TUMEREMO, Venezuela, (AFP) — Venezuela has opened a civil registry office in a remote mining border town that it has declared will be the new “capital” of Essequibo — a region in neighbouring Guyana it claims is its territory, officials said.

President Nicolas Maduro has revived a decades-old claim on the region which makes up more than two-thirds of Guyana’s territory, since an oil bonanza was found in its waters.

After a controversial December 3 referendum in which 95 per cent of voters allegedly supported Venezuela being declared the rightful owner of Essequibo, Maduro appointed a “sole authority” for a future Caracas-run state.

He also declared that the small border town of Tumerero, home to around 35,000 people, would be the “provisional capital” of the region.

“From Tumeremo we are giving identity documents to our people. People of Essequibo, we have arrived and are here to stay and assert our historic right,” Bolivar State governor Angel Marcano wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday.

The civil registry office opened on Saturday and is aimed at “the population of Tumeremo and Essequibo,” according to an earlier statement from Marcano’s office.

Essequibo has been administered by Guyana for more than a century and is the subject of border litigation before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

It is home to 125,000 of the country’s 800,000 citizens.

Controversy has simmered since 2015 when US oil giant ExxonMobil, operating under licenses from Guyana, discovered vast oil reserves in the area.

Maduro will meet Guyana President Irfaan Ali on Thursday in St Vincent and the Grenadines to discuss the land dispute.