Soyi­ni Grey

Se­nior Re­porter

Trinidad and To­ba­go Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and Bar­ba­dos Prime Min­is­ter Mia Mot­t­ley will be the last of the Cari­com Heads fly­ing in­to St Vin­cent and the Grenadines to­day, to join that coun­try’s Prime Min­is­ter, Dr Ralph Gon­salves, for the cru­cial dis­cus­sion be­tween the pres­i­dents of Guyana and Venezuela in the on­go­ing Es­se­qui­bo mat­ter.

Row­ley and Mot­t­ley are sched­uled to ar­rive just hours be­fore the meet­ing. The prime min­is­ters of Grena­da, Do­mini­ca, The Ba­hamas and St Lu­cia were sched­uled to ar­rive on the is­land yes­ter­day.

Oth­er high-lev­el at­ten­dees in­clude Cel­so Amor­im, of Brazil. He is a for­mer for­eign min­is­ter who will re­place his Pres­i­dent Lu­la Igna­cio Da Sil­va, who, de­spite ini­tial­ly agree­ing to at­tend, has had to change his plans. Sim­i­lar­ly, UN Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al An­to­nio Guter­res is al­so send­ing two of his more se­nior diplo­mats to at­tend in his stead. They in­clude the Chef de Cab­i­net in his Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fice Ear­le Courte­nay Rat­tray, a Ja­maican, who will be ac­com­pa­nied by a se­nior diplo­mat from the de­part­ment of Po­lit­i­cal and Peace­build­ing Af­fairs.

Gon­salves used his mem­ber­ship in Cari­com and the Com­mu­ni­ty of Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean States (CELAC) to bro­ker the meet­ing be­tween his two friends, Ali and Maduro.

As for its tone, Dr Gon­salves is very clear that this meet­ing isn’t a me­di­a­tion. In fact, he told NBC Ra­dio, “As an in­ter­locu­tor, what I want to see is the res­o­lu­tion of mat­ters con­se­quen­tial to the bor­der dis­pute.”

In this ap­proach, he finds sup­port from Guyana’s pres­i­dent.

In con­ver­sa­tion with a mix of lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al me­dia on Tues­day and while still in Guyana, Ali said while there will be no budg­ing on the bor­der is­sue, bar­ring the pend­ing de­ci­sion of the In­ter­na­tion­al Court of Jus­tice, there were still is­sues to dis­cuss with Venezuela’s Maduro.

“We say we’re part of the same re­gion. If we’re both con­cerned about the de­vel­op­ment of our coun­try, the de­vel­op­ment of our peo­ple, there’s so many things to talk about,” he said.

“You have the mi­gra­tion is­sue, you have cli­mate change, you have con­se­quen­tial mat­ters.”

Maduro has an­nounced sev­er­al plans for the re­gion he calls Guayana Es­e­qui­ba and says he will ad­dress the mat­ter with Ali di­rect­ly at to­day’s meet­ing. He has al­so said he will not recog­nise the off­shore oil li­cences grant­ed to Exxon by Guyana. In the past, he has said he wel­comes di­a­logue on the mat­ter but was open­ly con­temp­tu­ous of Guyana’s out­reach to the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty for as­sis­tance, claim­ing they were work­ing with the Unit­ed States to turn the dis­put­ed ter­ri­to­ry in­to a base for the Unit­ed States South­ern com­mand.

But for­mer head of In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions at UWI, St Au­gus­tine, Prof An­tho­ny E Bryan, yes­ter­day told Guardian Me­dia that Maduro can­not even ac­cess the Es­se­qui­bo.

Bryan said “the on­ly way he can get to the Es­se­qui­bo is through the Ro­raima (Venezuela) area, which is po­liced by Brazil. It would be very, very dif­fi­cult for the Venezue­lan army to do any­thing in that re­gard”.

He said that part of Venezuela is al­so moun­tain­ous and dif­fi­cult to ac­cess, which Prof Bryan said to­day’s meet­ing will amount to a love­ly vis­it from which very lit­tle will be achieved.

(See sto­ry be­low)