BUENOS AIRES, December 5. /TASS/. Brazil’s defense ministry has decided to deploy 20 armored vehicles to the border with Venezuela amid the escalating territorial dispute between Venezuela and Guyana, the G1 news portal reported.

The armored vehicles, along with 130 soldiers, will be sent to the state of Roraima in the north of the country, Brazilian Defense Minister Jose Mucio Monteiro said. According to the minister, this operation was planned long ago to prevent illegal mining in the region, but now these vehicles will be used to help protect the border.

Territorial dispute

Venezuela and Guyana have been at odds over a 159,500-square-kilometer area that sits west of the Essequibo River for more than 100 years. The territory, known as Guyana Essequibo, makes up more than two-thirds of Guyana and is home to 283,000 of the country’s little more than 800,000 residents.

The dispute escalated in 2015, when oil fields holding at least 10 billion barrels were discovered in the area and Guyana granted a concession for the development of oil fields on the non-delimited shelf to ExxonMobil. In September, seven more transnational companies, including China National Offshore Oil Corporation, QatarEnergy, and TotalEnergies, were granted shelf development licenses by the Guyanese government.

ExxonMobil said in November that it had begun developing the third oilfield (Payara) of the 26,800-square-kilometer Stabroek Block and planned to produce up to 620,000 barrels a day in 2024, upping that amount to 1.2 million by 2027.

In April, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that it has jurisdiction over the dispute in Guyana’s lawsuit concerning border demarcation with Venezuela on the basis of the Arbitral Award of October 3, 1899 (Guyana v Venezuela, Paris), which, under pressure from the United Kingdom, ceded control over 90% of the disputed territory to Guyana, a British colony at that time. However, Venezuela, which insists on its sovereignty over Essequibo, does not recognize the ICJ’s jurisdiction over the dispute and demands direct border demarcation talks with Guyana, as stipulated by the 1966 Geneva Agreement.