By Ernesto Picco
Words by Ernesto Picco. Photography by Rudja Santos. Cover illustration by Sebastián Angresano. Translated by Jacob Sugarman.
This piece is the second in a series of three long reads about Guyana, French Guiana, and Suriname. It was reported with support from the Pulitzer Center. The full version was published in Anfíbia Magazine, in Spanish. Click here to read the original.
Wendy extended four fingers, pressed her thumb against her palm, and as she brought her huge hand to my face, announced: “Now we have four-lane streets. Four lanes!”
She lets out a laugh with her toothless mouth.
“Two coming, and two going. And do you know why that is? Because now we have oil! Of course Guyana is changing!”
Wendy tells me about the wonders of the new Guyana as we cruise down the Corantijn River from Suriname. She turns 62 next week and claims she’s in her prime. She was three when her country claimed independence from British rule and eight when President Arthur Chung amended the Constitution and declared the Cooperative Republic of Guyana.
In 2013, she was 53. That year, David Granger took office as the first president who didn’t belong to any of the multifaceted leftist groups that had ruled or vied for power in Guyana over the past 35 years. Granger, a former military officer trained in Great Britain and Nigeria, opened the country to foreign capital and negotiated with the executives of the American oil company, Exxon, which had discovered reserves containing 11 billion barrels in Guyanese waters. It was the largest oil discovery of the 21st century worldwide. Since then, everything has changed.
Guyana was a sugar plantation ruled by white tyrants during the 18th and 19th centuries. After gaining its independence, it saw internal struggles between Afro-Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese, Chinese and indigenous peoples, who organized themselves into various left-wing parties that were radical, paranoid, and pragmatic, each to varying degrees. Now, economic liberalization has converged with an historic discovery of oil, and the country finds itself in a frenzy fueled by fresh dollars that are building roads, bridges, and buildings everywhere. They pose a stark contrast to the landscape of ruined houses, stray animals, ancient Hindu temples and half-crumbling Catholic churches. The new is piled up on top of the old and broken, as if time itself had accelerated and left no opportunity to restore order.
Guyana is the fastest-growing country in the world. Between 2015 and 2023, its GDP jumped from $3 billion to $14 billion. The IMF projected economic growth of 42.8% for 2024. Its estimate for China was 4.8%, for Brazil 2.5%, for the United States 2%, and for Russia 1.5%.
This rapid growth, disproportionate to the rest of the world, has brought its share of problems: a lack of human resources for the necessary technical tasks and developments, multiple allegations of corruption, and the various difficulties that come with allotting public funds. A mixture of enthusiasm and suspicion reigns in Guyana.
Wendy is among the enthusiasts. As we cross the river, she tells me she has a business selling food in Linden, the second largest city. She adds that Georgetown, the capital, is getting bigger and bigger.
We got off at Moleson Creek, and I bid farewell. I’m going to cross Guyana in a pick-up truck, passing through Georgetown to Lethem, a roadless jungle region bordering Brazil, to try to understand what’s happening in this small country of over a million inhabitants that’s growing faster than any other in the world.
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Almost the entire journey from Moleson Creek to Georgetown is on a clean, two-lane road, flanked by dense jungle. Half an hour outside of the city, the new money is in motion: bulldozers digging into the earth, cranes, roads under construction, the skeletons of buildings being erected. Brightly colored old Hindu mansions stand on the side of the road.
We cross the famous four-lane highway that Wendy celebrated. In the opposite direction, stray cows and horses amble along. There are huge billboards advertising banks, perfumes and expensive clothes, each featuring models of hegemonic beauty and olive skin. One of their messages captures the moment: the world is coming to Guyana. It’s an advertisement for the World League, the club cricket world championship scheduled to be played between November 26 and December 7. Teams from Australia, Bangladesh, England, and Pakistan will each be participating, and the fact that Guyana is hosting speaks to its new place in the world. Later, I will understand that the larger question is how the rest of the world sees Guyana — and who has come to profit from its oil windfall.
