Guyana

Friday

D.J. Taylor

Shiva Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere deserves its reissue

The Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 people were killed and a US congressman was shot dead on a Guyanese airstrip, has been written about in dozens of books. Shiva Naipaul met some of those aspiring Jonestown authors loafing on a Georgetown hotel terrace. “Sex. Race. Suicide. Murder. Corruption. A hot Third World country. That’s a classic mix,” one said to him. There have been both forensic and lurid accounts of the Jonestown apocalypse, in which crowds of American expats were forcibly dosed with cyanide-laced Flavor Aid, but nothing comes closer to its dark, post-colonial heart than Journey to Nowhere. The book was first published in 1981, three years after the massacre, but fell out of publication.

Wednesday

Andrew Gilligan

Revealed: David Lammy’s curious relationship with Guyanese Big Oil

From our UK edition

Better not tell Ed Miliband, but in spring 2022 his then shadow cabinet colleague, David Lammy, appears to have struck oil. For the first time, The Spectator can tell the story of how, while serving as Britain’s shadow foreign secretary, Lammy was announced as the director of another country’s sovereign wealth fund – set up to (theoretically) channel newfound oil riches to its people, with a bit left over for the board. This was announced on 20 April 2022 in an official press release from the President of Guyana’s office about the Natural Resource Fund (NRF). The statement is still on the government website.

Tuesday

Joseph M. Humire

Is Venezuela preparing for war?

Earlier this month, two American supersonic fighter jets flew over Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana. The US show of force is not only for the attention of Venezuela’s socialist regime who has been escalating toward a military conflict with its smaller neighbor since at least September 2023 when Nicolás Maduro returned from Beijing. The message of sending two F/A-18 Super Hornets flying from a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailing in the Caribbean Sea is also for the Islamic Republic of Iran. At first glance, the Venezuela-Guyana conflict is about a century-old border dispute of a dense territory called the Esequibo that makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s land mass but only 15 percent of its population.

nicolas maduro venezuela

Monday

Juan P. Villasmil

Venezuelans voted to annex Guyana. What’s next?

Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro carried out a controversial referendum on whether more than two-thirds of Guyanese territory is Venezuelan land this Sunday, challenging the international community and making a mockery of the Biden’s administrations rapprochement. The results for the referendum are in, with all of the propositions receiving more than 95 percent approval, according to the country’s electoral council.

guyana