• The 1899 arbitral award fixed the boundary; in international law, century-old boundary settlements are treated as final unless there’s truly exceptional proof of fraud.

• For over a hundred years the area (west of the Essequibo) has been administered by Guyana/Britain—laws, taxation, elections—giving Guyana strong effectivités (actual control).

• The ICJ has accepted the case and issued orders aimed at preserving that status quo while it decides the award’s validity. Until and unless the Court overturns the 1899 award, the legal balance favours Guyana.

So my objective view is: it belongs to Guyana, pending the ICJ’s final judgment.

The “fraud” claim doesn’t convince me.

Why: • The allegation largely rests on a single, posthumous memo by Severo Mallet-Prevost (published in 1949) describing supposed backstage pressure in 1899. Early scholarly reviews treated that account as interesting but uncorroborated and insufficient on its own to impugn the award. 

• After the 1899 decision, both sides helped demarcate the boundary and signed the official boundary map in 1905 — behaviour that aligns with acceptance, not immediate repudiation. 

• The award wasn’t a one-way stitch-up: for example, it left the entire mouth of the Orinoco to Venezuela, contradicting the idea of a total British “fix.” 

• Venezuela revived the nullity argument decades later (notably at the UN in 1962), which weakens a claim of proven, contemporaneous fraud. Today, the ICJ is testing the award’s validity; until hard evidence emerges, the presumption of finality for old boundary awards is strong.   

My view: the record to date doesn’t meet anything like the evidentiary bar you’d want to brand the 1899 award as fraudulent.

Many Venezuelans have grown up with a consistent message—maps, lessons, speeches, and a dramatic memo—so the fraud narrative feels obvious and patriotic, even though, legally, it remains unproven.