As we enter the city, the streets narrow. There’s trash littering the streets and splintered wooden houses abound. The silhouettes of buildings can be seen in the distance. All of the sidewalks in Georgetown are crisscrossed by canals of varying size, where cans, plastics and dead plants float in either green or black water. On one corner, a group of neighbors is cleaning the small canal on their sidewalk, removing trash and weeds with rakes and machetes.
The van drops me off at Smith’s bed and breakfast, a white wooden house adorned with greenery and colorful lights where I’ve rented a room. There live Elvis and Claudia, an Afro-Guyanese couple in their sixties who spent their youth in London and returned to Guyana with the oil boom hoping for a more comfortable retirement than the one they would have managed in England.
“There’s a lot of money here now,” Claudia tells me, “but we have to make sure these people use it well.”
Although she doesn’t clarify what she means by “these people,” it’s clear that she’s referring to the leaders of the People’s Progressive Party, which has governed since 2020 and is led by the Hindu majority. Political polarization here mirrors the country’s ethnic make-up.
“You never know with these people.”
Irfaan Ali’s big moment of international fame didn’t come when he defeated David Granger in the 2020 presidential election. Nor did it arrive in December 2023, when he met with Nicolas Maduro on the island of Saint Vincent to ease tensions that could have triggered an armed conflict with Venezuela over the disputed 165,000-square-kilometer Essequibo region. No. Irfaan Ali, whose youthful face is framed by a mustache-free black beard and thick-framed glasses that give him an intellectual air, went viral when he got into an argument during an interview with a BBC journalist.
Stephen Sacksur, one of the British channel’s star correspondents, spoke with him in March 2024. Sackur began by asking him about the pressure of governing a country with the fastest growing economy in the world before inquiring about the “two trillion tons of carbon emissions” that Guyana’s oil and gas would release into the atmosphere.
“I’m going to stop you right there,” Ali told him, pointing at his chest with his index finger. “Do you know that Guyana has a forest the size of England and Scotland combined? Do you know it conserves 19.5 gigatons of carbon?”
“And what gives you the right to release all that carbon?” the journalist inquired after a beat.
“What gives you the right to come and lecture us about climate change?” Ali responded, raising both his palm and his tone of voice. “I’m going to lecture you about climate change. We keep that forest alive, which the world enjoys, which you don’t value, and for which no one pays us.”
The tension didn’t ease during the 25-minute conversation. Sackur then asked about international analysts’ warnings of a single-party government emerging in Guyana, dominated by a PPP empowered by oil money.
“The ethnic division within this country has been instigated by external forces,” Ali retorted before taking an opportunity to reproach the journalist for Britain’s imperial past. “You divided the people. We are working to unite them again. We need to win votes from everybody, and we need to unify our people. That’s the strategy.”
Indeed, this had been the strategy of every government that managed to come to power. But it didn’t always work. There are two major parties in Guyana; the most important is Ali’s PPP, which historically led the Indo-Guyanese faction. Its leader and founder was Forbes Burnham, a lawyer of humble origins who had studied on scholarship in England, where he got involved with the League of Colored Peoples and other leftist organizations. To build a multiethnic coalition, he nominated as president Arthur Chung, a Chinese lawyer and judge who governed the country between 1970 and 1980.
The PPP was Marxist-Leninist in its conception, but it faced resistance from more radical groups influenced by the Black Power Movement and the Caribbean New Left, which criticized the government’s demagogic tendencies and accused it of pro-Soviet sympathies. Street protests and clashes resulted in several deaths and led to a victory for the opposition, the People’s National Congress (PNC), led by the Afro-Guyanese elite, in 1980. Broadly communist in nature, it had flexible principles and a fluid ideology, governing until 1992.
In 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, President Desmond Hoyte announced that he was abandoning his leftist ideology to pursue a more pluralistic and moderate form of governance. The gambit failed. The PPP won the 1992 elections and would hold power for more than a decade.
The Guyanese people distrusted the unbridled capitalism that had taken hold of the rest of the world. At the same time, their own economy was rickety, propped up by the cultivation of sugar and rice, and the yields of some small gold and bauxite mines. A series of corruption scandals and a deepening economic crisis led to the election in 2015 of David Granger, a military officer who took over as head of the PNC and opened the door to business with foreign companies. But it was short-lived. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Irfaan Ali was highly critical of Granger’s pact with Exxon and won the election by promising to use oil profits to secure the future of all Guyanese, regardless of their social class or ethnic origin.
