Brokering the Border Wars – LAC limbo on barbed lines of demarcation as Venezuela-Guyana dispute heightens
Dr Kris Rampersad 
Brokering Peace Border Wars Threat Global with Dr kris Rampersad
Barbed Wires Between Belize Guatemala
The old woman sitting in her hammock raises her head as my friend and local guide, a retired school principal calls out to her. A thin barbed-wire fence, broken in parts, stand between us.
She beacons us in. She is in Spanish-speaking Guatemala. We are in English-speaking Belize.
My friend raises the wire and limbos under, exchanging greetings and small chit-chat in Spanish as locals do at the borders, moving fluidly back and forth. Then he turns back and joins me standing by the wire on the Belize side. We cross the football field which sits half in Arenal, Guatemala, towards the other half in Arenal, Belize to walk towards the car. There are no wires on the dividing line of the football field.
As he comes through to join me back on the Belize side, the limber barbed-wire fence rebounds and nicks me in the eyelid. I think nothing of it, until I feel my vision blur. I pass my hand and it is filled with blood.
I see no visible lines of demarcation or indicatorsbetween the two countries. The barbed wire is the private property of the old woman. Only locals, and maybe not all would know that her house and the football field sit on the borderline between two countries. To them, there are no divisions!
A Stitch In Time
Holding a tissue to stem the blood, I take deep breaths expecting that it is just a nick. It stings. My friend takes a quick decision, accelerates the car and we are on the doorstep of the local healer.
The village nurse, Nurse Moh, passes her fingers gently over the lid and with a few soothing strokes, stitches up the nick where the wire had pulled the skin off the eyelid. Within seconds it is over. The bleeding stops and miraculously, too, the stinging pain.
She sits me up and holds up a small mirror to my face. I squint with one eye. The sutures on the other lid are like the fine filigree of the native needlework the local Mayan women had displayed with pride at the session I conducted on safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Belize.
Traditional Suturing
If only such suturing could mend the rips and torn relations that fester just skin-deep between and among the countries of the continent.
If only such indigeneous suturing could mend the rips and torn relations that fester just skin-deep between and among the countries of the continent.
Dr Kris Rampersad on disunity among countries
At political levels that is – at the people and community levels, a retired school teacher may duck under a superficial line of demarcation to visit his friend or relative on the other side. No barbed wires divide them.
Belize-Guatemala Dispute at International Court of Justice
As with the Venezuela-Guyana territorial dispute, the dispute between Belize and Guatemala has been before the International Court of Justice, the judicial arm of the United Nations, for the past 15 years – that is longer than the nine-year terms of the ICJ’s 15 judges.
It presides at the Peace Palace in The Hague in the Netherlands.
Established with the UN in the post world-war to hold world peace in check, the blind wheels of justice are not entirely sure, nor swift. Leaders know how to limbo on its processes and its patience.
Through protestations by Belize, Guatemala had requested extensions to submit its statements, leading to the delays in the Court’s adjudication, administering its role to, in its own words, ‘first settle, in accordance with international law, through judgments which have binding force and are without appeal for the parties concerned, legal disputes submitted to it by States; and, second, to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by duly authorized United Nations organs and agencies of the system.’
Local Crossings
On an earlier visit to Belize, my Mayan friends, eager to show me the beauty of their homeland take me to a stream, just a few meters wide. I make to take off my sandals to feel the cool clear water, musically gurgling over pebbles.
‘Not yet,’ they stay me, pointing to a raft-like contraption being operated with a pulley approaching us.
We board and within a few minutes we are in Mexico via the local crossing.
They show their local IDs – me, my passport – to a sleepy guard at a small cubicle that passes for ‘Border Control.” He puts the stamp of approval and access. Sure beats the 90 minute drive to the airport, three-hour wait, onerous security checks before flight and arrival procedures!
Spicy LAC Culinary Concoctions on Belize-Mexico Border
The guard nods at them familiarly. They cross over regularly – to buy bread made the traditional way in a large local dirt oven – another of the ancient culinary heritage traditions as the seven hour-long process of making tamales we had recreated as an exercise in documenting disappearing native culinary heritage practices from harvesting through the manual labour of preparation and creation of the indigeneous staple that is part of the cultural cuisine of the entire region.
Customary Traditional Practice vs Imposed Laws
Local customary practice, as the native people’s belief in their borderless world, and imposed alien laws often jar and create conflict between countries if not communities. It is a fine line and we often have to confront this in adjudicating or guiding communities to access UNESCO Protocols which uphold local and international laws. Sometimes the boundaries are not so clearcut! It is only owing to my understanding of the fine lines and permutations in local-global animosities that we were able to propel some o the countries into state of consensus required for international recognition.
