Guyana’s Own Generalized Language

BRICS never named Washington on tariffs or Moscow on Ukraine. Georgetown has developed the same instinct — and nowhere is it clearer than in what has, and has not, been said about Berbice

OPINION BY: Staff–Writer

Part One of this series examined a declaration built almost entirely out of omissions — a document that could condemn tariffs without naming the United States and condemn sanctions without naming Russia, because naming either would have broken the consensus holding eleven governments together in one room. Guyana belongs to no such bloc and signed no such declaration. But the same instinct for language that commits to nothing while appearing to commit to something governs how this country has talked about its own most consequential piece of positioning between great powers: the deep-water port planned for the mouth of the Berbice River.

A DECADE, TWO PATRONS, NO PUBLIC RECONCILIATION

In 2015, the China State Construction Engineering Company signed a memorandum of understanding with the Guyanese government to conduct what was described as a “pre-pre-feasibility” study for a deepwater harbour at Berbice, at the company’s own expense and with no obligation attached to the state. It was a modest instrument, but it was real: a formal, signed acknowledgment that China had scoped this specific piece of infrastructure first. By 2023, American analysts tracking Chinese engagement in the hemisphere were still citing China State Construction and China Dalian as having examined the Berbice site.

Then the patron changed. By 2025 and into 2026, President Ali was confirming a feasibility study underway with Bechtel, the American engineering firm, and Hess Corporation, ExxonMobil’s former–partner in the Stabroek consortium, with costs shared between the state and Hess. The Modern Port Act followed as the legislative vehicle. Nowhere in the public record does the government explain what happened to the 2015 Chinese MoU in between. It was not formally cancelled, in any statement this newsroom has located. It was not renegotiated. It simply stopped being mentioned, and a new set of partners appeared to occupy the same physical site and the same strategic purpose.

The 2015 MoU was not cancelled. It was not renegotiated. It simply stopped being mentioned — and a new patron appeared to occupy the same site.

This is Guyana’s version of the BRICS declaration’s careful vagueness. Where the bloc avoided naming Washington on tariffs to preserve consensus among its own divided membership, Georgetown has avoided naming China’s earlier position on Berbice to preserve room to maneuver between two powers whose competition in this hemisphere is no longer subtle. The silence is not an oversight. It is the position.

THE SECURITY TRACK TELLS THE SAME STORY

The pattern repeats on the security side of the ledger. On August 12, 2026, Guyana signed an enhanced memorandum of understanding with the United States committing US$2 million toward “air domain awareness and unmanned aerial systems,”signed by Foreign Minister Hugh Todd and US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, and framed publicly around organized crime and drug trafficking. It built on a March 2025 security cooperation MoU, a March 2026 drone-monitoring and EEZ surveillance announcement, and a July 2026 exchange between the Guyana Defense Force and the Florida National Guard on drone concepts. During the same Landau visit, the two governments also discussed port, road, and housing infrastructure, and the visit referenced a recent US$150 million American bauxite investment.

What the government has not said — publicly, in any statement this newsroom has found — is how this new American security architecture sits alongside Huawei’s already-established role in the country’s surveillance infrastructure across at least two regions. Analysts have flagged the data-security implications of that arrangement for years. The Guyanese state has never addressed the two tracks in the same sentence, let alone explained how they will coexist, what data each side can see, or what happens if their interests diverge. Like BRICS declining to name Washington and Moscow in the same clause, Georgetown has kept its American security patron and its Chinese surveillance vendor in entirely separate public conversations, each described as though the other does not exist.

WHAT THE SILENCE IS ACTUALLY PROTECTING

None of this means Guyana has chosen a side, or should be read as covertly favoring one power over the other. That is precisely the point, and precisely what makes the comparison to the New Delhi Declaration useful rather than merely decorative. BRICS’s vagueness on Iran, Ukraine, and tariffs was not confusion — it was a deliberate technique for extracting the appearance of unity from genuinely divergent interests without forcing any member to choose. Guyana’s silence on the Chinese-to-American handoff at Berbice, and on the Huawei-to-Pentagon handoff in its surveillance architecture, serves an equivalent function: it lets the state accept infrastructure, financing, and security cooperation from both directions without ever being pinned to a public accounting of the trade-offs involved in either relationship.

The difference is that BRICS’s vagueness was negotiated in the open, across eleven governments, in a document anyone can read. Guyana’s has developed by omission — through MoUs that quietly stop being mentioned, and press briefings that describe each new arrangement as though it is the first and only one.

A rule-shaper, to use Modi’s phrase from the New Delhi summit, names its terms in public. What Guyana has practiced instead, on the two files that matter most to its position in a contested Atlantic corridor, is the diplomacy of the unstated MoU.

Part Three of this series tests Prime Minister Modi’s claim that the Global South is becoming a “rule-shaper” against Guyana’s actual conduct — measured against the Stabroek Block PSA, the pattern documented here, and what genuine leverage would look like if Georgetown chose to exercise it.