EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• Barrels before books (BUSINESS AND REGULATORY CONTEXT): At the IMF–World Bank meetings in Bangkok, Calixto Ortega, vice president for the economy, presented a roadmap resting on oil and mining. He ruled out dollarization and promised a debt sustainability analysis “very soon.” Ec…

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Three reforms, a refusal and a private door (BUSINESS AND REGULATORY CONTEXT): Before the country’s main business federation, acting president Delcy Rodríguez ruled out dollarization and promised a tax reform, an electricity law open to private capital and a sorting of state assets into strategic and non-strategic. The official numbers are improving but still harsh: monthly inflation eased to 8.4% in September, with prices up 225.3% so far this year. Two signals matter more than the speech. Oil newcomers are poaching executives from Chevron, according to sources consulted by Ecosistema. And IDB Invest is preparing to lend to Venezuelan private companies before the Inter-American Development Bank has settled its US$2.5 billion claim on the state –an unusual order that says where lenders see the safer risk.

Courts first, ballots last (TRANSITION TRACKER): The State Department laid out the sequence of the US-supervised talks. Round three, starting October 14, is to finish the selection of a new Supreme Court and define guarantees for parties and candidates. Later rounds will take on the electoral council, the repeal of repressive laws and the return of exiled leaders. The court comes first because it is where bans on opposition candidates were ratified and parties were handed to boards of its choosing. María Corina Machado, barred from office until 2036 and still outside the country, is asking for elections by July 2027. That is possible only if no step slips.

A scoreboard and a theatre (OIL & DEALS): PDVSA wants 105 contracts signed by December; 61 are done. US$3.5 billion to two blocks, and Baker Hughes signed a gas alliance. Beyond oil, Starlink was formally licensed, JetBlue filed a Caracas schedule for February 2027, and a family trust announced US$40 million for Trasnocho Cultural, a rare bet on the city’s cultural life.

Banks lead a fast market (MARKET SNAPSHOT): The Caracas index rose 29.9% in September and another 24.8% in the first week of October, driven by financial stocks. It is a small market, measured in a currency that is losing value, but the direction is clear.

Bottom Line. The sequence is now public: courts, laws, electoral authority, candidates; credit for private firms before credit for the state. What nobody has published is a calendar. For anyone pricing Venezuela from outside, the order of events is the commitment, and the timing is still the negotiation.

BUSINESS AND REGULATORY CONTEXT

Three reforms and a refusal

The day before, at the Eurobuilding hotel in Caracas, Delcy Rodríguez –recognized by the U.S. as acting president since Nicolás Maduro’s capture in January– opened the 82nd annual assembly of Fedecámaras, the country’s main federation of business chambers and for two decades chavismo’s designated class enemy. She brought a regulatory agenda of her own. Since 2021, however, the federation has grown markedly closer to the government, in large part through an approach that Rodríguez herself, then vice president, cultivated with part of the business community.

The headline was a refusal. Some business leaders have been calling for the dollar to be adopted as official currency. The debate has been live since August, when lawmaker Antonio Ecarri floated talks with the American economist Steve Hanke on replacing the bolívar. Rodríguez closed the door in front of the people most likely to want it open: “It is not dollarization that will solve Venezuela’s problem.” Her counter-offer was a narrower gap and foreign banks. By her figures, the spread between the official and parallel exchange rates fell from 65.7% in January to 11.7% in October, and she wants to narrow it further with international –specifically US– banking.

She announced three reforms. A tax reform to “harmonise” the fiscal burden, with no date attached. A reform of the electricity law, promised within days or weeks and no later than this year, that would let private companies invest in generation, transmission and distribution. And, less noticed, a “re-engineering” of the national government in the coming months, alongside a classification of state assets to separate strategic from non-strategic holdings and clean up their legal status to ease investment –the closest thing to a privatization pipeline the interim government has described in public. Neither reform text has been released.

The numbers and the headhunters

The figures Rodríguez brought to the Eurobuilding were generous and, for the most part, her own: Sixty-one oil and gas agreements signed and 44 more under negotiation, which together could create some 320,000 jobs in four years. Consumption up 21.3% so far this year. And a projection of 6.5% growth for the third quarter –which, if confirmed, would be a deceleration from the 7.14% the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) reported for the second quarter, the 21st consecutive quarter of expansion in the official series.

The official data released days earlier tell a more qualified story. Monthly inflation was 8.4% in September, according to the BCV, down from 8.9% in August and well below the 19.9% of July, when the post-earthquake shock peaked. The central bank credits the normalization of external income flows and lower exchange-rate pressure, which narrowed the gap between official and parallel rates. But prices have risen 225.3% in the first nine months of the year, and the annualized rate stands at 465.5%, according to calculations based on BCV figures. The stability Rodríguez is defending against the dollarizers is a currency that lost value at roughly the pace of prices.

The composition matters for anyone pricing a consumer business. Education posted the highest monthly inflation in September, and restaurants and hotels the highest cumulative rate of the year, at 239.32%, according to the BCV breakdown. Services, in other words, are repricing faster than goods.

Independent forecasters are less exuberant than the podium. Oxford Economics cut its 2026 growth forecast to 6.3% after the earthquakes. The Institute of Economic and Social Research at Andrés Bello Catholic University (IIES-UCAB), the country’s most cited academic forecaster, expects oil output to grow close to 15% this year against roughly 6% for the non-oil economy –and estimates that activity remains around 62% below its pre-2014 level. Its reading is of a country that has started growing in a new scenario without yet having built the conditions for sustained expansion. Growth is real; it is also narrow, and it starts from the floor.

The deal flow is at least no longer hypothetical. A day before the speech, California-based Pacific Coast Energy Company announced agreements with state oil company PDVSA worth about US$3.5 billion. It takes over the Delta and Cabimas blocks, starting from about 19,300 barrels a day, with a target of doubling output in six months and a peak of 150,000 to 160,000.

The clearest sign that the industry is moving, though, is not in the contracts but in the payroll.

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A note before we start. From this week on, the Dispatch will alternate between two editions. One week you will get the main edition, with the macro picture: oil, sanctions, policy and markets. The next you will get this one, which works closer to the ground. It has two sections: a sector focus, on one industry and its actors, and a long read, on a single Ecosistema story told in detail.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Sector focus: fintech moves from paying to financing. A second generation of Venezuelan fintechs, with around ten actors that appeared or launched their star products after 2023, has moved past payments into financing, accounting, treasury and personal finance. Cashea leads with nearly 12 million users and followers such as Krece suggest a category is forming behind it. The opportunity rests on a banking system whose credit fell from near 40% of GDP to between 2% and 3%, according to figures the banks themselves acknowledge. The risk is the same number in reverse: several economists expect formal credit to begin normalizing from 2027.

Long read: five apps, one plumber. At least five startups have launched since late 2024 to digitize home repairs, a market where Apetoi already failed in 2022. The supply is there, with about seven million self-employed workers according to the association Atraem. The obstacles are structural: repairs are infrequent, the best technicians already have full calendars and clients trust a neighbor over a rating. Carlos Riera, a professor at UCAB, expects a price war that only the most efficient survives, with corporate contracts and memberships as the known ways out.

SECTOR FOCUS

Venezuela’s second fintech generation: financing, accounting and treasury

After the wallet. The first wave of Venezuelan fintech solved one problem: having something to pay with. YEiPii was one of the early local wallets, Ubii Pagos answered a chronic shortage of point-of-sale terminals, and Reserve and Zinli gave savers a way to hold dollars. PagoDirecto took the most mundane route of all, the parking ticket: according to the company, more than 700,000 users now pay through its app at over 100 parking facilities, with a wallet run in alliance with Banco de Venezuela. Most of those companies still exist. What has changed is that they now share the market with a cohort attacking the layers above payments: credit, accounting, treasury and personal finance.

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A note to readers. Starting with this issue, The Venezuelan Business Dispatch moves to a weekly schedule, with two alternating editions. One week you will receive our core briefing –the regulatory and political context, Oil & Deals, and the Market Snapshot–, and the following week you will receive the Sector Focus and The Long Read, our more reported and narrative pieces. The first section also gets a new name: Sanctions & Regulatory Context is now Transition Tracker & Regulatory Context. In the months since the June earthquakes, the story has moved beyond which licenses Washington grants and which it withholds. What investors now need to follow is the transition itself: the talks, the courts, the electoral calendar and the institutions being rebuilt, on which every deal ultimately depends. As always, we welcome your feedback.

Issue #10 Executive Summary: September 7–27, 2026

The core story: Caracas spent September sounding like a transition –elections promised at the UN, a Supreme Court to be rebuilt by consensus, websites unblocked– and capital answered with a wave of memoranda. But the deals are still mostly paper, the debt is being repriced for a slower and harder restructuring, and at home the grid and the streets are testing how much of the democratic signs are real.

Promises in New York, blackouts at home (SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT). Delcy Rodríguez promised elections at the UN without giving a date. She never said Maduro’s name and did not visit him in Brooklyn. Back home, a second round of talks with the 2015 opposition-led Assembly named a four-to-three council to vet candidates for a fully renewed TSJ and unblocked dozens of websites, although 149 remain censored. Oil, metals and multilateral money are reading these steps as a green light. According to sources consulted by Ecosistema, the debt process may shift toward a slower, IMF-involved debt sustainability analysis, and the World Bank has approached about ten large Venezuelan companies about financing.

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Dear reader,

Since our first issue, Ecosistema’s The Venezuelan Business Dispatch has tried to do one thing well: explain what is actually happening in Venezuela’s economy to the people who have to make decisions about it from the outside. Starting next Monday, the Dispatch will become a paid publication.

Each issue follows the country’s reopening where it matters for capital –the sanctions and licensing landscape, oil and deal flow, the sectors quietly coming back to life and the Caracas Stock Exchange– with the institutional context foreign readers need built into every story. What sets us apart is thorough, original research. We read the official publications, central bank data, regulatory notices and company filings in Spanish, we talk to the people behind the deals, and we turn all of it into analysis you will not find in wire copy or recycled reports. Every figure we publish carries its source.

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The Dispatch currently arrives every two weeks. Starting as early as next month, we expect to move to a weekly schedule at no additional cost, alternating between two editions: one covering Sanctions & Regulatory Context, Oil & Deals and the Market Snapshot, and the other devoted to The Long Read alongside a Sector Focus. Same price, twice the coverage.

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Thank you for reading us so far. Venezuela is changing faster than most of the reports about it –we intend to keep up.

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Editor, Ecosistema and The Venezuelan Business Dispatch.

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Venezuela’s reopening has drawn a new audience — investors, advisors, and firms evaluating the country from the outside — that needs more than news coverage. The Venezuelan Business Dispatch is Ecosistema’s analytical briefing on the political, regulatory, and business developments shaping Venezuela’s re-entry into global markets. This is the last free edition. Starting with the next issue, the Dispatch moves to a paid subscription model.

A note on this issue: the scale of what was signed over the past two weeks — the seventeen-field agreement, eight energy contracts at Miraflores, and the transactions that followed — demanded the full length of the briefing. Sector Focus and The Long Read do not appear here. Both return next issue.

