Venezuela calls the shipment of a British warship to Guyana a “provocation”

United Kingdom announced this Sunday the sending of a military ship towards Guyana, one of its former colonies that maintains a pulse with Venezuela over the Essequibo, an oil-rich region administered by Georgetown.

“HMS Trent will sail this month to Guyana, our regional ally and Commonwealth partner, for a series of engagements in the region,” the British Ministry of Defense indicated in a statement.

According to the BBC, the ship must participate in military maneuvers after Christmas with other allies of Guyana, a British colony until 1966. The British network did not specify which other countries are involved.

The Minister of Defense of Venezuela, Vladimir Padrino López, called the sending of the military ship a “provocation.”

“A warship in waters to be delimited? And then? And the commitment to good neighborliness and peaceful coexistence? And the agreement not to threaten and use force against each other under any circumstances?” Padrino López published in

“We remain alert to these provocations that put the peace and stability of the Caribbean and our America at risk!” settled the Venezuelan military chief.

London had already shown its support for Guyana with the trip earlier in the week of David Rutley, head of British diplomacy in America.

He ‘HMS Trent’, which usually operates in the Mediterranean Sea, had already traveled to the Caribbean at the beginning of December to fight drug trafficking.

Venezuela maintains that Essequibo, a territory of 160,000 km2 rich in natural resources, is part of its territory, as in 1777, when it was a colony of Spain, and appeals to the Geneva agreement, signed in 1966, before Guyana’s independence from the United Kingdom, which laid the foundations for a negotiated solution and annulled an 1899 award, which Georgetown asks the ICJ to ratify.

Caracas has claimed this territory for more than a century, although it intensified its initiative after the discovery of vast oil reserves in the region in 2015 by the American company ExxonMobil.

Tensions between both countries increased after the holding of a referendum on the sovereignty of Essequibo on December 3 in Venezuela.

However, Presidents Ali and Maduro reduced the tension after their meeting in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, although they did not resolve their underlying differences.