Wakapoa, Guyana – The threat had always been there, ever since Lloyd Perreira was a young child: that one day his ancestral home could be absorbed into the neighbouring country of Venezuela.
A member of the Lokono Indigenous people, Perreira considers his home Essequibo, a vast territory on the western flank of Guyana. He grew up in Wakapoa, a village composed of 16 islands on the Pomeroon River, nestled in the heart of the region.
“Even as a small boy, I remember hearing Venezuela saying Essequibo is theirs,” Perreira said. “But I also know I live in Essequibo, and as an Indigenous person, Essequibo is ours.”
Perreira is now the toshoa, or chief, of Wakapoa. But his childhood fears returned when Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro recently held a referendum to claim Essequibo as his country’s own.
“We were very scared when we saw the referendum,” Perreira said, as he picked a harvest of rare liberica coffee beans.
Though tensions have subsided since the December 3 referendum, the ongoing question of whether Essequibo could be annexed to Venezuela has sparked anxiety among those who call the territory home.
Nearly two-thirds of what is considered Guyana lies in Essequibo, a 159,500-square-kilometre (62,000sq mile) area lush with jungles and farms.
Along the Pomeroon River, coconuts are cultivated to make oil. Coffee shrubs blossom from riverbanks. And Indigenous groups like the Lokono harvest cassava for bread and cassareep, a syrup used to preserve food.
But the discovery of large oil deposits off its shores in 2015 reignited a decades-long territorial dispute over Essequibo. Experts estimate that more than 11 billion barrels of oil and natural gas could sit within its territory.
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