UN General Assembly
1962

64. For a good part of the past century, there were long and sometimes bitter disputes between Venezuela and Great Britain with regard to the boundaries of their respective territories in Guiana. On becoming an independent republic, we had inherited from Spain all the territory which up to 1810 formed the Capitanía General de Venezuela. In Guiana this territory was adjacent to the Dutch settlements of the Essequibo. By the Treaty of London of 13 August 1814 the Netherlands ceded approximately 20,000 square miles of this Dutch colony to Great Britain. The ceded territories bear the names of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice. At the expense of Venezuela and contrary to all legality, the British colony began to expand, and rich areas of our land were incorporated by a powerful Great Britain during the period of Victorian imperialism at such a pace that by the middle of the last century the 20,000 square miles had grown to 60,000 and, by the end of the century, had turned into a claim of an area of 109,000 square miles. There was no holding back Great Britain in its ambitions, and the territory which it desired would have stretched to the very mouth of the Orinoco, one of the great rivers of South America and the most important in Venezuela.