To the Victor Belong the Spoils —But Whose Spoils, and Whose Silence?

 THE GRAMMAR OF PATRONAGE

To the Victor Belong the Spoils —But Whose Spoils, and Whose Silence?

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

On September 22nd, Donald Trump grinned and gave a thumbs-up as he posed for a photograph beside Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s unelected interim president, at the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan. Seven miles away, in a Brooklyn jail, sat Nicolás Maduro — the man US special forces dragged from his compound in Caracas in January, and the man on whose behalf Rodríguez once served as vice president. The next day, from the same rostrum where she had denounced Washington’s “state terrorism” in 2019, Rodríguez thanked Trump for “renewing cooperation,” pledged elections with no date attached, and declared, of the oil agreement her government struck with Washington last month, that “to the victor belong the spoils.”

It is a precise epitaph for the arrangement. The deal grants the United States effective control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves. Trump is pursuing some $100 billion in fresh investment into an industry Rodríguez’s government now administers largely at Washington’s pleasure. An AtlasIntel/Bloomberg poll finds more than 60 percent of Venezuelans disapprove of her leadership.

She did not set a date for the vote she promised. She did not need to. She had already secured the only endorsement that currently matters: a photograph, a handshake, and a president who has said, through an aide, that “Delcy is a key to that” — Venezuela being, in the same breath, called “the president’s top success.”

Guyana’s editors will recognise the shape of this trade before they recognise its details. We have our own oil, our own patron, and — as of this week — our own quiet accumulation of American financing arriving in a season when this country’s own democratic machinery has sat idle for a year. The question this editorial puts to President Ali’s government, and to Washington, is not whether Georgetown is Caracas. It plainly is not; on the one front where Venezuela pressed hardest — the Essequibo — Ali held his ground at the same UN podium Rodríguez had used a day earlier, rejecting her call to bypass the International Court of Justice in favour of bilateral talks she does not have standing to demand. That is on the public record and this newroom will not pretend otherwise.

The question is narrower, and closer to home: on the front where Venezuela’s president has openly deferred her own electorate — the promise of a vote, indefinitely delayed; does Guyana’s government enjoy a comparable deference from the same patron? And if so, on what terms is that deference being extended?

A DEADLINE ALREADY MISSED, QUIETLY

Guyana’s local government elections are constitutionally biennial. The last were held in June 2023, themselves three years late. The next are statutorily due by November 2026. Standing in the way is the Guyana Elections Commission, which has not convened a single meeting since the September 2025 general and regional elections — not one, in a year — and whose composition still answers to a Parliament that no longer exists. The three opposition-nominated commissioners, Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin and Desmond Trotman, were seated by APNU+AFC, the coalition that lost its status as the principal opposition bloc to Azruddin Mohamed’s WIN in the 2025 election. WIN, the largest opposition party in the National Assembly, holds zero seats on the body that will decide whether, and how, the next elections are run.

Opposition Leader Mohamed submitted replacement nominees to President Ali on June 30th. He received no substantive response. He followed up on August 7th. Still nothing. On August 19th, his office issued a formal statement, “Guyana’s Electoral Institutions at a Crossroads,” and dispatched it directly to the United Nations Secretary-General, the CARICOM Secretary-General, the British and Canadian High Commissioners, the Carter Center — and the United States Ambassador, Nicole Theriot, by name.

“Constitutional and electoral institutions should recognise enduring democratic principles, not the identities of particular political parties. Governments change. Oppositions change. Political parties change. The constitutional framework must endure.”

That is the opposition’s own language, and it is worth sitting with, because it is notably modest in what it asks of the international community. It does not ask Washington, or London, or the Carter Center, to intervene in Guyana’s domestic legal affairs. It asks them to watch, and to say so — to lend the ordinary, low-cost weight of attention that a functioning diplomatic community extends to a democratic ally whose electoral machinery has stalled.

FIVE WEEKS OF NOTHING, THEN A QUESTION

The Carter Center, to its credit, did not wait to be asked. On August 5th — a full two weeks before Mohamed’s office formally addressed the diplomatic corps — the Center issued its own statement, noting “with considerable concern the current impasse surrounding the composition” of GECOM, and warning plainly that without a functioning commission, “GECOM will be unable to organize local government elections by the statutory deadline this year.” It was issued alone. Not jointly with the US Embassy. Not jointly with the European Union.

A solo statement, from the one international body in Guyana whose institutional memory of this country’s elections runs longest.

What followed that statement, and Mohamed’s direct appeal to her by name three weeks later, was five weeks of silence from the United States Embassy in Georgetown. No statement. No press release. Nothing from the State Department in Washington either — whose only public word on Guyana’s elections since the 2025 vote remains a one-paragraph congratulatory note to President Ali on his reelection, issued the week of the vote itself, and silent on everything that has happened to this country’s electoral machinery since.