Issue #9 Executive Summary: August 24 – September 6, 2026

The gap between twenty-five and one hundred (SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT). Donald Trump announced majority American control over seventeen fields holding 65 billion barrels on August 28. Delcy Rodríguez went on state television the following night to describe a twenty-five-year binational project with a 16% royalty, 34% income tax and $209 billion in fiscal revenue, insisting Venezuela retains ownership and sovereignty. On August 31 the White House published a fact sheet describing hundred-year concessions to NABEP, the firm of the controversial businessman Alejandro Betancourt, whose parent company transferred a 35% stake to the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital through penny warrants — no cash out, equity in, plus the right to buy a fifth of the crude at cost and first refusal on the rest. The legal door was built in advance: article 40 of the January hydrocarbons reform created a contract with no maximum term, and the scheme was designed by Rodríguez herself when she was vice president. The critics have stopped arguing about price and started arguing about signature. María Corina Machado, in her first statement six days after the announcement, did not reject the investment — she rejected the counterparty. A chavista hardliner promised the contracts would be void under a new government. The reason that matters is the same reason the structure was built the way it was: an equity stake held by the Department of War and a term of a century are not instruments meant to survive Delcy Rodríguez. They are meant to survive whoever replaces her — the leasehold logic the United States used at Guantánamo, in Panama, in the Philippines and in Okinawa, where the occupation ends, the friendly republic is recognized, and the presence stays.

Eight signatures in one day (OIL & DEALS). Energy secretary Chris Wright flew to Caracas and watched eight agreements signed at Miraflores on September 2. Chevron committed more than $7 billion and a doubling of output — the only large number attached to a producer already pumping. Eni took the operatorship of Junín 5 and began drilling the same day, the only commitment of the eight with a date rather than a target. GE Vernova took the electrical grid, including Guri, in a week when several states again registered voltage fluctuations, which is the constraint every production forecast depends on. A Coinbase co-founder’s firm and a Denver holding took blocks on undisclosed terms. Outside the ceremony: Jaime Gilinski’s GeoPark took Bare in the Orinoco Belt, Sable Offshore is negotiating with a former Trump energy adviser now on its payroll, the IMF is weighing its first permanent office in Caracas after two decades without an Article IV review, Miyamoto International signed to clear three million tons of earthquake debris in La Guaira, and Maiquetía reopened at roughly a quarter of the airport that existed in June.

A rally that finally widened (MARKET SNAPSHOT). The IBC gained 5.61% in five sessions and is up 185.29% year to date, with the whole move belonging to the weeks the oil deal was negotiated and signed. The novelty is breadth: after months of four bank shares carrying the index while industrials fell, financials and industrials rose almost in step and the gainers ran into consumer and industrial names. Against accumulated inflation of 200.11% over eight months, the nominal gain is still a real loss.

SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT

Ninety-nine years of solitude

The number that matters is not 65 billion barrels. It is the gap between twenty-five and one hundred.

On Friday, August 28, Donald Trump announced what he called the largest oil deal in history: majority American control over Venezuelan fields holding 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer, in an operation he said would more than double American reserves and bring down a gasoline price sitting above four dollars a gallon less than two months before the midterms. The following night, twenty-four hours later, interim president Delcy Rodríguez went on state television to explain the same agreement in a different vocabulary: a binational project of twenty-five years, seventeen strategic fields, a production target above 1.5 million barrels per day, a minimum royalty of 16% and income tax of 34% on eight greenfield blocks in the Orinoco Belt –a zone of more than 55,000 square kilometers– and $209.335 billion in fiscal revenue for the Venezuelan state, calculated at a reference price of $65 a barrel. Roughly nineteen dollars per barrel produced, she said, would enter the country directly. Venezuela retains ownership and sovereignty over its resources.

On Monday the 31st, the White House published a fact sheet, and the two accounts stopped being reconcilable. According to that document, the Rodríguez government granted North American Blue Energy Partners –NABEP, the private firm headed by controversial businessman Alejandro Betancourt– hundred-year concessions to operate the seventeen fields. Not a twenty-five-year joint venture. A century. The text of the agreement itself has still not been published by either government.

The rest of the fact sheet explains why Washington was willing to describe it that way. NABEP transferred, at no cost to the American taxpayer, a 35% equity stake in its parent company to the Office of Strategic Capital of the Department of War. The State Department obtains the right to buy 20% of the crude extracted from the company’s current and future fields at production cost, and a right of first refusal over the remaining 80%, which makes the United States government the priority buyer of the output. Washington also holds a veto over appointments to NABEP’s board. The White House put investment at close to $100 billion and taxes to Venezuela at some $200 billion over twenty-five years –a figure that, read against Rodríguez’s own $209.335 billion, is the one point on which the two capitals nearly agree. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth signed on August 31.

The financing mechanism is the detail that carries the constitutional argument. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital structured the stake through penny warrants –rights to buy newly issued shares at a symbolic price– which gives Washington equity ownership without disbursing meaningful capital up front. That is the source of Trump’s “no cost.” It also means that, for the first time since Franklin D. Roosevelt created a vehicle to manage reserves and buy from American companies in Saudi Arabia during the Second World War, the United States government holds a direct ownership position in an oil producer. If the reserve figures hold, it would be the holding with more oil under its control than any other on earth after Saudi Aramco.

The model that Delcy built

NABEP was not chosen through a tender. It produces around 200,000 barrels per day in Lake Maracaibo and the Orinoco Belt, which makes it the second-largest private producer in the country behind Chevron, according to Fortune, citing a person familiar with its operations. It entered the business in April 2024, when it formalized with PDVSA and its subsidiary Corporación Venezolana del Petróleo a contract to operate the Petrozamora fields under the Productive Participation Contract scheme –the CPPs, which allow the private partner to keep and commercialize up to 57% of the value of the production corresponding to its stake.

That scheme was the personal project of the then vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. The CPP was the flexibilization of the chavista mixed-company model, which had required majority state equity control in every hydrocarbons venture. Rodríguez designed the contractual instrument; the company that grew fastest inside it is now receiving seventeen fields from her hand. Under the structure described to Ecosistema by sources in Washington familiar with the agreement, PDVSA will hold up to 45% and NABEP up to 55%, with percentages varying by field. The state company becomes the minority partner in its own subsoil.

The legal machinery was assembled in advance. The reform of the Organic Hydrocarbons Law sanctioned in January kept the royalty at 30% but allowed it to be lowered according to a project’s economic viability; its regulation, published in July, assigned a 34% income tax rate to projects classified as undeveloped fields. The eight green blocks of the Belt. The conditions Rodríguez presented on Saturday as a negotiated victory were the conditions her own government wrote before the negotiation began.

Article 40 of that reform is where the century enters. The 1975 nationalization deleted the word “concession” from Venezuelan legal vocabulary, and the January reform did not restore it. But as the lawyer Simón Herrera Celis has analyzed, the CPP resembles the old concessionary scheme in its underlying mechanics –the private party assumes the activity at its own account, cost and risk, using public assets that revert to the state when the contract ends– even as ownership of the deposit remains permanently with the state under article 12 of the constitution, which declares it inalienable. The law fixes no maximum term for a CPP, unlike mixed companies, which are capped at twenty-five years renewable for fifteen more. That silence is what allows a hundred-year lease to be discussed today without openly colliding with the letter of the statute.

The whole formula was born of a failure. The majors refused to commit capital in Venezuela for legal, security and infrastructure reasons, and the Trump administration could not persuade ExxonMobil or ConocoPhillips to return. The State Department ran the negotiation and brought in the Pentagon’s office to assemble the financing; officials from both, among them OSC director David Lorch, traveled to Venezuela in July to close the terms. The result, for now, leaves American oil companies competing against a private company backed by their own government.

What Wright signed

Then came the week that made the architecture visible. U.S. energy secretary Chris Wright arrived in Caracas on the night of Tuesday, September 1, and the following day stood in Miraflores Palace while eight energy agreements were signed with Chevron, Eni, GE Vernova, Primavera and Aspect Holding. Wright put the commitments at tens of billions of dollars and called the day historic. Rodríguez, beside him, thanked Trump and framed the increase in production as employment, wages and public services.

Chevron announced that same Wednesday that it will invest more than $7 billion over five years and more than double its production, to some 600,000 barrels per day against its 2026 level. The company said it reached agreements improving the fiscal, commercial and legal conditions of its mixed companies, and signed the recognition of the conversion contracts for Petroboscán, Petropiar and Petroindependencia under the reformed law. Chief executive Mike Wirth flew to Caracas for the signature, his first visit to the country. Eni took the operatorship of Junín 5 in the Orinoco Belt through a productive participation contract and a transition agreement, assuming exclusive technical, financial and commercial responsibility; according to La República, the block holds some 35 billion certified barrels, produces around 12,000 barrels per day today and could approach 400,000 by the end of the decade on an estimated $1.5 billion a year. Claudio Descalzi, the Italian company’s chief executive, said in Miraflores that signed papers are not what counts but barrels, and announced that drilling of the first well began that same day.

The electrical chapter is the one worth watching for anyone modeling execution risk. GE Vernova –successor to General Electric– signed a strategic alliance with PDVSA to recover the electrical infrastructure of the oil industry and a second agreement with Corpoelec, the national electricity corporation, covering the national grid, including rehabilitation of the Guri hydroelectric complex. The American objective is to stabilize the system within six to twelve months. Roger Martella, an executive of the company, estimated the projects will require around a thousand workers. The commitments were signed in a week in which several states again registered voltage fluctuations.

Wright also set the numbers everyone will be marked against. In a CNBC interview that Wednesday he said Venezuelan output will exceed two million barrels per day toward the end of the decade, against roughly 1.25 million now, with a 50% rise within twelve to eighteen months; Infobae reported his projection that the country could pass 1.5 million in the first half of 2027. For reference, OPEC’s secondary sources put Venezuelan production at 1.117 million barrels per day in July, below the official figure Caracas reports, and the government is separately weighing withdrawal from the organization the country helped found in 1960.

The signature and its critics

At this point, the objections are not about numbers. They are about signature.

The economist Ricardo Hausmann went to the source of authority rather than the arithmetic, calling the interim government illegitimate to sign what he considers an unconstitutional agreement. Asdrúbal Oliveros, one the most measured voices, acknowledged that the industry urgently needs capital, technology and stable markets while warning that announcing investment is easy and converting it into wells demands predictable rules, contracts that are honored, and institutions that do not depend on who governs.

While ruling party PSUV supported the deal, some Chavistas criticized. Former PDVSA president Rafael Ramírez, the dissident chavista whose own politicization of the company did much to produce the decline now being repaired, told El Nacional the deal is unconstitutional, made behind the country’s back, and injurious. Hardliner lawmaker Iris Valera said all the agreements would be nullified once there is a new government, as they were being signed under coercion.

The opposition also questioned the agreement. Henrique Capriles granted the need for investment and questioned the opacity and the corruption record of those administering the public purse. Juan Pablo Guanipa asked for a calm reading and set a condition: if Venezuelans see jobs, investment and income, the agreement will hold public support; if not, repudiation will build.

Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado waited six days. On Thursday, September 3, in her first public statement on the deal, Machado –out of the country since December– did not reject foreign investment. She rejected the counterparty. A pact of this magnitude, she argued, is being signed by an illegitimate regime, and the patrimony of Venezuelan soil does not belong to that regime; an agreement like this should be signed with a serious, democratically elected government. She underlined the strategic character of the association between Washington and Caracas and said that is precisely why it has to be done properly, with the profitability conditions and legal certainty that sustain long-term investment. She rejected hand-picked awards. And she closed with the formula she has been repeating in international forums: Venezuela is worth more than its oil.

