Guyana’s armed forces and police said gunshots were fired from Venezuela at a boat carrying election materials in the disputed Essequibo region, prompting a patrol boat to return fire and escort the team to safety.
According to the AFP report carried by TRT World, the incident took place around 1830 GMT on Sunday on the Cuyuní River, in an area at the centre of a territorial dispute between Guyana and Venezuela. The patrol boat was escorting election officials as they distributed ballots to remote polling stations when it came under fire from the Venezuelan shore, the joint statement said.
The statement said the patrol immediately returned fire and manoeuvred the escort team out of danger. It also said no injuries were sustained and no election materials were damaged or compromised. Despite the exchange, the team continued its journey and the remaining ballot boxes were delivered to their assigned polling stations.
The report comes as Guyana holds elections for president and parliament in a country of about 850,000 people that also has the world’s highest per-capita oil reserves. Most of those reserves are in Essequibo, which has made the territorial dispute even more sensitive. The region makes up roughly two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and has been administered by Guyana for more than a century, but Venezuela claims it historically belongs to it.
The incident is notable partly because both countries have complained in the past of gunfire targeting their boats, but usually stop short of directly blaming the other side’s armed forces. This time, Guyanese officials explicitly said the shots were fired from Venezuela, and that the patrol had to return fire. That raises the political stakes of a dispute that is already being handled by the International Court of Justice.
The current standoff has been sharpened by oil discoveries and by Venezuela’s increasingly assertive posture. Guyana says its frontier was fixed by an 1899 arbitration panel, while Venezuela argues that the Essequibo River should be treated as the historical natural border. The AFP report also notes that Venezuela elected a governor to the region this year, a move that underlines how both sides are trying to assert control over the area.
Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali has taken a firm line against Venezuela and has U.S. support for Guyana’s territorial claim. That matters because any exchange of fire near election logistics is not just a border incident; it is a threat to the state’s ability to run a vote in hard-to-reach communities.
For now, the verified facts are tightly bounded. Guyana says gunfire came from the Venezuelan side while election materials were being transported. No one was hurt. The materials were delivered. The broader dispute over Essequibo remains unresolved, and the river encounter shows how quickly it can intrude on ordinary state functions like voting.
