Speaking to journalists on the final day of International Court of Justice hearings, Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodríguez dismissed President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the United States might annex her country. Her visit to The Hague was dominated by the separate, long-running dispute with neighboring Guyana over the Essequibo territory — but Trump’s comment, made earlier Monday on Fox News, drew an immediate retort.
“We will continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history,” Rodríguez said. Venezuela, she added, is “not a colony, but a free country.”
Trump’s remark came via a social media post by Fox News co-anchor John Roberts, who wrote that the president said he was “seriously considering making Venezuela the 51st US state.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Later, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly declined to elaborate on Trump’s plans but said the president “is famous for never accepting the status quo,” and she praised Rodríguez for “working incredibly cooperatively” with the U.S. Rodríguez separately confirmed that Venezuelan and U.S. officials have been in contact and are pursuing “cooperation and understanding.”
Inside the wood-paneled courtroom, Rodríguez focused the bulk of her appearance on Venezuela’s claim to the 62,000-square-mile Essequibo region, which makes up roughly two-thirds of Guyana. She told the 15-judge panel that political negotiations — not a legally binding ruling — are the path to settlement. The dispute, she said, should be governed by a 1966 agreement reached in Geneva, arguing that the treaty effectively nullified an 1899 arbitration that had drawn the border along the Essequibo River largely in Guyana’s favor.
Rodríguez accused Guyana of undermining that agreement. “At a time when the mechanisms established in the Geneva agreement were still fully in force, Guyana unilaterally chose to shift the dispute from the negotiating arena to a judicial resolution,” she said. “This change was not accidental; it coincided with the discovery in 2015 of the oil field that would become world-renowned.”
When hearings opened a week earlier, Guyanese Foreign Minister Hugh Hilton Todd put the stakes bluntly. The territorial question, he said, “has been a blight on our existence as a sovereign state from the very beginning,” and he told judges that 70% of Guyana’s territory was at risk.
The Essequibo region sits atop staggering resource wealth. Beyond its onshore gold, diamonds, and timber, the territory lies near massive offshore oil deposits in the Stabroek Block, where ExxonMobil and its partners now produce an average of 900,000 barrels a day. That output is roughly equal to Venezuela’s own daily production and has transformed Guyana, one of South America’s smallest nations, into a significant energy power.
The century-old dispute escalated sharply in 2023, when then-President Nicolás Maduro threatened to annex the Essequibo region by force after holding a referendum that asked voters whether the territory should be turned into a Venezuelan state. On January 3, Maduro was captured in Caracas in a U.S. military operation and flown to New York to face drug trafficking charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Rodríguez, who assumed power after Maduro’s removal, did not address the 2023 referendum in The Hague.
The International Court of Justice is expected to issue a final, binding ruling within months. Venezuela has stated that its participation in the hearings does not constitute consent to, or recognition of, the court’s jurisdiction.