Guyanese soldier wounded in border gunfight with armed men in Venezuela

Source: THE AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

A Guyanese sol­dier was wound­ed fol­low­ing a gun­fight with armed men in Venezuela that oc­curred along their shared bor­der, au­thor­i­ties said.

The Guyana De­fense Force said in a state­ment that a pa­trol ves­sel on the Cuyu­ni Riv­er came un­der fire late Fri­day.

It is the lat­est of sev­er­al bloody clash­es in re­cent years as ten­sions re­main high over Venezuela’s claim to two-thirds of Guyana’s ter­ri­to­ry. One pre­vi­ous at­tack wound­ed eight Guyanese sol­diers.

The two coun­tries ap­peared ear­li­er this month be­fore the In­ter­na­tion­al Court of Jus­tice in The Hague for ar­gu­ments in a dis­pute over a 62,000-square-mile (160,000-square-kilo­me­ter) ter­ri­to­ry that is rich in gold, di­a­monds, tim­ber and oth­er nat­ur­al re­sources. It’s al­so lo­cat­ed near mas­sive off­shore oil de­posits cur­rent­ly pro­duc­ing an av­er­age 900,000 bar­rels a day.

Venezuela’s act­ing Pres­i­dent Del­cy Ro­dríguez has told judges in The Hague that po­lit­i­cal ne­go­ti­a­tions and not a ju­di­cial rul­ing will re­solve the cen­tu­ry-old dis­pute.

Venezuela con­sid­ers Es­se­qui­bo its ter­ri­to­ry be­cause the re­gion was with­in its bound­aries dur­ing the colo­nial pe­ri­od. It ar­gues that a 1966 Gene­va agree­ment among Venezuela, Britain and then-British Guiana, now Guyana, nul­li­fied a bor­der drawn in 1899 by in­ter­na­tion­al ar­bi­tra­tors. —GEORGE­TOWN, Guyana (AP)