation. When a regulator joins its regulated company in court to defeat a protection that a judge found appropriate and necessary, something has gone profoundly wrong with the regulatory relationship. That is not a minor procedural matter. It is a fundamental question about whether the EPA serves Guyana or serves the industry it is supposed to oversee.

The Government of Guyana’s presence in the same appeal carries its own implications. The government is, simultaneously, the licensing authority for petroleum operations, a shareholder through its National Resource Fund, and — through the EPA — the environmental regulator of those same operations. When all three capacities align to reduce the financial burden on a foreign oil company, the public is entitled to ask plainly: who in this arrangement speaks for the people of the Essequibo coast, the fishermen of the Demerara, the communities whose livelihoods sit downstream of whatever a blowout would bring?

 “The EPA broke its silence only to celebrate a ruling it helped engineer. That is not transparency. That is a victory lap.”

   THE SILENCE, THEN THE SPIN

It is telling that the EPA “broke its silence” — as it is being characterised — only after the ruling came down in its favour. There was no public communication from the Agency during the period between the High Court’s decision and the Appeal Court’s reversal explaining to the public why it believed an unlimited guarantee was inappropriate. There was no public interest statement. There was no engagement with the civil society voices arguing that unlimited guarantees are the global standard in high-risk offshore operations precisely because the consequences of failure are unlimited in nature.

Instead, the Agency waited for its preferred outcome, and then issued a statement framed not as accountability to the public it serves, but as a public relations exercise designed to pre-empt criticism. “The EPA wishes to make it absolutely clear,” the statement declares, that permit holders remain fully liable. One would wish the EPA had been equally eager to make things absolutely clear before the ruling — when transparency might have invited scrutiny rather than deflected it.

  WHAT MUST NOW BE DEMANDED

The ruling has been made. The court has spoken. The 592 Guardian does not litigate final judgments. But what comes after a ruling matters as much as the ruling itself, and what comes after this one must not be silence dressed as satisfaction.

The National Assembly must now demand a full accounting from the EPA of the basis on which it determined that a $2 billion cap constitutes adequate financial assurance for the Stabroek Block operations. That determination must be made public, subjected to independent technical review, and tested against international benchmarks. The Environmental Protection Act, if it is genuinely silent on the level of financial assurance required — as the Court found — must be amended to speak clearly and ambitiously, not quietly and conveniently.

Civil society, the legal community, and the Opposition must use every available avenue to ensure that the gap between “liability” and “enforceability” does not become the gap through which Guyana’s future is swallowed if the unthinkable occurs. And the EPA must be made to understand — by public pressure if not by institutional conscience — that its mandate is to the Guyanese people, not to the companies whose operations it permits.

Guyana is now an oil-producing nation of genuine global consequence. Its institutions must rise to that consequence. The EPA’s statement this week demonstrated that, so far, they have not.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.