Rubio’s answer to the legitimacy problem is structural rather than political. In an interview with the journalist Sergio Novelli, he confirmed he participated directly in the negotiation and specified that the understanding is not with the Rodríguez interim government but with a private company in which the United States participates through the Department of War. Most of the seventeen fields, he said, were previously in Chinese and Russian hands, many without active production. On elections, he placed the vote among the final stages of the three-phase plan Washington drew up after January 3 –stabilization, economic recovery, political transition– said the election must be valid rather than merely held, and mentioned that leaders of the 2015 National Assembly will meet in October to advance political negotiations. On Machado’s return, he said she needs no American authorization and has every right to enter her own country, that Washington has offered advice and voiced concern for her safety, and that the decision is hers.

Trump was blunter. Asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday, September 2, he said Venezuelans are not ready for an election, praised Rodríguez’s work, and said both capitals want elections “soon,” without dates. Almost simultaneously, at the Miraflores press conference beside Wright, Rodríguez said there will be an electoral process under the conditions in which Venezuela is prepared, recalled that a constitution and a democratic system exist, and concluded that setting a date is not hers to do. She declined to address 2027.

The leasehold empire

Read from Washington, the structure is not only a way to secure a presence in the country and to insure against a chavista snapback. It is also a way to armor American interests against the government that a democratic transition would produce.

That is the logic of what historians of American expansion have called “the leasehold empire”, and it has a documented pattern. When the United States ended its occupation of Cuba in 1902 and recognized the new republic, it kept Guantánamo. It recognized and guaranteed the independence of Panama, and took control of the canal for more than a century. After the Second World War it granted independence to the Philippines and retained military bases in the islands through a 1947 agreement. When the occupation of Japan ended in 1952, Okinawa remained under direct American control for twenty more years, and an extensive network of installations remains there still. The process concludes, the friendly republic or the new democracy is recognized, and the presence stays –lodged in an enclave, or in the control of a strategic asset.

An equity stake held by the Department of War, a veto over board appointments, a right of first refusal on 80% of the crude, and a term measured in centuries rather than electoral cycles are not instruments designed to survive Delcy Rodríguez. They are instruments designed to survive whoever replaces her. Machado’s objection and Washington’s design are, in that sense, describing the same document from opposite ends: she is arguing that an unelected government cannot bind the country for a hundred years, and the architecture’s entire value to its authors is that it can.

The Venezuelans, Rodríguez said on Saturday, have the right to know how much is invested, how much is produced, how much the state receives, and what the conditions for the operators are. The text remains unpublished.

Entendido — cortaste bien. Aquí va Oil & Deals completo y cerrado, solo esa sección.

OIL & DEALS

Eight energy agreements were signed at Miraflores Palace on Wednesday, September 2, with U.S. energy secretary Chris Wright standing beside interim president Delcy Rodríguez as witness. Neither government published an itemized list, and no aggregate figure was released beyond Wright’s description of commitments running into tens of billions of dollars.

• Chevron — the only major American producer that never left — announced more than $7 billion of investment over five years and a plan to more than double its output to some 600,000 barrels per day against its 2026 level. The company said it obtained improved fiscal, commercial and legal conditions for its mixed companies, and signed the recognition of the conversion contracts for Petroboscán, Petropiar and Petroindependencia under the Organic Hydrocarbons Law reformed in January. Chief executive Mike Wirth traveled to Caracas for the signing, his first visit to the country. This is the largest disclosed number of the fortnight and the only one attached to a producer already pumping.

• Eni signed a Productive Participation Contract and a transition agreement with PDVSA over Junín 5 in the Orinoco Belt, becoming exclusive operator of the block with full technical, financial and commercial responsibility. According to La República, the area holds some 35 billion certified barrels, produces around 12,000 barrels per day today, and could approach 400,000 by the end of the decade on an estimated $1.5 billion of annual investment. Chief executive Claudio Descalzi said in Miraflores that signed papers are not what counts but barrels, and announced that drilling of the first well began that same day — the only commitment of the eight with a spud date rather than a target.

• GE Vernova — the General Electric successor — accounted for two of the eight. The first is a strategic alliance with PDVSA to recover the electrical infrastructure of the oil industry itself. The second, with Corpoelec, the national electricity corporation, covers projects to strengthen the national grid, including rehabilitation of the Guri hydroelectric complex. The American objective is to stabilize the system within six to twelve months while modernization proceeds; executive Roger Martella put the labor requirement at around a thousand workers and said the company intends to move fast. No investment figure was disclosed. The agreements were signed in a week in which several states again registered voltage fluctuations, which is the relevant context for every production target announced beside them: the barrels do not move without the grid.

• Primavera, co-founded by Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of the crypto exchange Coinbase, signed a Productive Participation Contract over the Budare-Elotes block in the east. No reserve figure, production target, term or investment number was disclosed. The profile of the counterparty is the disclosure: the block went to a firm with no oilfield operating history in the country.

• Denver-based Aspect Holding appears on the official list of signatories without published terms. Neither the asset, the instrument nor the amount has been made public.

Three more transactions closed or advanced outside the ceremony.

• GeoPark, now controlled by the Colombian magnate Jaime Gilinski, signed on Friday, September 4 in Caracas a 25-year Productive Participation Contract to operate the Bare block in the Orinoco Belt, alongside Rodríguez, PDVSA executive vice president Jovanny Martínez, hydrocarbons minister Paula Henao and PDVSA president Héctor Obregón. The asset carries some 1,100 wells, current gross production of 11,000 barrels per day, an estimated potential of up to 95,000, and 15.7 billion barrels of original oil in place. GeoPark finances 100% of the work programs and takes a 65% net economic interest; entry into force depends on regulatory approvals that could take up to 120 days. The second component matters as much as the first: the share-structured deal announced on September 2 takes the Gilinski Group to roughly 56.3% of GeoPark Limited, with an adjustment mechanism that could raise it to 58.4%. Gilinski called the agreement a declaration of faith in Venezuela’s future; Rodríguez used the occasion to invite more Colombian businessmen in.

• Sable Offshore, the Houston producer, is in advanced talks for field development contracts with the government, the Financial Times reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. The company’s vice president of policy and commercial affairs, Brittany Kelm, worked until last month in the Trump administration as senior adviser to the National Energy Dominance Council, and four months ago posted on LinkedIn about driving Venezuelan economic growth through American investment after appearing alongside Rodríguez. The same reporting places Yorkville International Capital and Hunt Oil inside a broader wave of negotiations. Bloomberg separately documented that the seventeen-field agreement displaces a set of operators tied to Maduro who sustained crude flows to Asia despite sanctions — a Colombian businessman, a relative of Cilia Flores and a Chinese national, all sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury — who held prior contracts over some of the same blocks Rodríguez reassigned.

• The International Monetary Fund is considering opening a local office in Venezuela, which would give it permanent representation in the country for the first time in years, Bloomberg reported on September 3, citing familiar sources. The Fund is seeking to intensify technical assistance now that Caracas has begun sharing more economic data; the idea has been discussed with Venezuelan officials, no final decision has been taken, and a spokesman noted that a technical team is currently in Caracas working on capacity development, data provision and institutional strengthening. Relations resumed formally on April 16 after being suspended in 2019; in May, sectoral vice president for the economy Calixto Ortega was named governor for Venezuela before the organization; senior officials traveled to Caracas at the end of July for the first time in more than two decades, followed by a wider staff mission concluding this week. The Fund has not conducted an Article IV review of the Venezuelan economy since 2004.

• Miyamoto International, the American structural engineering firm, signed a contract on Friday, September 4 in Caracas to remove three million metric tons of earthquake debris in a first phase, concentrated in La Guaira state. The agreement was signed by public works minister Juan Ramírez and founder Kit Miyamoto, with Rodríguez and U.S. chargé d’affaires John Barrett present — three days after Miyamoto had accompanied Wright through Catia La Mar on the September 2 tour. The scope runs past haulage: the communications ministry framed it as technical assistance to raise construction standards and apply disaster-prevention protocols, and Ramírez pointed to the firm’s international record in post-earthquake infrastructure. The company has been in the country since the June 24 events conducting engineering assessments.

• Maiquetía reopened, at a fraction of itself. The Simón Bolívar International Airport resumed passenger operations on September 1 through provisional terminals, with fourteen airlines certified to operate there — internationally Plus Ultra, Iberia, Air Europa, American Airlines, Copa, LATAM Colombia, Avianca and GOL, and domestically Laser, Conviasa, Venezolana, Estelar, RUTACA and Avior. The first arrival was a Laser flight from Miami, the first departure a Conviasa service to Mexico City, and the flights displaced to Maracay, Valencia, Barquisimeto and Barcelona returned to the capital. Capacity is where the official accounts diverge, and the divergence is the useful part: El Nacional reported the reactivation recovers 25% of pre-earthquake operations, transport minister Francisco Garcés had earlier put the initial share at between a quarter and a third of international flights and projected 40% within roughly two months, and the ministry’s own restitution plan targets 40% of functions in the traditional terminals by November and combined capacity above 60% at year-end. Valencia, Barcelona and Maracay stay in coordinated operation meanwhile. For anyone planning travel into Caracas, the working number through the first quarter of 2027 is a quarter to a third of the airport that existed in June. United Airlines still has its Houston–Caracas relaunch parked at January 12, 2027 on pending regulatory approvals.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

The IBC closed the week of August 31 to September 4 at 5,940.58 points, up 5.61% in five sessions and 185.29% year to date — but the number worth holding is the one from five weeks earlier, when the index closed July down 0.76% and flat. The entire move belongs to the weeks in which the oil agreement was negotiated, announced and signed. What changed underneath the headline is breadth: for months this was a rally of four bank shares in a market of roughly thirty listed names, with industrials falling while financials ran. This week the Financial and Industrial indices rose almost in step, and the gainers list ran past the banks into Domínguez & Cía, Envases Venezolanos, Ron Santa Teresa, Corimon, Protinal and Sivensa. Nine shares rose at Friday’s close and four fell, against six and five at the end of July — still a rounding error of a market, but no longer a single-sector one. Set against accumulated inflation of 200.11% over eight months reported by the BCV, the nominal gain remains a real loss, which leaves the Caracas exchange where it has been all year: a readable gauge of which domestic sectors are being repriced, and not yet a venue.

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The core story: Legal access to Venezuela is no longer the binding constraint. Enforceable rights are. Two things happened in parallel this fortnight: the U.S. Treasury opened an entire new sector to foreign participation, and the Venezuelan state showed —by revoking a producing oil stake and by stripping a sitting deputy of his post for proposing a currency reform— that the perimeter of what is permitted inside the country is still drawn by hand, and can be redrawn overnight. That gap explains why the oil majors are still not signing, and why the money that is moving is coming from smaller, faster players instead.

Washington opens telecom while Caracas closes the debate (SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT). OFAC issued General Licenses 61 and 62 on August 21, authorizing telecom infrastructure work with the government, the regulator Conatel, and the state carrier Cantv — the first general license of this cycle aimed at a consumer-facing sector. Domestically the movement ran the other way: the tax authority now requires the taxpayer ID on every advertisement, including Instagram and TikTok posts, and the transport institute has issued a licensing framework for delivery apps. Both target the dollarized platform economy that grew while the state was absent. Meanwhile the heirs of Oswaldo Cisneros say the state revoked their 40% stake in the Petrodelta joint venture and moved the assets to a little-known U.S. company, and the National Assembly removed deputy Antonio Ecarri from the chairmanship of the friendship group with Washington within 24 hours of his proposing dollarization with economist Steve Hanke.