At a hut roofed with palm leaves, we stop to enjoy some of the local ceviche – a spicy concoction made from vegetables indigeneous to Latin America – chopped tomatoes, avocadoes, cucumbers, onions and chillies that flavour fresh shrimp, then take the crude ‘raft/ferry’ back. Another re-crossing.
‘This is our America. We are all Americans,’ my Mayan friend laughs.
‘This is our America. We are all Americans,’ my Mayan friend laughs.
Dr Kris Rampersad Journeys Across Latin America & the Caribbean tenuous borders
‘The Treaty of Tortillas,’ I rejoin with a chuckle. It is my interpretation of the Treaty of Tordesillas that had first demarcated for the rival monarchs of Spain and Portugal, and propelled subsequent regional fracturing as other territories of Europe stumbled in, lured by the region’s rich resources. As the bounty of the lands drew more conquistadors, the tortilla was cut up in more and more parts – this to the Dutch, this to the French, this to the British, over the last three hundred years. It further crumbles in the civil wars that wracked the region in its quest for Independence of the colonisers’ creation. The sores fester in the greed of subsequent political inheritors. The kinship ties run deeper.
Ritualistic Friendly Aggression India-Pakistan
The experiences of this region transport me back to experiences in another – across the the world, a little over a decade earlier.
It is twilight. Confronting my own ‘cold war’, nursing a flu from the change in intensity of the climate, pollution and dust, I join throngs jostling near tall imposing gates marked with the Lion of Ashoka Indian national emblem, and beyond it the white crescent moon with five-pointed star accentuated against dark green, the emblem of Pakistan.
As we wait at the India-Pakistan Border at Attari-Wagah, I start up a conversation with the woman next to me. She is straining her neck, as so many others, to see beyond the gates. She comes every evening to see her family, she says – her ritual of more than forty years, having been separated when the gates closed on the borders and she was a mere child.
One could not be immune to the overflow of emotion exuding from all around.
Beating Retreat! Ritualistic Ramajay At India-Pakistan Border
The large iron gates open against the backdrop of the setting sun to unveil similar throngs eagerly straining their necks on the other side as the guards put-on their own ritualistic ramajay, as we would say, on those who thought to divide them.
I have never witnessed anything like it! Members of two rival armies in a ritualistic mimicry of the colonial partitioning! They synchronise lowering of their respective flag to the microsecond, as neither of the nation’s mast must descend, then folded, before the other. Soldiers in the uniforms of their respective nations, brown khaki on the Indian side and Green on Pakistan’s, meet on the borderline where the gate rests, perform an exaggerated march, legs stomping, hand-shaking, mock salutes, turn and retreat pretentiously in a macabre street theatre. The gates then clank shut. It is as emotional as it is comic and awesome. Emotions pour out in tears and audible sobs amidst the cheers, as it must have on that first bewildering day when a nation was cut apart.
Link Chain Fence of the Colonial Radcliffe Line
On the journey there by the bus of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication where I was on fellowship for the Non-Aligned News Agency (NANA) Journalism Diploma programme – eye-opening in the exposure to the many permutations of diversity in democracy – I could not help but notice what seems to be an unending link-chain fence that I would come to learn is the Indian border with Pakistan. The fence extends for miles parallel to the Grand Trunk Road that links India to the rest of Asia.
It was named the Radcliffe Line, for the technocrat Sir Cyril Radcliffe who drew it sitting in England, with neither knowledge of cartography nor local cultures – England’s solution to create separate territories for Muslims and Hindus of India on the occasion of their Independence from British rule – another festering canker in the world of animosities implanted in the colonial scramble – for the Americas, for Africa, for Asia.
Non Aligned Movement to respect Borders
The non-aligned movement (NAM) had grown in reaction to the post-world war Cold War which had fostered western and eastern alignments to the struggle for world dominance between the USA on Western Bloc and USSR on the Eastern, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
NAM, comprising some 120 countries, stands on the five principles of peaceful co-existence as described by foundation member India’s Jawaharlal Nehru: mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in domestic affairs, equality and mutual benefit and peaceful co-existence. Instrumental in consolidating the Independence movements against colonialism, racism and underdevelopment. It has in recent years been struggling to redefine itself to changes in geopolitical dynamics.
Tautening Limbo Line in escalating Guyana-Venezuela Tensions
Insufficiently schooled in the colonial underpinnings of intra-regional relations, media and social commentators today weigh-in with an all too narrow focus on the Venezuela-Guyana conflict and the escalating political tensions.