The deal nevertheless remained in place. Exxon pays no taxes but contributes a 2% royalty to the country and splits its oil profits 50/50, which corresponds to around 25% of what’s extracted. Some sectors in Guyana warn that there isn’t enough discussion about the wisdom of the agreement and how the government is spending the money.
In October 2024, Irfaan Ali appeared before parliament and announced a one-time cash grant of 200,000 Guyanese dollars for each head of household, with the aim of distributing this oil wealth. It was a hefty sum—around US$1000, or almost four times the average salary in Guyana
Annan Persaud, editor of the Stabroek News, is complaining. His newspaper, which has been in circulation since 1986, was the first privately owned daily in a country where the state controlled the press.
“It’s very funny,” Persaud says with a wry smile. “The president announces a bonus, but he makes no distinction between locals and foreigners. There are no requirements to receive this money. Then he goes and changes his mind, and it’s all a confusion. A week later he comes up with a new plan: give one hundred thousand Guyanese dollars to every Guyanese over 18. But to do that, you have to design an app, and you have to wait. There’s no planning.”
He points out another problem. When Guyana gained its independence, people began leaving the country, with waves of immigrants departing for the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
“We lost an entire generation when that happened,” Annan tells me. “That cost us a critical mass that would have helped us then and that we need now to diversify the economy. The PPP, which was once a communist party, changed along the way and today has no ideology. It is run by a small oligarchy that preaches the free market and pursues its own business.”
Professor Thomas Singh, an economist at the University of Guyana, tells me that this lack of critical mass also explains why the country lacks a civil society that voices disagreements with the government or denounces the environmental and economic dangers of unchecked oil extraction. For this reason, the government treats portions of the press, like Stabroek News, and the university itself as critics within a growing Guyana.
Singh also explained the concept of “Dutch disease,” in which the sudden emergence of wealth often leads to its concentration in the hands of a few at the expense of the poorer segments of society.
All of my formal efforts to secure an interview with a public official have failed, so I venture to one of the places where important conversations are held and decisions are made: the Georgetown bar frequented by Guyana’s leading politicians.
The Oasis Café is its own microclimate, with an air conditioner on full blast and virtually no natural light. Its floors are an Arabesque mosaic of hypnotic blue on which rest a dozen or so wooden tables. The bar has a scent of flowers, and a soft, almost indistinguishable music fills its walls. One can lose track of time in conversation here, completely cut off from the outside world. People speak in low voices, almost whispering.
I sat at a table where a diplomat and a restaurant owner, both European, were having lunch. The owner told me that a new petite bourgeoisie of mostly Indo-Guyanese contractors, subcontractors, and service licensees was growing under the government’s protection. He explains what is happening to all the new wealth with an almost musical turn of phrase: “It trickles, but it’s not spreading.”
The lives of the lower classes will likely remain the same, the diplomat and the businessman agree.
At one point, a tall, bald man in a flowery shirt interrupts them. He shakes with each as if he knows them, and then with me, because I happened to be there. When he leaves, the diplomat takes a sip of coffee and says to me: “He’s the ambassador from Qatar. They just opened an embassy, and he arrived a few weeks ago. He’s settling in.”
He tells me that the United Arab Emirates has also recently opened an embassy, and that France is next. At the end of the month, Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister with whom Guyana has agreements to promote agriculture, coordinate defense and, of course, sell oil, will be making a visit. Like the ad at the city’s entrance says: The world is coming to Guyana.
Rex Tillerson is a white-haired executive with a wide chin. He almost always wears a dark suit, and his presence is stony. When he speaks, he does so through the right side of his mouth, like a cowboy from his native Texas. As CEO of Exxon, he promoted the development of oil platforms in Iraqi Kurdistan and the expansion of projects in Russia. He calls himself a good friend of Vladimir Putin and does not discriminate based on ideology — or at least he hadn’t until Hugo Chávez decided to expropriate the assets that his company managed in the Orinoco Belt.