Independents sign, majors watch, airlines wait (OIL & DEALS). Hunt Oil signed a production contract for the Caro and Carisito fields and SLB signed a national reservoir-study framework, both announced from Houston, both without disclosed figures. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips have still committed to nothing. United Airlines pushed its Houston–Caracas relaunch to January 2027 on pending regulatory approvals, while Maiquetía airport remains in provisional terminals after the June earthquakes and most carriers operate out of Valencia.

Capital reaches past the outlier (SECTOR FOCUS). Fina, a Caracas software company selling administrative automation to small businesses, raised a $1 million seed round — small in absolute terms, significant as the first sign of depth below Cashea’s record $100 million. The broader sector case is chronological: technology and telecom now approach 5% of non-oil GDP, and this ecosystem was built before the political opening, not because of it.

A bank rally in a thirty-stock market (MARKET SNAPSHOT). The IBC rose 2.66% and then 8.67%, up 181.64% year to date, driven almost entirely by financial shares. Four stocks rose at Friday’s close, one fell, 28 were unchanged. Read against inflation near 400%, the real return is far thinner than the chart.

Bottom Line. Every door Washington opens this year leads into a room where the rules are still discretionary. The companies moving fastest are the ones small enough to survive being wrong; the ones sitting still are waiting for the one thing no license can grant, which is the assurance that a signature binds the state that signed it.

SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT

Permission is not protection

On Friday, August 21, the Office of Foreign Assets Control –OFAC, the arm of the U.S. Treasury that administers sanctions– issued General Licenses 61 and 62, extending to telecommunications the sector-by-sector authorization scheme Washington has been rolling out through 2026. GL 61, signed by OFAC director Bradley T. Smith, authorizes the supply of goods, technology, software and services to install, maintain, repair, upgrade, operate and sustain telecom infrastructure in the country. Its scope runs from data and telephony to internet connectivity, radio, television, satellite transmission and submarine cable landings.

The relevant detail is not the breadth of the activity but the identity of the counterparties. The license explicitly covers transactions with the Venezuelan government, with Conatel –the national telecommunications regulator– and with Cantv, the state carrier nationalized in 2007, along with its mobile subsidiary Movilnet. Eight months after the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the operating logic in Washington is to make it transactable in pieces. Telecom is a rational place to start: the infrastructure is degraded to the point where the political risk of investing is arguably lower than the commercial risk of not doing so, and the capital requirements sit below what an oil field demands. It is also the first general license in this cycle aimed squarely at a consumer-facing sector rather than at extraction.

The taxman discovers the influencers

While Washington opened, Caracas tightened –and it tightened precisely where the economy has grown fastest in the state’s absence.

An administrative ruling published on August 12 by the Seniat, the national tax authority, requires the Registro Único de Información Fiscal –the RIF, Venezuela’s taxpayer identification number– to appear clearly and legibly in every advertisement circulated through mass and digital media, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and websites included. The same ruling eliminated the RIF’s expiration date, and a companion measure repealed the 2024 requirement that invoicing software be certified by the agency.

Read narrowly, this is less novel than the headlines suggested: the obligation to display the RIF in advertising –cinema, television, print, flyers, billboards, internet– has been on the books since 2013, and the 2026 reform mostly rewrites the language. Read as policy, it is something else. The enforcement emphasis has shifted onto the entrepreneurs, small brands, delivery-first businesses and influencers who sell through social platforms, in dollars, without ever having appeared in a tax ledger. That informal-digital layer is the one genuinely dynamic part of the domestic consumer economy, and it grew during the years when the state could neither pay nor police. New superintendent Román Maniglia has been pushing the agency’s digitalization, and interim president Delcy Rodríguez announced on August 17 the integration of the Seniat’s platforms with those of the Saren, the public registries and notaries authority –a merger of the two databases that record who owns what and who sells what.

The influencer economy is not a marginal curiosity in Venezuela. Through the worst years of the collapse, when formal retail contracted and traditional advertising budgets evaporated, Instagram and later TikTok became the storefront of choice for an entire class of dollarized micro-businesses –bodegones importing goods by the suitcase, home bakers, resellers of cosmetics and electronics, personal trainers, tutors– and the people with audiences became the sales infrastructure that connected them to buyers. Eventually, these platforms’ homegrown influencers were also adopted by major companies in the country. Charging for posts and stories with fees that are way higher than the average salary of a professional in Caracas, the influencer economy is priced, invoiced and collected almost entirely outside the fiscal perimeter, largely because for years the state offered no reason and no mechanism to enter it.

The same week, on Tuesday the 18th, the Instituto Nacional de Transporte Terrestre –the INTT, which regulates ground transport– published a framework for home-delivery companies and courier apps: registration in the institute’s national registry, commercial-driving aptitude certificates issued by INTT-accredited driving schools, active civil liability and medical assistance policies, and periodic fleet inspections by certified specialists.

Home delivery has gone from a service limited to pizza chains and Chinese restaurants in Caracas to structural infrastructure since 2020 –built first by Yummy, the local superapp born in the middle of the pandemic, then by the arrival of the regional player PedidosYa, and increasingly by a long tail of smaller operators and the in-house digital delivery arms of established chains such as the pharmacy retailer Farmatodo.

Taken together, these are the first serious attempts to bring the platform economy –startups, gig couriers, influencer commerce– inside the fiscal perimeter.

Houston, and the majors who didn’t sign

Hydrocarbons minister Paula Henao announced from Houston on Tuesday the 18th the signing of a Productive Participation Contract with Hunt Oil, the Dallas-based independent, to develop and raise output at the Caro and Carisito fields in the east, plus a framework agreement with SLB –the former Schlumberger– for integrated reservoir studies at national scale. No investment figures, production targets or timelines were disclosed. The delegation –deputy minister for geopolitics Eduardo Ramírez, PDVSA executive vice president Jovanny Martínez and chargé d’affaires in Washington Johan Álvarez– appeared at the IMAGE 2026 conference alongside U.S. deputy energy secretary Kyle Haustveit. Hunt Oil chief executive Hunter L. Hunt said his company wants to play a constructive role in reviving Venezuelan production.

The contrast with the majors is the story. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips sent teams to assess opportunities early in the year and have signed nothing since; Chevron remains the only large U.S. producer that never left. A Wall Street Journal report in late July described the impasse plainly: seven months after Maduro’s capture, the majors had made no significant moves, were circling the same handful of valuable assets, and were demanding guarantees, while the Trump administration redirected its attention toward independents that can move faster. The attorney José Ignacio Hernández, quoted in that report, likened it to selling a house –a crowded open house, no offers afterward.

The macro data does not explain the hesitation. Crude output averaged 1.2 million barrels per day in July, up 1.09% from June and half of Venezuelan production is now exported to the United States. Contracts are being signed, but the process is opaque and the rules are uncertain.

What Petrodelta teaches

The clearest lesson in that uncertainty arrived the same week. Around August 18, the heirs of the late magnate Oswaldo Cisneros accused the government of stripping them of drilling rights and awarding them to a U.S. company. In a statement dated August 15, DP Delta Finance BV –the vehicle run by Cisneros’s widow and heirs– said it had been deprived of its assets and of operational control through an arbitrary sanctions process, and put the amount owed at $2 billion.

Its 40% stake in Petrodelta, the mixed company held with PDVSA, carried drilling and development rights through 2042. According to two people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by Bloomberg, the government revoked those rights after determining that the joint venture had failed to meet its investment and production commitments, and has since advanced the transfer of the assets to Pacific Coast Energy Co., an American company unknown in the local market. The partnership produced 12 million barrels worth $700 million and provided a further $100 million in services without receiving payment through March. Company counsel Juan Domingo Alfonso Paradisi wrote separately that the hydrocarbons ministry initiated the revocation and bears responsibility for the confiscation. The fields in dispute –Tucupita, Bombal, Uracoa, El Isleño, Temblador and El Salto– sit in the eastern basin. This is the branch of the Cisneros family led by Oswaldo, who died in Miami in 2020, and not the Grupo Cisneros of Adriana Cisneros, which owns Venevisión.

The instrument matters more than the parties. Failure to meet investment and production plans is the same discretionary lever the state has used against foreign partners for two decades. That it was reportedly used to move assets toward an American company should unsettle rather than reassure American capital: it establishes that a stake in a mixed company can still change hands by administrative decision, before any court has spoken. Every risk committee in Houston now has a live, documented precedent from the post-Maduro period. The majors are not waiting for licenses –they have licenses. They are waiting for evidence that a signature binds the state that signed it.

Who is allowed to say “dollar”

The week’s last demonstration was monetary. Fortune revealed that Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins, had been brought in as a special adviser on economic, monetary and energy affairs to work on a full dollarization law that would replace the bolívar with the dollar and shutter the Banco Central de Venezuela. He confirmed to his own newsletter subscribers that he was returning to Venezuelan politics three decades after designing a currency board as chief economic adviser to president Rafael Caldera, a plan that never won a majority in Congress.

On Friday the 21st, National Assembly president Jorge Rodríguez denied that the legislature had hired anyone, called the report absurd and poisonous, said Venezuela defeated hyperinflation long ago, and announced an investigation into the origin of the story. Hours later, deputy Antonio Ecarri, of the small ‘systemic opposition’ party Alianza del Lápiz, confirmed that Hanke works with his own parliamentary team and not with the institution; his press chief, Pedro Eduardo Leal, clarified that Ecarri was acting in a personal capacity. On Saturday the 22nd, Rodríguez removed Ecarri from the presidency of the Venezuela–United States Parliamentary Friendship Group for conduct he called irresponsible, citing the chamber’s internal rules on interparliamentary diplomacy and the constitutional article establishing the bolívar as the monetary unit and the BCV as the sole authority over monetary policy. The board opened a sanctions procedure. Ecarri, who has argued for dollarization since 2017, responded that Venezuela is already dollarized in practice and that the people paying the price are those still collecting salaries in bolívares –teachers, nurses, workers and pensioners.

Hanke’s Venezuelan résumé is worth revisiting in fulll. He advised Rafael Caldera’s government in 1995 and 1996; he was announced in 2023 as economic adviser to Roberto Enríquez, the Copei candidate in the opposition primary that María Corina Machado went on to win by a landslide; he consulted for Javier Milei‘s team in Argentina; and he has supervised dollarizations in Montenegro, Ecuador and Zimbabwe. Rodríguez attacked him for Argentina’s convertibility regime and its collapse under Carlos Menem –a period in which Hanke was not, in fact, the architect. Over three decades he has offered the same prescription to a Caldera administration, to an opposition primary candidate and now to a deputy elected into a rubber stamp parliament presided over by chavismo.

That last configuration is the point for anyone underwriting Venezuelan risk. Ecarri is not an insurgent. He is a minority lawmaker from a ‘systemic opposition’ party –parties that are nominally opposition but play within the authoritarian state’s rules– who accepted the electoral framework, took his seat in a chamber run by the ruling PSUV, and was trusted enough to chair the friendship group with Washington –the single most sensitive parliamentary portfolio in the country right now. He was stripped of it within twenty-four hours, not for opposing the government but for proposing a monetary regime. Jorge Rodríguez, who signed the removal, is the brother of the interim president. The transition redistributed power inside the governing structure; it did not disperse it. And the perimeter of what may be debated –including the currency the economy already uses every day– is still drawn by the same hand.

The licenses are written in Washington. What they are worth is still decided by an unelected government in Caracas.

OIL & DEALS

• Hunt Oil signed a Productive Participation Contract with PDVSA for the Caro and Carisito fields in eastern Venezuela, announced from Houston on August 18 by hydrocarbons minister Paula Henao. The Dallas-based independent is among the first producers to sign with the state company under the new framework. No investment figure, production target or term was disclosed. Chief executive Hunter L. Hunt framed the move as a constructive contribution to reviving national output.