The silence broke on September 23rd — not in a statement, not in a briefing, but on the sidelines of an unrelated gathering, the 27th Americas Regional Conference, when a reporter asked Ambassador Theriot directly whether she considered Mohamed’s concerns valid. “He’s the leader of the opposition and we take his concerns very seriously,” she said, “and we have, indeed, all received that correspondence, all of the diplomats that I know here in Guyana, and we take it very seriously and his concerns are valid.” Asked whether GECOM needed to move forward, she did not equivocate:

Those are, on their face, the correct words. Those are also words that existed, evidently, for five weeks before anyone heard them — held in reserve until a journalist’s question made their withholding no longer tenable. Theriot disclosed, in the same exchange, that the diplomatic missions have been meeting individually with the opposition rather than issuing anything jointly. That is itself a downgrade from the coordinated posture Washington, London, Ottawa, Brussels and the Carter Center were willing to adopt as recently as election day 2025.

A joint statement carries cost; it commits every signatory publicly, on the record, to a shared position. Individual meetings, held quietly and disclosed only when asked, carry none.

THE FINANCING ARRIVED ON SCHEDULE

Whatever hesitation attended Washington’s willingness to speak about Guyana’s stalled elections, no comparable hesitation attended its willingness to finance Guyana’s infrastructure. On the same UNGA sidelines where Ali met his moment with Rodríguez’s rival claim to the Essequibo, he also met with US EXIM Bank Chairman John Jovanovic, who confirmed the bank’s readiness to lend up to $550 million toward the second phase of the Wales Gas-to-Energy project — on top of the $527 million already committed to Phase One — while folding in fresh discussion of financing for the Berbice Deepwater Port, affordable housing, and security infrastructure. Jovanovic called it a portfolio: GTE, the port, housing, “security, and other areas of national interest.” Ali, for his part, thanked EXIM for “the partnership that is growing between US, EXIM, Guyana, and our other international stakeholders.”

Nothing about this financing is improper on its own terms, and this newsroom has covered its energy and industrial logic elsewhere. What is worth naming is the coincidence of timing and register. In the same week, at the same conference, by the same government, two separate American institutions delivered two separate messages to Georgetown: one, delivered proactively, unprompted, with dollar figures attached and a Chairman’s personal presence — money, moving. The other, delivered only under direct press questioning, with no dollar figures, no personal visit, and five weeks of prior silence — concern, withheld until asked.

Rodríguez received a photograph and a thumbs-up for deferring an election indefinitely. Ali received $550 million in financing discussions the same week his own elections commission marked a year without meeting — and an American ambassador’s endorsement of his opposition’s concerns arrived only because a reporter asked.

This is the precise sense in which the Rodríguez parallel holds, and the precise sense in which it must be qualified. Venezuela’s interim president converted acquiescence into visible reward: a handshake with the man who jailed her predecessor, staged for cameras, on the same trip where she declined to name an election date. Guyana’s president has not acquiesced on the Essequibo — the record from this week’s UNGA session shows him doing the opposite, anchoring Guyana’s position in the ICJ’s binding jurisdiction against Rodríguez’s own appeal, one day earlier from the same podium, to bypass it. That distinction matters and this newsroom will not blur it for the sake of a tidier analogy.

But the border is not the only front on which a government’s deference to Washington can be measured, and it is not the front this editorial is concerned with today. The deference in question here is domestic: whether Guyana’s own government, and Guyana’s own international observers, treat a year-long stall in the machinery of local democracy with the urgency the Carter Center itself has called for — or whether, as in Caracas, the appearance of partnership with Washington is permitted to substitute for the substance of an electoral calendar kept on time.

WHAT SILENCE COSTS

The Opposition Leader’s own framing bears repeating, because it anticipates the objection that this is somehow a request for foreign meddling. It is not. Guyana’s constitution, not Washington’s State Department, sets the statutory deadline for local government elections. Guyana’s own courts, not the Carter Center, are the appropriate venue for resolving whether Article 161(3)(b) requires GECOM’s opposition-nominated seats to reflect the 2025 result — a remedy Mohamed has repeatedly threatened to pursue and has not yet filed.

But an invited observer’s silence is not neutral, and a diplomatic corps that reserves its concern for the moment a reporter forces the question is not merely being cautious — it is choosing, each of the five intervening weeks, not to spend the modest political capital that a public statement costs. Rodríguez’s government has learned precisely how little that capital costs a patron who wants a return on its investment more than it wants a functioning opposition on the other side of the ledger.

The test of whether Guyana’s government, and Guyana’s American patron, have learned the same lesson will not be settled by an ambassador’s answer to a question she did not volunteer to address. It will be settled by whether GECOM meets before November, whether local elections happen on the calendar the constitution sets, and whether the diplomatic community that professes to “take these concerns very seriously” is willing to say so before being asked — not after.

— The Board