Exxon had been there since 1920, when it was still called Standard Oil. But in 2007, an international court battle forced the oil giant to leave the country.
Some say that the launch of Exxon’s operations in Guyana was a revenge move by Tillerson, whose expectations were low but who nevertheless sought to annoy Chávez, because it was a territory that Venezuela had coveted. In 2017, Tillerson left his position as CEO while plans to begin extraction in Guyana were already well underway. A bigger challenge awaited him: Trump had tapped the oil executive for secretary of state.
Tillerson was succeeded at Exxon by Darren Woods, a fellow executive in much the same mold. During an interview in December 2023, while Maduro was launching a referendum to garner support for the recovery of Essequibo, a news anchor at CBS asked him what kinds of risks such a move carried.
“I’m not sure Guyana is defenseless,” Woods replied. “The global community is there, watching that dispute. We’re focused on doing what we have to do.”
In addition to Exxon’s presence, British and French ships swarmed the Guyanese waters at the time, ready to support the country in the event of a conflict.
In 2021, the environmental lawyer Melinda Janki sued Exxon and the government of Guyana for violating the Environmental Protection Act. Janki, an Oxford-educated Guyanese professional, had previously resigned from British Petroleum in order to dedicate her life to fighting climate change. She received a favorable ruling two years later when it was determined that, according to the company’s own calculations, oil could extend for thousands of kilometers and reach as far as Jamaica if there were a spill on one of its three platforms in Guyana. High Court Judge San ruled the company engaged in “deceptive conduct,” ordering it to pay for insurance and guarantee certain environmental protections. Environmental permits, meanwhile, were reduced from 23 to five years, and Exxon will now face stricter controls.
The company currently extracts 624,000 barrels of oil per day. It continues to explore other areas and expects to hit 1.3 million by 2027. Although Exxon operates three platforms (Liza 1, Liza 2, and Payara), it has had to share its investment with two other companies in order to work the area quickly. Exxon owns 45% of the business, while the North American company Hess Corp. holds 30% and the Chinese company CNOOC 25%. A new threat has emerged in the form of Chevron, Exxon’s main competitor, which is in the process of buying Hess Corp.’s stake.
Janki continues her offensive. In a country with a seemingly inactive civil society, as professor Thomas Singh has noted, she appears to be a small but powerful source of resistance. In early November, during an interview at a 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference side event, the lawyer acknowledged that she planned to go even further, making clear the ambition and magnitude of her struggle: “it is impossible for life on earth to continue with fossil fuels.”
Six hundred kilometers southeast of Georgetown lies one of Guyana’s exit points. Between the capital and the border stretches the Rupununi savannah, a region distinct from the northern coast and the western highlands. Part of the Amazon rainforest, and known for its red soil and golden grasslands, the savannah alternates between dry and rainy seasons. The village of Lethem is home to just over a thousand people, and is part of the territory still under dispute with Venezuela. English and Portuguese speakers wander its unpaved streets. Above all else, it’s a transit zone, where a handful of miners and merchants sell cheap goods to the Brazilians who cross the border.
Oil is rarely discussed here, but the effects of global warming are already being felt: the changes of seasons are becoming more extreme, with floods and droughts that are difficult to navigate, if not catastrophic. The last major flood in Lethem was in 2021, when heavy rains and overflowing rivers left the town underwater, forcing people to evacuate or take refuge in the homes with upper floors.
In the morning, I walk through Lethem toward the Brazilian border. The sun is white, and people stroll the streets glistening with perspiration. The air smells of grass. I head toward the bridge over the Tacutu River, past a gas station with greasy wrecks of broken vehicles, a small market, and a church. Near the road’s end is a cube-shaped building with a glass facade in the middle of a vacant lot. Inside, five white mannequins showcase pastel dresses and tee-shirts.
Above the storefront is the name of the outlet, with a description of its goods: American Dream, Imported Clothes and More. Its logo consists of a coathanger bearing the American flag, above a silhouette of grey buildings. The business is closed, and its lights are off. Around the corner, there is nothing at all.