• SLB –the former Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield services company– signed a framework agreement with the ministry for integrated reservoir studies at national scale. A framework agreement is not a contract: it authorizes the technical work that precedes investment decisions, which makes it the more informative of the two signings. Whoever maps the reservoirs shapes what the next round of contracts is worth.

• United Airlines pushed its Houston–Caracas relaunch to January 12, 2027, closing bookings for the entire window between October 6 and January 11, according to schedule records reported by the aviation outlet AeroRoutes. The route was first announced in May for an August 11 start, then moved to October 6. Specialized outlet AeroRoutes reported that the delay stems from pending regulatory approvals: the bilateral air restrictions issued by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration in May 2019 have not been formally lifted, and the operating authorizations from Venezuela’s INAC –the civil aviation authority– are not complete. American Airlines has flown the Miami route since April 30, so the obstacle is not the corridor itself.

• Maiquetía is the other half of that story. The Simón Bolívar International Airport, the country’s main gateway, has been closed to commercial traffic since the June 24 earthquakes; provisional terminals built in the parking area began testing on August 19, with reopening estimated for August 24. In the meantime, Iberia, Air Europa, Plus Ultra and TAP Air Portugal are operating from the Arturo Michelena airport in Valencia, two hours from Caracas; Turkish Airlines suspended its Istanbul route until October 1; Qatar Airways keeps its Doha–Caracas–Bogotá service –which was about to be launched before the earthquakes– suspended indefinitely; and American is offering Miami–Maracaibo rather than the capital. Local airliner Laser is offering direct flights to the United States through Valencia and Barcelona.

• Fina, the Caracas enterprise-resource-planning platform for small and mid-sized businesses founded by Enrique Rivas, announced a seed round of $1 million. The company sells inventory, sales, payroll and payments automation to Venezuelan SMEs, and had previously raised $450,000 in two rounds. The round is small in absolute terms and large in what it signals: after Cashea closed $100 million across a Series A and B this year –the largest raise ever for a Venezuelan startup– the open question was whether capital would reach beyond the single outlier. A seed round in business software is the first evidence that it might.

SECTOR FOCUS

Venezuela’s startup economy: the seed round after the megaround

The missing middle. When Cashea closed $100 million across a Series A and a Series B this year –the largest raise in the history of Venezuelan startups, and a figure that arrived weeks after the June earthquakes– the reasonable investor question was not whether the country could produce a winner. It was whether anything existed underneath it. A single outlier is a story about one team. A functioning market needs the layer below.

This week’s announcement by Fina, the Caracas-based enterprise resource planning platform that sells inventory, sales, payroll and payment automation to Venezuelan small and mid-sized businesses, is the first real test of that question. Founded by Enrique Rivas and three others, the company raised a seed round of $1 million. Its previous raise was $450,000 in two rounds.

The absolute number is trivial by regional standards –the median Latin American seed round runs around $2 million– and that is exactly what makes it worth reporting. Venezuela’s problem was never the top of the funnel; it was the middle. As Carlos Inguanzo, a local tech expert, money exists in the country but most local investors lack the experience to deploy it into startups, and instruments as basic as a SAFE or a convertible note remain unfamiliar to many of them. Combined with weak legal certainty, that leaves friends and family as the dominant early-stage source, and the absence of exits –no large acquirers, no functioning equity market– caps the return that would justify institutional money entering at all.

A million dollars into business software is a modest correction to that structure. It also lands in a suggestive place: Venezuela’s tech ecosystem.

…

Built before the opening. The most useful thing for a foreign investor to understand about Venezuelan technology is chronological. The second Startup Venezuela Summit that assembled hundreds of attendees and sixty panelists at Caracas Campus –a cube-shaped complex in the southeast of the city that was once Procter & Gamble’s Latin American headquarters, and became a coworking hub after the multinational left– was held in October 2025. That is before the January U.S. intervention, before the new licenses and laws, before any of the current expectations. This ecosystem was not built on the political opening. It was built during the closure, which says something about its durability that no sanctions timeline can.

The macro data supports the sequence. According to Venezuelan economist Asdrúbal Oliveros, technology and telecommunications now account for close to 5% of non-oil GDP and were the sixth-fastest-growing sector between 2021 and 2024, with cumulative growth near 20%; in the first half of last year, the sector expanded 11%, second only to oil. A report by the private investment association Venecápital and the accelerator Innoven by SquareOne counted at least 84 startups in the country, the vast majority founded since 2020, with 2024 the record year for new company formation. According to sources in the industry, once minor projects are taken into account, the country could have around 400 of these. Underneath that sits a much broader base: a study by the Andrés Bello Catholic University and IESA, the Caracas business school, found that by 2024 4.5 million Venezuelans had started a business in a country of fewer than 30 million people, though with high informality and high mortality (the number of entrepreneurs has collapsed since then). Aramis Rodríguez, professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at IESA, describes the environment as a viscous one, lacking the nutrients a healthy ecosystem should have, which pushes thousands into business out of necessity rather than opportunity.

The companies that entered anyway did so on numbers that outsiders had not run. Andoni Alava, managing director of the delivery platform PedidosYa in Venezuela, described the internal case he had to make to headquarters: “Venezuela is a large country, with a GDP far exceeding that of Central American countries where we have successful operations. When we entered the market, there wasn’t much competition, and the usability conditions were already there.” María E. Pereda, country manager for the mobility platform Yango, frames it as a blue ocean, where the low digitization of everyday services allows a company to create demand rather than take it: “The penetration of non-digital mobility services remains enormous.” The investor Patrick Dolman, previously at Bicycle Capital and Morgan Stanley, offered the ratio that best captures the anomaly: Brazil sells three million motorcycles a year into a population of 220 million, while Venezuela sells 700,000 into fewer than 30 million. “That ratio is unbelievable,” he said. “It’s a very consumer-driven market and it’s open to anything.”

Financial services show the same pattern of scarcity producing adoption. Venezuela remains the second most banked economy in Latin America according to the World Bank, even as formal credit effectively disappeared, which is why payment startups such as PagoDirecto, Ubii and Zinli found immediate traction. Ramón Velásquez, chief executive of Ubii, put the scale of the resulting gap plainly: Cashea has processed more than $2 billion in credit lines last year, nearly matching the loan portfolio of the entire national banking system. That is one four-year-old company approximating the credit output of every bank in the country –a statistic that is simultaneously an argument for the sector and an indictment of the system it replaced.

The constraint is talent retention and capital depth, in that order and improving. Yummy, founded in 2020 as a delivery app in a market where UberEats and its peers never operated, has functioned as the ecosystem’s training ground; its chief technology officer, Ignacio Carrillo-Batalla, calls the company a kind of technical university whose alumni now staff or found other companies. Its chief executive, Vicente Zavarce, marks the shift in how the country appears to outside capital: “Venezuela no longer shows up as a grey dot separated from the map” in the portfolios of large Latin American funds.

Also worth noting. The 2026 edition of the Startup Venezuela Summit is scheduled for October 21 to 23 in Caracas, which for anyone building a first-hand view of the sector is the single most efficient three days on the calendar –subject, as everything is this season, to which airport is operating.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

What traded. The headline figure at the Bolsa de Valores de Caracas fell from Bs 40.69 billion in the week of August 10–14 to Bs 31.88 billion in the week of August 17–21, which sounds like a retreat and is not one. Almost the entire volume in both weeks –Bs 39.59 billion and then Bs 30.58 billion– consisted of Certificados de Financiamiento Bursátil, short-term corporate paper issued through the exchange. That instrument is the story of the Caracas bourse: it functions primarily as a corporate money market, not as an equity market. Actual share trading is a rounding error beside it, at Bs 257 million and then Bs 329 million, and it went the other way –operations rose from 8,723 to 12,461 and shares traded from 1.92 million to 2.55 million.

What moved. The IBC index gained 2.66% in the first week and 8.67% in the second, closing at 5,864.39 points and taking the year-to-date gain to 181.64%. The rally is almost entirely financial: on Friday’s close the Financial Index rose 3.67% while the Industrial Index managed 0.28%, repeating the previous week’s pattern of a 5.10% financial gain against a 0.42% industrial decline. Banks dominated the volume tables both weeks –Banco Provincial, Banco Nacional de Crédito, Banco de Venezuela, Mercantil Servicios Financieros– alongside the exchange’s own shares and CANTV, the state carrier, whose class D stock remains among the ten most traded. Two price moves need an asterisk. BNC’s 55.92% rise reflects an opening-price adjustment after a capital increase paid as a stock dividend, with the ex-date set for August 19, not a re-rating.

What it means. Breadth is the number to hold onto: at Friday’s close, four stocks rose, one fell and 28 were unchanged. This is a market of roughly thirty listed names where a handful of bank shares set the index, and where the rally reflects the repricing of financial institutions in an economy where credit is being rebuilt from near zero. The 181.64% year-to-date gain also has to be read against the currency it is denominated in –Venezuelan inflation is running around 400% a year– which means the nominal chart flatters a real return that is considerably thinner, and possibly negative. For a foreign allocator the practical read is unchanged: the Caracas exchange is a window into which domestic sectors are recovering, not yet a venue.

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Venezuela’s reopening has drawn a new audience — investors, advisors, and firms evaluating the country from the outside — that needs more than news coverage. This is a shorter pilot for a new version of Ecosistema’s The Venezuelan Business Dispatch, built for that audience: an analytical briefing on the political, regulatory, and business developments shaping Venezuela’s re-entry into global markets. We are planning to change towards a paid subscription model in the coming weeks. We’d love your feedback.

Issue #8 Executive Summary: July 27 – August 9, 2026

No deals until there’s a deal (SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT): Blackouts of five to eight hours pushed protests across several states and cost Corpoelec its leadership, and while Delcy Rodríguez asked Venezuelans to save electricity and promised 4,800 megawatts, Washington sent Department of Energy engineers to Guri – turning the grid into a bilateral performance problem rather than a domestic one, without truly warming investors. The same paralysis runs through oil, where nearly eight months on there is not one finalized major U.S. deal and production sits at 1.2 million barrels a day against 1.1 million before the November quarantine. What foreign private money doubts is not the geology but the counterparty: a bureaucracy organized to extract from institutions. Venezuelans have reached the same verdict, naming corruption the country’s top problem at 66.2% in AtlasIntel’s July poll while Rodríguez’s approval has fallen 30 points since January to 16.2% according to More Consulting, with only 7% trusting the executive to handle earthquake donations. Which is why the August 6 talks are not a parallel political story: Rubio wants elections in “months and weeks,” the opposition leadership expects a new TSJ by November and a new CNE by December, and very little gets bankable before either arrives.

Hunt in, Sargeant out, and the Caribbean reopens (OIL & DEALS): Hunt Oil signed an MOU to evaluate crude development — the wildcatter lane finally moving while the majors wait. Treasury froze the assets of Harry Sargeant III’s offshore vehicle and licensed his exit, ending the reopening’s most personal back channel. Aruba reopened its airspace after seven years, at one flight a week, to a market that once sent it 250,000 visitors a year; Copa added Margarita for the December high season. Air connectivity is the least glamorous signal here and the most honestly priced.

The $2 billion category nobody is watching (SECTOR FOCUS): According to economist Asdrúbal Oliveros, Venezuela’s pet market could reach $2 billion —about 2% of GDP— under normalization, and today trades at 10% to 15% of that, growing 15% to 20% a year over a base of 3.5 million animals. Behind the retail buildout sits a founder layer that mirrors the Cashea thesis: design brands built on $200, veterinarian-formulated food scaling to six cities in a year, and a telemedicine platform quietly assembling a national microchip database and distributing insurance from $39.99. Nobody downgrades the dog.

