This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

One June morning last year, Gavindra Saywack, 26, set out from his home near the village of Whitewater in north-western Guyana and made the short trip by boat to Venezuela – one of hundreds of Guyanese who have found work at the region’s alluvial gold mines in recent years.

Four months later he was dead, murdered, says his father, by sindicatos – the violent gangs that now rule Venezuela’s eastern border.

“They shot him 200 times and threw him in a shallow grave,” said Patrick Saywack. “They took my boy, then took over the mine.”

As the crisis in Venezuela intensifies, the breakdown of law and order has been particularly acute in its remote eastern regions.

Quick guide Why is Venezuela in crisis? Show Hide Under the late Hugo Chávez, who ushered in Venezuela’s socialist revolution in 1999, a new constitution and numerous elections placed nearly all government institutions under the control of the ruling Socialist party. This concentration of power was aided by a feuding opposition which carried out ineffectual campaigns and electoral boycotts. After Chávez died of cancer in 2013, he was succeeded by Nicolás Maduro who is even less tolerant of dissent. Growing political authoritarianism has coincided with greater state dominance over the economy. But expropriations, price controls and mismanagement have led to a 40% contraction of the economy in the past five years. Oil accounts for 96% of Venezuela’s export income but many foreign companies have been driven out and production has dropped to a 30-year low. The resulting fiscal crisis has prompted the government to print more money, which has led to hyperinflation and a collapse of the currency. It also means that the government can’t import enough food and medicine to meet demand. Maduro has rejected economic reforms out of loyalty to socialism and because many government officials are allegedly getting rich off the economic distortions – through exchange rate scams and by selling scarce food on the black market.



And for border communities in neighbouring Guyana, a country of just 770,000 people on the northern shoulder of South America, the growing threat of cross-border criminal activity has exacerbated a century-old territorial dispute.

Whitewater, a settlement of fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, lies in the Essequibo region, a vast carpet of thick forest and meandering rivers that makes up two-thirds of the country’s territory.

Hunger Highway: desperate Venezuelans take hard road to Brazil Read more

Venezuela has claimed ownership of the region since the mid-19th century and has repeatedly warned off potential foreign investors in the region, costing Guyana billions of dollars in potential oil, mining and hydroelectric projects since its independence in 1966.

In March, Guyana filed a claim with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that it hopes will enshrine the country’s current borders.

“We have tried to use conciliation and other peaceful mechanisms but those options have been exhausted, our only resort is the ICJ,” said Carl Greenidge, the minister of foreign affairs.

To raise awareness of the ICJ case, the ministry even commissioned a soca song brimming with references to obscure border treaties and defiant lyrics such as: “Love our neighbours, let the good vibes flow / So why would they wanna take Essequibo?”

But in Whitewater the atmosphere is more anxious than defiant. A new patrol base for the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) was set up in February and on a recent afternoon, a handful of young recruits cleaned their weapons in the shade of the small wooden building.

For years, both governments have turned a blind eye to the unreported comings and goings in the border town. The village’s main dirt track peters out at a riverside landing bay where bare-chested men lug barrels of contraband Venezuelan gasoline from motorized canoes.

Entrepreneurial or desperate Guyanese have also trodden the path in the other direction, entering Venezuela to mine for gold. Miners say that until mid-2017 they paid members of Venezuela’s Guardia Civil 3oz of gold per month for the right to work.

Then, without warning, it was the sindicatos demanding the fee – and eliminating anyone who stood in the way of their business operations.

Late last year, Guyanese social media buzzed with a series of videos supposedly depicting the beheadings of Brazilian and Guyanese miners. “This is the worst brutality I have seen in my life – it’s worse than Isis,” said Gerry Gouveia, a former Guyana Defence Force soldier and pilot who runs a flight service to the region. “This criminality is spreading a huge sense of fear to businesses along the border.”

And the Venezuelan gangs are already making their influence felt in Guayanese territory. In April, miners in the town of Eterinbang, south of Whitewater, reported that heavily armed sindicatos had set up a base on the Cuyuni river and were attacking boats that refused to give in to their extortion attempts.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An illegal miner. Analysts said crime was rising with instability in Venezuela. Photograph: Jorge Silva/Reuters

Many Guyanaese suspect that the sindicato gangs operate in collusion with the Venezuelan government but Greenidge insisted that there is no evidence for the claims. Instead, he said, the gangs “recognize there is a dispute and a lack of cooperation between the countries. This creates a vacuum in the border region and it makes them bolder.”

Some international analysts are not so sure. “As the Venezuelan social and economic crisis intensifies, we have seen violence and crime in border regions increase significantly – and we expect it to continue to do so in the coming two years, unless we see an unlikely regime change” said Raúl Gallegos, the associate director of Control Risks, a political consultancy.

“The Venezuelan government has become essentially a joint venture between extreme leftists and very corrupt bureaucrats. And some of these groups, especially inside the military and the investigative police, have links with criminal organizations working in kidnapping, extortion and gold mining.”

President Nicolás Maduro has form in stoking nationalist fervour over Essequibo. In July 2015 – two months after ExxonMobil discovered huge oil deposits off the coast of Guyana – he issued a decree claiming ownership of vast parts of Guyanese waters and established the Essequibo Rescue Office telling countrymen “we are going to take back what our country left for us.” So far, however, the new government agency has remained inactive.