The United States scrambled warplanes to fly over Guyana’s Essequibo region the day after Venezuela threatened to snatch the area.
The threat came only hours after a military chopper carrying Guyanese officials mysteriously vanished close to the Venezuelan border.
Searchers found the wreck of the helicopter on Thursday and confirmed three of the military personnel on board had died.
Prime Minister Mark Phillips said at the moment, there was no indication to suggest any hostile fire.
But the crash coincided with the escalating diplomatic row with Venezuela over the vast region of Essequibo, which is rich with minerals and located near massive oil deposits.
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Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, warned on Thursday he is prepared to start a land grab to take over control of Essequibo’s oil resources.
The threat put Guyana and its United States allies on high alert about a potential invasion in the coming days.
The US Embassy in Guyana confirmed the two countries had been conducting “routine” exercises in efforts to strengthen their cooperation.
In a statement, they said: “This exercise builds upon routine engagement and operations to enhance security partnership between the United States and Guyana, and to strengthen regional cooperation.”
The flight operations came days after Venezuela held a controversial referendum which found 95 percent of voters support Maduro’s claim over Essequibo. However, the result of the vote has been questioned.
The UN Security Council scheduled an emergency closed meeting on Friday at the request of Guyana to discuss Madura’s threat.
In a letter to the council president, Guyana’s foreign minister, Hugh Hilton Todd, accused Venezuela of violating the UN Charter by attempting to take its territory.
The letter recounted the arbitration between then-British Guiana and Venezuela in 1899 and the formal demarcation of their border in a 1905 agreement.
For over 60 years, he said, Venezuela accepted the boundary, but in 1962 it challenged the 1899 arbitration that set the border.
The diplomatic fight over the Essequibo region has flared since then, but it intensified in 2015 after ExxonMobil announced it had found vast amounts of oil off its coast.
The 159,500-square-kilometer area accounts for two-thirds of Guyana.
But Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven oil reserves, has always considered Essequibo as its own because the region was within its boundaries during the Spanish colonial period.
