United States authorizes its companies to trade gold from Venezuela

Miami.- The United States Department of the Treasury issued a license this Friday authorizing certain activities related to the exploitation and commercialization of Venezuelan gold by US companies, a sector that until now was subject to sanctions. The announcement comes a day after the meeting in Caracas between the interim Venezuelan president, Delcy Rodríguez, and the US Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum.

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General License 51 allows U.S. companies to purchase, transport, and resell gold of Venezuelan origin, even in transactions involving the Government of Venezuela or the Compañía General de Minería de Venezuela (Minerven). The authorization also covers logistics services, insurance, and transportation linked to the trade of that metal. The document states that contracts arising from these operations shall be governed by the laws of the United States and that any legal dispute shall be resolved in U.S. courts. Likewise, payments to be made to Venezuelan entities sanctioned by Washington will not be made directly, but must be channeled through a fund controlled by the Department of the Treasury. Burgum traveled to Caracas on Thursday accompanied by representatives of the mining sector and met with Rodríguez, after which he announced that Washington would soon issue licenses to facilitate operations in the country. For his part, the president of the Venezuelan National Assembly, the Chavista Jorge Rodríguez, brother of the interim president, reported on Monday that the Mining Law is already under review with the aim of urgently reforming it and opening the sector to foreign investment, as already happened with the Hydrocarbons Law and the oil sector. Thursday also saw the official restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Venezuela announced, just two months after the US operation that led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro.

Diplomatic ties between both countries remained broken since early 2019, during Donald Trump's first term, when Washington recognized the opposition leader and then-president of the Parliament, Juan Guaidó, as interim president, which led the Maduro government to break relations with the United States.