The United States Department of the Treasury issued a license this Friday authorizing certain activities related to the exploitation and marketing of Venezuelan gold by American companies, a sector that until now was subject to sanctions. The announcement comes one day after the meeting in Caracas between the interim president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, and the US Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum. General License 51 allows US companies to purchase, transport, and resell Venezuelan-origin gold, even in operations involving the Government of Venezuela or the Venezuelan General Mining Company (Minerven). The authorization also covers logistics, insurance, and transportation services related to the trade of this metal. The document states that contracts derived from these operations must be governed by US laws and that any legal disputes must be resolved in US 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 mining sector representatives and met with Rodríguez, after which he announced that Washington would soon issue licenses to facilitate operations in the country. Meanwhile, 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. On Thursday, the official restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Venezuela was also announced, just two months after the US operation that led to the capture of Nicolás Maduro. Diplomatic ties between the two countries had been severed since early 2019 during Donald Trump's first term, when Washington recognized the opposition leader and then head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as interim president, which led the Maduro government to break relations with the United States.
