A Country’s Subsoil, Opened for Business
Venezuela is rewriting its mining laws at a pace that tracks not with ordinary legislative process but with the tempo set by Washington. On Monday, the ruling-party-controlled National Assembly passed a new mining bill in its first of two required votes, barely a week after acting President Delcy Rodríguez announced the legislation alongside U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum at the Miraflores presidential palace. At least one opposition bloc abstained, complaining that lawmakers received the draft just before the session opened. Assembly president Jorge Rodríguez — Delcy’s brother — dismissed the objection.
The bill replaces a 2015 decree that imposed state control over mining exploration and a 1999 mining regulation law, opening the sector to foreign corporations for the first time in over two decades. Concessions would extend from 20 to 30 years, disputes could be settled through international arbitration rather than Venezuelan courts, and a new tax framework would govern mining projects. Mineral deposits remain state property, but the legal architecture is designed to provide the security guarantees that companies burned by Hugo Chávez’s expropriations — Crystallex, Gold Reserve, and Rusoro Mining among them — would require to return. Venezuela still owes billions in compensation from those seizures.
Gold First, Rare Earths Next
Burgum’s two-day visit last week set the stage. He brought over 20 U.S. and Canadian mining executives — including representatives from Peabody Energy, Caterpillar, Paulson & Co., and Hartree Partners — many from companies that had operated in Venezuela before the Chávez-era nationalizations. The day after his departure, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued General License 51, authorizing transactions with state gold miner Minerven, provided contracts are governed by U.S. law and exclude entities from Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba.
Within days, a first shipment of $100 million in gold doré bars arrived in the United States, brokered by commodities trader Trafigura under a deal for up to 100 tonnes valued at approximately $165 million. The revenue, however, does not flow directly to Caracas: proceeds are deposited in U.S. government-run accounts before being released to Venezuela under conditions dictated by the White House — a financial architecture that critics describe as colonial extraction under a different name.
The Orinoco Mining Arc’s Dark Reality
The territory at stake is the Orinoco Mining Arc, a 112,000-square-kilometer zone — roughly 12% of Venezuela‘s land mass — that Maduro created by decree a decade ago to generate revenue as oil production collapsed. On paper, the arc holds $500 billion in gold reserves, Latin America’s largest, plus significant deposits of bauxite, iron, diamonds, coltan, and potentially unconfirmed rare earth minerals that Washington covets to reduce its dependence on Chinese supply chains. In practice, the arc became a lawless zone controlled by Colombian ELN guerrillas, FARC dissidents, and criminal organizations like the Tren de Aragua, operating with the complicity of military officers and local officials.
United Nations reports have documented forced labor, human trafficking, and environmental destruction across the region. The advocacy group S.O.S. Orinoco has warned that General License 51 risks “maintaining the ecocide and laundering criminal wealth.” Turning these chaotic artisanal operations into the large-scale industrial mining that American companies envision would require not just legal reform but the physical displacement of armed groups from territory they have held for years — a security challenge that Burgum acknowledged only with assurances that Rodríguez had “promised” safety for investors. Whether that promise can be kept in jungle territory where the state has been absent for a decade is the question the new law cannot answer.