Two weeks, one round trip (MARKET SNAPSHOT): The Caracas Stock Exchange closed August 7 at 5,256.49, up 1.60% across ten sessions and 152.44% on the year against inflation near 130%. Roughly 97% of the Bs 82.7 billion traded was short-term corporate paper. The tell is what didn’t move: Fábrica Nacional de Cementos, last issue’s reconstruction rally, gained 0.32%.

Who pays for La Guaira (THE LONG READ): With close to 18,000 people without housing and a third of 12,552 assessed buildings tagged red, the state has answered with a subsidized mortgage covering up to 80% of a $70,000 home and a sketch of three market instruments — two bonds and a securitization program. Every one of them, plus the roughly $334 million minimum subsidy bill, ultimately backstops onto the same strained fiscal source. The construction chamber’s own fix is legal rather than financial: repeal two laws, create a special property regime for La Guaira. Which requires a recognized legislature and an enforcing court. The financing puzzle is not, at bottom, a financing puzzle.

SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT

No deals until there’s a deal

Communities across the interior are enduring daily outages of five to eight hours with no published rationing schedule, and on August 2 acting president Delcy Rodríguez asked Venezuelans to save electricity and water in the face of the “Super El Niño” climate phenomenon while announcing a plan to add 4,800 megawatts to the national grid over the rest of the year.

Those megawatts, according to Rodríguez herself, would come on top of capacity delivered under contracts already signed with the American firm GE Vernova and the U.S.-Argentine manufacturer IMPSA; she announced no mandatory rationing regime and no schedule for the cuts. Yet, a near-identical appeal in March —framed as a 45-day emergency savings plan— expired without the cuts stopping, against a national demand the outlet puts at roughly 13,000 megawatts, which Corpoelec, the state electricity corporation, cannot cover.

The response reflects the disenchantment. Residents of Turmero in the central state of Aragua closed roads and burned tires after outages of more than six hours, following cacerolazos —the long tradition of pot-banging protests— on the Santiago Mariño intercity avenue, with similar demonstrations in La Victoria and San Mateo. By August 8, Rodríguez had replaced the leadership of the sector, naming José Luis Betancourt vice minister of electrical services and Juan Crisóstomo Fernández president of Corpoelec, amid protests in no fewer than ten states of the center and west. Personnel changes are the cheapest available policy. They are also the clearest signal that the government has run out of the other kind.

Washington’s electric boogaloo. The United States has read the same signal. According to the U.S. embassy in Caracas, chargé d’affaires John Barrett accompanied technical experts from the U.S. Department of Energy to the Guri dam —officially the Simón Bolívar hydroelectric plant, in Bolívar state; the country’s main source of electricity— on August 2 for a technical diagnostic intended to define a modernization route for the national grid, carried out with State Department support and in coordination with Venezuela’s electricity ministry and Corpoelec. Guri generates roughly 60% of the electricity the country consumes, according to figures cited in coverage of the inspection. The embassy framed the work as support for Venezuela’s economic recovery under the three-phase plan announced by President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

But what has arrived to answer that pressure is not the scale of capital the sector requires. A memorandum with GE Vernova, a contract with IMPSA and a technical diagnostic are the instruments companies use when they want optionality without exposure – real commitments, but small against a grid that is short of covering roughly 13,000 megawatts, and against the more than $180 billion estimated would be needed to fully rehabilitate the oil and gas industry alone. The reason the checks are undersized is not the geology and no longer the sanctions. It is that foreign private capital does not yet believe in the counterparty: ministries and state enterprises staffed by political appointees with thin technical command of the assets they administer, where discretionary permitting, opaque contracting and the absence of a functioning arbiter turn every approval into a toll booth rather than a rule. Corruption was named the country’s principal problem by 66.2% of respondents in AtlasIntel’s July Latam Pulse, published on August 6: Venezuelans and boardrooms have, for once, converged on the same finding.

And the situation has turned newly political for Washington: it did not send Department of Energy engineers to Guri because the grid became newly broken in August; it sent them because the tutelage that made the reopening possible also converted a domestic services failure into a bilateral performance problem, on a timeline set by protesters rather than by licenses. Having supervised the export trade, endorsed the stabilization phase and lent its credibility to an interim authority, the United States is now seen within Venezuela as enabling the system blamed every time the lights go out in Maracay. Local pollster Poder & Estrategia recently found that a plurality of Venezuelans no longer reads Washington’s role as “tutelage” but as “submission” – with the US shifting “from hero to increasingly questioned,” according to the firm’s founder Ricardo Ríos.

Eight months, no deals. The situation is not limited to the electric sector. According to U.S. outlet Axios, which spoke with a dozen industry professionals, senior U.S. officials and Venezuela insiders for an August 3 report, no new petroleum deals have been finalized with American firms nearly eight months after Trump predicted U.S. companies would rapidly rebuild the industry – with the blame falling largely on the Department of Energy. “We have no new concessions. No new deals,” a senior U.S. official told the outlet.

The paralysis traces to two fault lines: an industry split between majors like Exxon and ConocoPhillips, publicly cool on returning because of the uncertainty, and the smaller independents known as wildcatters, eager to move; and an administration split between officials who wanted PDVSA pushed quickly toward international contracting standards and Energy Department staff, with relatively little international oil experience, who preferred a slower process negotiated with Caracas. Rubio, according to the same reporting, has declined repeated requests to take the portfolio from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, partly because firms are effectively asking the U.S. government to pick winners.

While spokesperson Ben Dietderich told Axios that production and exports have reached levels few thought possible because of U.S. investment, Venezuela produces about 1.2 million barrels a day: only modestly above the 1.1 million it managed before the November quarantine and Maduro’s capture.

The patience deficit. Meanwhile the political clock, which investors had been treating as a background variable, has become a foreground one: because Venezuelans are running out of patience faster than Washington is.

According to the July edition of Latam Pulse, produced by AtlasIntel with Bloomberg, Rodríguez’s approval stands at 22% against 64.5% disapproval, the highest the series has recorded, with 58% rating her management bad or very bad against 11.9% who call it good or excellent. Although sidelined by Washington, María Corina Machado’s positive image rose from 53% in June to 72% in July and in a hypothetical three-way presidential race she draws 57.4% against Rodríguez’s 17.7%, with Empresas Polar president Lorenzo Mendoza third at 9%.

Similarly, a survey by local pollster More Consulting taken after the quakes registered Delcy Rodríguez’s accelerating erosion: her approval as head of state has dropped 30 points since January, sitting at 16.2%. Machado, by contrast, hasn’t slipped since February – holding above 45% positive and even ticking up a couple of points last month. More Consulting also describes a national mood swing from hopeful after Maduro’s capture to frustrated and worried, with many now casting themselves as “expectant critics.”

Other polls highlight the confidence crisis: according a July study by pollster Poder y Estrategia, just 7% of Venezuelans trust the national executive to channel international earthquake donations. Ríos, who leads the firm, attributed the slide not only to the earthquake but to unmet electoral expectations –close to 70% of respondents expected elections within the year when the firm asked in March– alongside the failure to update the official transparency portal on the use of oil revenue and the worsening blackouts now reaching Caracas.

On the path towards a democratic transition. All of these pressures is what makes the negotiation that opened this month fundamental. Speaking to reporters on August 4, before the first round convened, Rubio said he expected elections to take months rather than years: it would require constancy and some patience, “not years, but months and weeks.” According to his remarks that day, the conditions are genuine press freedom, multiparty participation, national reconciliation, and an electoral commission that counts votes accurately – and the transition must go beyond calling elections to leaving functional institutions behind.

Once the opposition delegation arrived, the negotiation table was installed on August 6 at the La Carlota air base in Caracas, with Jorge Rodríguez, president of the Chavista-controlled Assembly and the government’s chief negotiator, facing Dinorah Figuera, who defends the continuity of the opposition-majority Assembly elected in 2015 and returned from Spain the previous day. According to the joint communiqué issued by both delegations, this first cycle runs through August 12 after the parties defined methodology, phases and agenda. The agenda has three axes — attention to the victims of the June 24 earthquakes, the strengthening of democratic institutions, and political and civil rights guarantees — and Figuera has said the process will run to December 2026, when its full product will be formally presented.

According to Figuera’s own statements on arrival, the institutional objective includes renewing the National Electoral Council (CNE) by December and the TSJ, the country’s loyalist-packed highest court, by November. The delegation expects advancements regarding political rights and guarantees –such as the removal of bans on opposition candidates, the legalization of opposition political parties and new press freedoms– by October. Highly popular opposition leaders Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia are outside the room —Washington chose the 2015 Assembly as its formal channel— and in a joint statement offered conditional support, noting they took no part in the design of the process and tying their backing to the release of political prisoners, the restoration of democratic institutions and a presidential electoral calendar.

A renewed electoral authority and a renewed judiciary —the CNE and the TSJ, both named by Figuera on arrival as objectives of the talks— are what convert an OFAC authorization into a contract a board will sign, a grid concession into a twenty-year asset, and a hydrocarbons framework into a development cycle rather than an export recovery. The Energy Department’s caution and PDVSA’s contracting standards are downstream of the same absence: there is no institution in Venezuela today whose signature ensures anything because there is no court that can be appealed to, no independent parliament to enforce the law and no election that can replace the officials who broke it.

The distinction matters because the Venezuelan state as currently constituted is not merely inefficient at delivering electricity or approving permits; it is organized to extract from the delay. A ministry that cannot be sued, an electoral authority that cannot be lost and a judiciary that answers to the executive together produce a predictable equilibrium: one in which the scarce good is not capital or expertise but access, and the officials who ration it capture the rent. That is why an audit at Guri and a memorandum with a turbine manufacturer do not, on their own, move the number. They enter a system whose incentives run the other way. Elections are the mechanism that breaks the pervasive logic of Venezuela’s predatory state, not because voting is intrinsically virtuous but because a bureaucracy that can be removed is a bureaucracy that can be made to perform and a new set of institutions is fundamental for the reestablishment of the rule of law.

The frustration of January 3 –the sense that something enormous had happened and nothing had changed– is now measurable, and it is compounding. Investors are pricing a settlement that has not arrived; Venezuelans are living in the interval while the lights go off. Both are waiting in the same room in La Carlota.

OIL & DEALS

• Hunt Oil signed a memorandum of understanding with the Venezuelan authorities to evaluate crude development opportunities, according to María Julia Aybar, the Dallas company’s senior vice president and country manager for Peru and Latin America. Aybar characterized the move as a risky and aggressive bet with attractive production potential, and said the agreement is oriented initially toward crude production without ruling out natural gas. Hunt, a privately held company with operations in North America, South America, Africa and the Middle East, is best known regionally as a partner in Peru’s Camisea gas consortium.

• Harry Sargeant III is being pushed out of Venezuela by the same administration whose access he helped build. According to Bloomberg, the Treasury Department on August 7 froze the assets of Bluewave Properties Ltd., the Florida magnate’s British Virgin Islands–registered vehicle participating in Venezuelan oil-producing ventures, citing violations of a 2018 executive order blocking property of those deemed to have supported the former government in Caracas — while simultaneously issuing a license permitting him to unwind his interests. Sargeant, a Republican donor and occasional Trump golf partner, served for years as a back channel between Washington and Caracas, accumulating outsized influence on both sides; his Global Oil Terminals held the first direct PDVSA asphalt purchases under General License 44 in 2024, and in February Trump publicly disclaimed him on Truth Social after a Wall Street Journal report, stating that he had no authority to act on behalf of the United States.

