South America

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) — The government of Guyana, under pressure from neighboring Brazil and a Caribbean trading bloc, agreed Sunday to join bilateral talks with Venezuela over an escalating territorial dispute.

The century-old dispute between the two South American nations recently reignited with the discovery of masses of oil in Guyana. The government of Nicolas Maduro, through a referendum last week, has claimed sovereignty over the Essequibo territory, which accounts for two-thirds of Guyana and lies near big offshore oil deposits.

MONTEIDEO, Dec 8 (NNN-PRENSA LATINA) — A network that transported cocaine by air from Argentina to Uruguay was dismantled in a joint operation by the two countries’ prosecutors’ offices, it was announced here.

Argentine pilots brought the drugs on flights with over 400 kilos of cargo, reported El Pais newspaper.

The drugs came from Peru and were then transported in trucks to Montevideo, with the purpose of sending them to Europe.

GEORGETOWN, Dec 8 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Five Guyanese soldiers died this week when their helicopter crashed near Venezuela, President Irfaan Ali said as the neighbors faced off in a fast-escalating border dispute.
 
   Writing on Instagram, Ali said Guyana had lost “some of our best men in uniform” when the helicopter went down on Wednesday. An official said earlier that there was nothing to suggest Venezuelan involvement in the crash.

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Tuesday directed the country’s state-owned companies to “immediately” begin to explore and exploit the oil, gas and mines in Guyana’s Essequibo region, a territory larger than Greece and rich in oil and minerals that Venezuela claims as its own.

The announcement came a day a day after Maduro got the victory he sought in a weekend referendum on whether to claim sovereignty over the region.

CARACAS, Dec 4 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Venezuelan electoral authorities on Sunday claimed that 95 percent of voters in a nonbinding referendum approved of the nation’s territorial claim on a huge chunk of neighbouring oil-rich Guyana.

It is “an evident and overwhelming victory for the ‘Yes’ in this consultative referendum,” said the president of the National Electoral Council, Elvis Amoroso.

CARACAS, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) -- The Venezuelan government on Monday expressed strong condemnation of the latest Israeli airstrike against the international airport in Damascus, the capital of Syria.

The Foreign Ministry of Venezuela issued an official statement, in which it described the Israeli action as "generating political and military tension in the Middle East."

The Israeli missile attack against the Syrian infrastructure took place on Sunday afternoon and left the airport temporarily out of operation.