Fractures in LAC territorial tortilla
Meanwhile, Latin America and the Caribbean bow in limbo, as to the next chapter of peace in the region, aware that the region’s stability is only tenuous.
Beneath the skin-thin surface of the region’s eyelids are still-simmering tensions of implanted colonial and post-colonial contentions and animosities. Covetousness that mirror the colonial conquests hover over new explorations for mineral wealth. Porous borders facilitate the fluidity of legal and illegal migration and potential tensions on borders escalate.
Regional Fractures
They are reminders of persistent and latent tensions between not just Venezuela and Guyana but between Venezuela and Colombia, Guatemala and Belize, Guatemala and Mexico, Belize and Mexico, Mexico and USA, Colombia and Peru, Peru and Ecuador, Argentina and Chile, Chile and Peru, Brazil and Uruguay, Brazil and Bolivia, Bolivia and Chile, Peru and Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay, Paraguay-Bolivia-Brazil-Argentina, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, Panama and Colombia…
Even beyond the continental borders, disputes simmer between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago where T&T fishermen often find themselves in Venezuelan jails, charged by the Venezuelan Guardia Nacional of encroaching on territorial waters.
The outcomes and decisions of the current conflicts could well prove how the tortilla crumbles in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Brokering Peace Amidst the Tensions
It was the peace and consensus building processes at its finest. The UNESCO hall erupted in applause and a feeling of warmth and good-will overflowed like honey, presiding over motions that we moved to consensus – to establish an International Coordination Committee (ICC) for Preah Vihear Temple, included in the World Heritage List. The temple had long been subject to a border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand and we were unsure of how the motion for protection would play out.
Cambodia-Thailand shield swords to protect cultural heritage
The world had come together to protect the cultural property and give effect to the decision of the International Court of Justice that both countries as parties to the World Heritage Convention cooperate to protection of the site as a world heritage property, and obliges each State not to “take any deliberate measures which might damage directly or indirectly” such heritage.
Disputed Arab States find consensual community
Similarly too, was the consensus decisions for protecting educational and cultural properties in disputed Arab Territories of Syria and Palestine. Unfortunately, in for these decisions, the bombs now pouring over Palestine have no respect, as the powers are caught therein:
… a child’s game of besieged and besieging race who felt themselves driven to seek themselves ..miserable twins of faith… conquerors and invaders of all mankind.
— Wilson Harris Palace of the Peacock
To be continued….
Excerpts and extrapolations from my upcoming Autobiography – LIFE! HoleHeartedly!
About Dr Kris Rampersad
Dr Kris Rampersad is an Independent Thought Leader, award-winning journalist and content innovator, Sustainable Development Consultant and Facilitator documenting global processes of the Anthropocene.
She straddles spheres of media, culture and education as an expert on integrated sustainable developmental issues of the CARIBBEAN, SIDS, Developing World and the Global South. A Commonwealth Professional Fellow an Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, Indian Institute of Mass Communication and Foreign Press Centre with a PhD in Pre and Post Colonial Literature, she invented the world’s newest creative genre, the MultiMedia MicroEpic. It adapts the long-form classical epic for short-form new media which she piloted to the Commonwealth Scholars Forum at the height of the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Her online platform, the GloCaL Knowledge Pot features her developing multimedia expositions of CEIBA-EDUtainment, novel creations that blend education and entertainment for all ages and sectors from pre-school to policy-making through traditional, conventional and new media forms. Dr Rampersad is a National Geographic Educator, UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Facilitator, Global Woman Techmakers’ Ambassador, Google Digital Skills Ambassador and Small Island Innovators’ Ambassador. Internationally, she has served variously as President of the UNESCO Education Commission, Vice President of UNESCO Programme and External Relations Commission, Vice President and Independent Member of the Consultative Body to the InterGovernmental Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage and Vice President of the Commonwealth Journalists’ Association. More at https://krisrampersad.com/explore-our-world/who-we-are/dr-kris-rampersad-connecting-glocal-cultures/
To support, sponsor or collaborate on developing online resources in the GloCal Knowledge Pot as CEIBA-EDUtainment and MultiMedia MicroEpic interactive initiatives, new investigative research, multimedia publications and productions and digitisation of journalistic, academic and socio-cultural archives and development of online resource base You can make contact and connect through her web portal GloCaL Knowledge Pot, www.krisrampersad.com; as KrisRampersad on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest, KrisRampersad1 on Facebook and @Krisramp on X/Twitter.
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