• Aruba reopened its airspace to Venezuela on August 1, ending a closure imposed in 2019. According to a statement from Aruban transport, tourism and labor minister Wendrick Cicilia, the air border reopens gradually, beginning with commercial flights; Prime Minister Mike Eman said the first phase would run at roughly one weekly frequency, with priority given to routes from Maracaibo, Maiquetía and Las Piedras. According to Ronella Croes, executive director of the Aruba Tourism Authority, Aruba Airlines and the Venezuelan carriers Turpial and Laser have expressed interest, though no operator has been formally selected. Visa requirements for Venezuelans are unchanged. The closure came when Maduro sealed air and maritime links with the ABC islands as the opposition attempted to move U.S. humanitarian aid through the archipelago, which Caracas treated as an invasion attempt. But the relationship long predates that rupture: Aruba’s economy was built on Venezuelan crude, with PDVSA’s Citgo holding the country’s refinery and main economic engine for years before transferring control back to Aruba in 2020. On the tourism side, according to Aruban figures, Venezuela was once the island’s second-largest source market, contributing close to 250,000 visitors a year at its peak.

• Copa Airlines announced on August 4 that it will begin serving Porlamar, on Margarita island, from November 26, with three weekly frequencies. According to the airline, the route adds roughly 3,500 monthly seats in both directions and lifts Copa to 46 weekly frequencies between Panama and Venezuela, making Margarita its sixth Venezuelan destination after Caracas, Valencia, Maracaibo, Barcelona and Barquisimeto, and its second in the east of the country. Copa is a listed carrier with disciplined network planning, committing aircraft and slots to a Venezuelan leisure destination nine months after Maduro’s capture and five months after a catastrophic earthquake — and doing it for the December high season, betting that the diaspora and the region will fly to Margarita for Christmas.

• Also worth noting: OFAC renewed the license shielding the PDVSA 2020 bonds on August 3, replacing General License 5X with 5Y and extending the block on bondholder claims to Citgo at least until September 17, when another extension is widely expected. The collateral question that has hung over Citgo since 2019 remains, for now, deferred rather than resolved.

SECTOR FOCUS: THE PET ECONOMY

Venezuela’s pet boom is a $2 billion market trading at a tenth of its size

Drive through southeastern Caracas and the category announces itself: a 24-hour emergency veterinary center in a remodeled quinta with minimalist interiors, a billboard for dog biscuits on Avenida Francisco de Miranda, a clinic in Las Mercedes running ophthalmology, dermatology, cardiology and neurology for dogs and cats around the clock. Empresas Polar, the country’s largest private company, has entered with Dougourmet, its own dog food line. In Valencia, the first canine grooming fest followed a local edition of the regional Congreso Veterinario de León that drew a dozen national and international speakers and more than fifty brands.

According to economist Asdrúbal Oliveros, this is a genuine boom rather than an affluent curiosity, spanning veterinary services, challengers to the traditional food brands, and newer lines entirely — pet parties, pet funeral services, pet training. The demand core, he estimates, is roughly 15% of the Venezuelan population with an unusually high willingness to spend on animals, though he emphasizes the phenomenon is not confined to them: middle- and lower-income households will also raise pet spending within their means, provided someone builds products at accessible price points.

The number that matters. According to Oliveros, under conditions of political and economic normalization the Venezuelan pet market could move toward $2 billion –around 2% of current GDP– within the next few years. Today, by his estimate, it reaches only 10% to 15% of that size. That is a market of roughly $200 to $300 million growing into a ten-figure category, and the gating variable he names is precisely the one this issue’s regulatory section keeps circling. Meanwhile the momentum is already there: according to figures from sector specialists cited by the trainer and pet-care operator Samuel Sánchez, the segment is expanding 15% to 20% annually. The addressable base, according to market studies consulted by the food brand Bone Appetit, is some 3.5 million dogs and cats nationally.

Why this category, in this country. The demographic logic is global and Venezuela is a late but fast adopter of it. According to Sánchez, Spain became the first country with more pets than children in 2024, and the local pattern rhymes: young couples starting with an animal rather than a child, a shift the pandemic accelerated. Oliveros frames it generationally, noting that declining fertility from the millennial cohort onward has redirected spending toward animals. The commercial consequence is the same one Nutresa is buying into with Tío Rico: a dollarized, affectively defended, recession-resistant consumption line. Nobody downgrades the dog.

The retail buildout is already visible. Vida Pets operates across four Venezuelan cities; Maxipet runs dozens of branches in metropolitan Caracas plus one in Margarita, offering dog birthdays, veterinary services, a coffee bar for waiting owners and scent branding borrowed from five-star hotel lobbies. At the Parque Cerro Verde mall, a japandi-styled newcomer, Archie’s Pet Shop, markets itself as a luxury pet boutique. Two of the largest chains now sit directly beside each other in Las Mercedes, which is either a demand signal or a warning, depending on how much of that $2 billion arrives.

The pet services layer is where the founders are

The interesting bets are not the shelves. They are the businesses being built on top of them — and they map neatly onto the same startup thesis that produced Cashea.

Product, built on $200. According to founder Cristina Raffalli, Decopet began as a side project while she was a student at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, selling wooden dog houses to cover tuition that had spiked with four semesters left; she started with roughly $200 for materials and online sales. The brand now runs a team of five with products between $18 and $80, has close to 60,000 Instagram followers, sells through the buy-now-pay-later app Cashea and ships nationwide. Her diagnosis of the market she entered is the most investable line in the story: everything looked the same, she says, the offer endlessly repetitive, the same shapes and the same fluorescent colors, with little intention or creativity behind any of it. The design answer was a deliberately small catalogue built for vertical urban life — ergonomic bowls that keep anxious dogs from choking, ramps that prevent injury, artificial-grass balconies for buildings where walking the dog several times a day is not realistic.

Food, as a health category. Bone Appetit attacked a market dominated by industrial kibble with cooked, natural, veterinarian-formulated food personalized to the animal. According to founder Adriana Selvaggio, Venezuelan owners have begun to internalize long-term health as an investment rather than an expense, and the growth followed: in under a year the brand went from Caracas to Maracay, Valencia, Barquisimeto, Maracaibo and the Puerto La Cruz–Barcelona–Lechería corridor. Her framing of the expansion is worth noting for anyone modeling Venezuelan consumer demand from a Caracas desk — the country, she argues, is considerably more than its capital.

Insurance, quietly building infrastructure. The most structurally significant business here may be the least glamorous. According to Katty Sayago, CEO of Miveteonline –founded in 2017 as a veterinary telemedicine platform– the company now works alongside the country’s largest insurers to distribute pet policies, with plans starting at $39.99 a year. Sayago says the platform has also driven adoption of internationally standardized microchip identification, assembling what she describes as the country’s largest such database in alliance with insurers, and is working to bring mayors’ offices and state governments into chip scanning as public policy. In a market where formal insurance products are scarce for humans, a functioning pet policy channel with an identity layer beneath it is not a novelty item. It is a distribution asset.

Where the money concentrates. The premium end has its own index. According to Sánchez, six of every ten dogs he trains are goldendoodles –the doodle wave having displaced the French bulldog that dominated locally between 2016 and 2022– and the Parque Cerro Verde mall now hosts Doodle VIP, dedicated to doodle sales, care and advisory. The scale of what that trend is worth elsewhere: according to estimates by Bloomberg Businessweek, factoring puppy purchase prices and thousands of dollars in annual upkeep, the doodle economy in the United States could exceed $1 billion. Sánchez also notes the supply side has been hollowed out – Venezuela lost its pioneering breeders of the 2000s, and the vast majority of dogs are now imported from the United States, Colombia, Spain and South Korea. Veterinary practice shows the same caution as everything else in this issue: according to Sánchez, clinics are hiring more veterinarians, but established practitioners are not making heavy capital investments in equipment.

Even the exit is served. Maracaibo now has multiple pet crematoriums.

Oliveros keeps the thesis honest. The generational shift is real and the opportunity is real, he says, but income constraints limit the perspective sharply; the high-growth scenario depends on building genuinely accessible value propositions. Which is the same wager Nutresa made on a $30 million ice cream company, expressed in a different aisle: bet on the categories Venezuelans refuse to cut, and wait for the income to arrive.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

July 27 – August 7 2026

Two weeks, one round trip. According to the Caracas Stock Exchange, the IBC index opened the July 27 week at 5,173.61 points, slid to 5,134.46 by month’s end (-0.76%), then recovered to close August 7 at 5,256.49 – a net gain of 82.88 points, or 1.60%, across the ten sessions. Year to date the index is up 152.44%, which against inflation running near 130% leaves a real return barely worth the name.

Volume tells the more useful story. According to the exchange, the two weeks moved Bs 82.7 billion in total, of which Bs 80.3 billion –roughly 97%– was Certificados de Financiamiento Bursátil, short-term corporate paper. Equities accounted for Bs 1.31 billion across 17,480 transactions and 8.04 million shares. The Caracas exchange remains, functionally, a short-term corporate funding venue with a stock ticker attached.

Among the shares, the exchange’s own thinly traded listing rose 51.80% in the August week, and Fondo Petrolia class B gained 54.19% in the July one – moves that say more about float than about conviction. Banco Provincial led turnover in both weeks, and Envases Venezolanos jumped from Bs 40.9 million to Bs 264.3 million traded, the sharpest shift in the board’s composition.

The absence is the signal. Fábrica Nacional de Cementos, which last issue posted a cumulative surge near 77% on the reconstruction bet, rose 0.32% in the August week. The rally that priced rebuilding La Guaira has gone flat – which is what happens when the money to do it is still waiting for decisions in a room in La Carlota.

THE LONG READ

Who pays for La Guaira?

First you count the dead. Then the rubble. And at some point somebody has to sit down with the most complex arithmetic of all — what it costs to rebuild what fell, and where the money comes from.

Six weeks after the double earthquake of June 24, that is where the discussion has moved. According to state figures, close to 18,000 people are without housing, and of the 12,552 buildings assessed in La Guaira, a third are tagged red, 40% green and 25% yellow. Against that, the government has advanced two instruments — subsidized mortgage credit and exchange-traded bonds — that share a single point of origin and therefore a single point of failure: both rest almost entirely on a fiscal wallet that was already in the red before the ground moved. A third piece attracts no investor at all and precedes everything else: debris removal, roads, the airport, water and power.

The forced return of the mortgage. According to the scheme announced by acting president Delcy Rodríguez, public and private banks will issue secondary-market housing credit in two tranches: for homes valued up to $70,000, the state covers 80% and the household finances the rest over 25 years; between $70,000 and $100,000, the subsidy falls to 50% on the same term.

The threshold is not arbitrary — it tracks the per-square-meter prices the platform Rent-A-House recorded in La Guaira in May, when $100,000 bought 50 to 70 square meters in nearly any zone of the state. But May prices are not today’s. An apartment there may now be cheaper per dollar of square meter precisely because it will need repairs, a cost the mortgage does not cover and that falls entirely on the buyer.

Read from construction cost rather than resale price, the subsidy shrinks further. According to Francisco Pimentel of Fedecámaras’ infrastructure commission, former president of the Cámara Venezolana de la Construcción, and Lawrence Dow, the chamber’s second vice president, a new single-family home on urbanized land runs $350 to $800 per square meter and a three- to six-story building $450 to $1,200 — higher, Dow notes, where deep foundations, marine corrosion protection or imported components are required.

