With a couple dozen representatives of American mining companies and other firms in tow, the U.S. interior secretary, Doug Burgum, pushed for greater U.S. access to Venezuela’s reserves of critical minerals and gold during a visit to the country’s capital on Wednesday and Thursday.
Mr. Burgum’s visit was the latest meeting between a high-ranking U.S. official and Venezuela’s new interim government, led by Delcy Rodríguez, aimed at opening up the South American country’s economy to U.S. investors. Previous visitors have included the energy secretary: Chris Wright; the Southern Command chief, Gen. Francis Donovan,; and the C.I.A. director, William Burns.
On Wednesday, Ms. Rodríguez pledged to work at “Trump speed” in accelerating U.S. access to Venezuelan minerals. She promised to introduce a new mining measure to national lawmakers in the coming days that would allow foreign companies to extract gold, diamonds and rare earths. She didn’t offer any further details about the possible proposal.
Mr. Burgum’s visit coincided with a State Department announcement that the United States and Venezuela were re-establishing “diplomatic and consular relations.” A White House official also disclosed an American-brokered deal that was not publicly announced between Venezuela’s state mining company and Trafigura, a Singapore-based commodities giant, for the sale of up to 1,000 kilograms of gold, which is worth well over $100 million.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the agreement publicly, said the deal was part of an effort by the administration to restore Venezuela’s mining sector and increase investment there. Officials with Trafigura did not respond to a request for comment.
“More positive has come in the past two months than the last 20 years,” Mr. Burgum said of Venezuela’s economy while speaking to reporters on Thursday.
Since the U.S. capture of President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3, the Trump administration has essentially seized control of Venezuela’s moribund oil industry with hopes of reversing years of declining production.
A similar effort targeting Venezuela’s anemic mining sector, which was also largely nationalized by the ruling socialist party, could prove more difficult. Much of Venezuela’s vast deposits of gold, bauxite, tungsten and other minerals are untapped and found in southern, rainforest regions that include protected lands.
Venezuelan lawmakers would have to make regulatory changes to entice foreign investment that could also invite backlash in a country that for decades has been told that the United States was the enemy.
But perhaps the greater barrier to the revival of Venezuela’s mining sector is the stranglehold of illegal mining operations on the industry. Embedded deep in Venezuela’s jungle, violent criminal networks have built lawless settlements that strip precious metals from the earth, leaving behind polluted work sites.
Amid the prolonged slump of Venezuela’s oil industry, the Maduro government boosted gold mining as a means to generate more revenue, often ignoring the environmental effects, according to watchdog groups. Illegal mining operations in Venezuela have also contributed to rampant deforestation, as well as the poisoning of rivers and displacement of Indigenous people, the groups have said.
According to a State Department report to Congress, sources estimate that the value of the gold mined in Venezuela averaged $2.2 billion annually over the previous past five years. That money helped maintain the Maduro government, but came at the cost of the destruction of more than 1,000 square miles of forest land.
“This is much more complex than oil, by far,” said Luisa Palacios, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and former board chair at Citgo, which is owned by Venezuela’s state-run oil company.
She said Venezuela was a relatively large regional producer of minerals like aluminum, gold, bauxite and iron, but the mining industry had a “complete collapse” over the years after the Venezuelan government expropriated companies.
Bauxite, which the United States lists as a critical mineral, is processed into aluminum. Experts also believe Venezuela has deposits of coltan, which is used to manufacture capacitors for electronics like laptops and smartphones.
Ms. Palacios said she was optimistic about a resurgence of Venezuela’s mining sector, but cautioned that reinvigorating production would require significant investment and most likely new laws to improve government transparency and accountability, as well as environmental practices.
“Any improvement in the governance surrounding mining production is welcome,” she said. But, Ms. Palacios added, “I don’t know how the Trump administration is going to do this.”
President Trump has made the global hunt for critical minerals a priority, striking deals with Ukraine and Australia to gain access to their resources and pursuing Greenland, which is rich with natural resources. The United States has also been taking stakes in American rare earths companies as a way to compete more effectively with China, which mines 70 percent of the world’s rare earths.
Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a research organization based in Washington, said the gold deal involving Venezuela raised a number of questions, including what kind of security would be provided for the companies involved.
“Yes, the U.S. has unseated Maduro, but Venezuela is still not a perfectly functioning market economy,” Ms. Braw said, adding, “Western companies doing business there will want some sort of security.”
The mining push also brings Washington closer to a government that, aside from Mr. Maduro’s removal, is largely unchanged from the one that is widely accused of human rights abuses, vast corruption schemes, drug trafficking and election rigging. Mr. Maduro, awaiting trial in New York, has denied the claims against his government.
In one of a few indications of the awkward partnership between the United States and Venezuela, Ms. Rodríguez was joined on Wednesday by her interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, who has a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head after being accused of ties to narcotics trafficking (which he denies).
Ms. Rodríguez’s brother, Jorge Rodríguez, who heads the country’s legislative assembly, pushed a sweeping overhaul of the oil industry through less than a month after Mr. Maduro’s ousting. The new law effectively reverses the 2007 nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry, which led U.S. oil giants like Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips to abandon their pursuit of the country’s reserves, which rank among the largest in the world.
Mr. Burgum said he had dined with both Rodríguezes on Wednesday evening, and repeatedly referred to them together as running the country. He deflected a question about Mr. Cabello, who has been described as the government’s enforcer.
The Trump administration says it has raised more than $1 billion in oil sales as Venezuela has ramped up its production in the past two months, with several hundred million dollars ending up back in Venezuelan coffers. The United States has also pressured Venezuela to end oil shipments to Cuba.
Max Bearak is a reporter for The Times based in Bogotá, Colombia.
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