The fiscal arithmetic is the harder part. With 17,907 people without housing at an average of three per household, according to state data, the need is roughly 5,969 units — some $334 million at $70,000 each, excluding homes not yet demolished or still awaiting assessment. The loan currency, interest rate and application process remain undefined. Pimentel puts immediate demand far higher, at around 40,000 housing solutions.

Which makes displacement the predictable outcome. For a family that lost its home, moving to Caracas may be simpler than absorbing seismic risk. At the temporary shelters near Tanaguarena, one resident described what she expects as eviction — that they will knock all of this down.

Build back better. Debris removal generates no cash flow, carries no collateral and has no final buyer. Reusing it requires machinery the country lacks: according to Pimentel, the mobile crushing plants that turn collapsed concrete into recycled aggregate would have to be imported, inside the same tariff-relief package the chamber is pushing. Dow warns the process cannot be indiscriminate — asbestos, fuels and sewage must be separated first, and a representative sample of the failed structural elements preserved, because it holds the information explaining why they collapsed.

The rest is logistics and services. The Maiquetía airport, the country’s principal point of entry, took severe structural damage; according to the Ministry of Transport, partial operations resume in 10 to 12 weeks, with cargo flights slated for August 5. The port of La Guaira restarted after 28 days idle. According to Unicef, 432 schools and 38 hospitals were damaged in Caracas alone. On timing, Pimentel outlines a critical path of three to five years; Dow argues for low- and mid-rise construction over towers, and for building communities with water, sanitation, transport and employment rather than maximizing unit count.

The instruments. The Caracas Stock Exchange, the securities regulator Sunaval, the UNDP and the Cámara Inmobiliaria de Venezuela have agreed to study the capital market as a funding source, and Sunaval has sketched three instruments.

A four-year Reconstruction Bond, issued by a public entity or the banking system and backed by an autonomous patrimony fed by a state fund, channeling new money into housing under fiduciary control. Its weakness is price: the yield offered for Venezuelan public risk is far below what existing sovereign debt pays with the Republic in default, sanctions exclude the foreign investors it is meant to attract, and the guarantee covers interest but not principal — full exposure until the last day.

A Solidarity Corporate Reconstruction Bond, issued by a private builder, with sturdier guarantees: a trust holding collection rights, a reserve fund, an insurance policy and partial coverage on issuer default. Not being public debt, it does not collide with sanctions.

A Mortgage Securitization Program, pooling the affected families’ loans into securities and releasing proceeds to builders as work advances. Two problems: the mortgage yields less than the paper promises, and someone covers the spread — almost certainly the state; and until the work finishes there is no property serving as real collateral.

They are complementary in theory — bonds finance the start, securitization frees capital once credits are running. But the public bond is direct sovereign risk, the securitization spread falls on the state, and the corporate guarantee probably does too. Concentrating every backstop on one strained source is the limitation none of them solves alone.

There is also a track that bypasses the market entirely. According to Dow, the construction chamber has asked the National Assembly to repeal the 2012 law against real-estate fraud and the 2017 mortgage-debtor protection law, both of which obstruct private mortgage origination and presales, and is studying a Special Regime of Reparcelization and Reconstruction for La Guaira that would create a dedicated trust and reserve expropriation for public works or unmitigable risk zones — a preliminary proposal, he stresses, still requiring legal validation.

Which is where this issue closes on itself. Repealing two laws and creating a special property regime requires a legislature whose acts are recognized, a judiciary that will enforce them, and a government still there when the paper matures. The financing puzzle for La Guaira is not, at bottom, a financing puzzle.

None of the obstacles is minor — the fiscal gap, sovereign risk, the missing machinery, timelines counted in years. But the country retains the engineers, architects, builders and skilled labor to do this, and the expertise to design the instruments that would pay for it. What is missing is not capacity. It is that the legal, fiscal and institutional frameworks align in time to activate it.

And the margin is narrow. Every month that machinery takes to mesh is an eternity for the families whose lives collapsed in 39 seconds.

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Venezuela’s reopening has drawn a new audience — investors, advisors, and firms evaluating the country from the outside — that needs more than news coverage. This is a shorter pilot for a new version of Ecosistema’s The Venezuelan Business Dispatch, built for that audience: an analytical briefing on the political, regulatory, and business developments shaping Venezuela’s re-entry into global markets. We are planning to change towards a paid subscription model in the coming weeks. We’d love your feedback.

Issue #7 Executive Summary: July 7–26, 2026

The core story: Venezuela’s commercial recovery is outrunning the political settlement meant to sustain it. Capital is returning – but on probation, pricing a reinstitutionalization that has not yet happened.

The reopening ahead of the settlement (SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT): Crude exports have passed 1.2 million barrels a day, and refiners and producers –Phillips 66, Reliance, Valero, plus JV partners Chevron, Repsol and Eni– are displacing the traders Vitol and Trafigura, treating Venezuela as a reopening market rather than a source of opportunistic barrels. But commerce is moving faster than politics. The August 1 talks between the two rival legislatures are the reinstitutionalization test: the July 9 hydrocarbons framework supplied the legal basis, but only political durability makes a license bankable – as GE Vernova’s Corpoelec memorandum, signed before the guarantees exist, already shows. The earthquake raises the stakes, fusing the political track to the money track: unlocking the frozen assets abroad (IMF SDRs, gold at the Bank of England) requires a settlement between the Assembly that controls recognition abroad and the government that controls implementation at home. The warning sign is an estimated $13 billion to Washington since January against a single traceable transfer. The barrels are easier to track than the money.

Two deals, one wager (SECTOR FOCUS): Grupo Nutresa’s ~$30 million purchase of ice cream leader Tío Rico bets on a resilient, dollarized consumer category; Cashea’s $100 million raise, the largest non-energy private injection since January, is venture capital re-rating a market it had written off. One deal bets on the comfort economy, the other on the startup ecosystem – both on the same reopening.

Market Reality (MARKET SNAPSHOT): The Caracas Stock Exchange’s main index drifted ~4% lower in nominal terms – up ~148% on the year, but a mirage against ~130% inflation. The one real signal was a cement-and-glass rally led by Fábrica Nacional de Cementos: Venezuelans pricing the reconstruction bet in their own bolívares.

The view from the epicenter (THE LONG READ): One month after the June 24 quake, only 1,752 of La Guaira’s 7,000 businesses stand, running near 40% capacity on demand that is anomalous and unsustainable –emergency crews replacing tourists, 65% of those surveyed already cutting staff. Reconstruction hinges on a financing gap and, above all, on confidence.

SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT

Venezuela’s Oil Recovery Is Outrunning Its Political Settlement

Venezuelan crude exports have climbed above 1.2 million barrels a day, far beyond the 847,000-barrel daily average recorded in 2025. The increase matters, but the composition of the trade matters more. U.S. refiners imported roughly 804,000 barrels a day in July –the highest volume since 2017– as Canadian wildfires threatened supplies of the heavy crude Gulf Coast plants are built to process and refining margins remained near multiyear highs.

At the same time, the commercial architecture surrounding Venezuelan oil is changing. Refiners and producers are beginning to displace Vitol and Trafigura, the trading houses that had dominated exports under the U.S.-supervised arrangements introduced in January. Phillips 66 resumed spot purchases in May after a seven-year absence. Reliance Industries, Valero, and other buyers are moving toward direct contracts with PDVSA, while Chevron, Repsol, and Eni expand cargoes produced through their joint ventures.

Taken together, these moves amount to more than a temporary increase in exports. They suggest that international companies are beginning to treat Venezuela not simply as a sanctioned source of opportunistic barrels, but as a market that may be reopening. The problem is that the commercial recovery is advancing faster than the political settlement meant to sustain it.

The reinstitutionalization test

That gap places unusual weight on the talks scheduled to begin August 1 between Venezuela’s two rival legislatures. On one side is the opposition-majority National Assembly elected in 2015, which the United States continues to recognize as the country’s last legitimately elected legislature. It is now led by Dinorah Figuera, who returned to Caracas in June after eight years in exile and was designated by the U.S. State Department to lead the negotiations. On the other is the Chavista-controlled 2026 Assembly, presided over by Jorge Rodríguez, brother of acting president Delcy Rodríguez.

The talks are intended to move Venezuela toward what both sides have described as “democratic reinstitutionalization,” more than six months after Nicolás Maduro’s capture. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has incorporated the process into Washington’s three-stage approach to Venezuela: stabilization, economic recovery, and a democratic transition culminating in free elections. The State Department has endorsed the joint agenda, particularly its emphasis on restoring electoral guarantees and rebuilding institutional legitimacy.

For investors, this is not a parallel political story. It is the central economic variable. The hydrocarbons framework issued on July 9 provided a legal basis for new investment and contracting. But legislation alone cannot make an investment bankable. Companies need confidence that licenses will survive the next political dispute, that contracts will be enforced, and that future governments will recognize the rules under which capital entered. The August negotiations are supposed to provide that second layer: political durability.

The distinction is important. An OFAC authorization can permit a transaction. It cannot guarantee that Venezuela will have a stable regulator, a credible judiciary, or an internationally recognized government capable of honoring a twenty-year investment.

Capital is already pricing in a settlement

Some companies appear willing to move before those guarantees are fully established. GE Vernova, the former General Electric power business, signed a memorandum with Corpoelec in June to add roughly one gigawatt of generation capacity within twenty-four months and recover more than five gigawatts over four years. According to CEO Scott Strazik, the company is preparing contracts that might already have been signed had the June earthquake not disrupted negotiations and implementation.

That hesitation captures the broader investment climate. Companies increasingly believe there is money to be made in Venezuela, particularly in oil, electricity, infrastructure, and reconstruction. But they are still distinguishing between commercial opportunity and institutional certainty.

The former can arrive quickly. The latter cannot.

Direct oil purchases, expanded joint-venture production, and infrastructure memoranda all indicate that companies are positioning themselves for a reopening. Yet much of this activity remains dependent on licenses, temporary political understandings, and Washington’s continued supervision. Capital is returning, but much of it is still entering on probation.

The earthquake changes the scale

The June earthquake has made the institutional question more urgent rather than less relevant. The United Nations estimates total damage at close to $37 billion, with more than 5,000 people killed and tens of thousands missing. Reconstruction on that scale cannot be financed through humanitarian pledges or public spending alone. It requires foreign contractors, private capital, multilateral financing, insurance, transparent procurement, and long-term infrastructure agreements. Each of those depends on legal and political credibility.

Washington and Caracas are therefore exploring mechanisms to release billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets frozen abroad, including approximately $5 billion in International Monetary Fund Special Drawing Rights and gold reserves held at the Bank of England. The objective is to finance reconstruction without placing the burden primarily on U.S. taxpayers, beyond the roughly $386 million already pledged.

But the frozen-assets question reveals why the political negotiations cannot be separated from the economic recovery. The 2015 Assembly retains legal authority over significant Venezuelan assets abroad, including Citgo. The Rodríguez government, meanwhile, exercises control over the state, the ministries, and the domestic institutions that would spend reconstruction funds.

One side controls legal recognition abroad. The other controls implementation at home. Unlocking the money therefore requires some form of political settlement between them. The August talks are not simply about electoral rules. They are also about who can authorize, receive, oversee, and account for billions of dollars in oil revenue and reconstruction financing.

The earthquake also appears to have accelerated Washington’s support of a politica. transition. The state’s slow and chaotic response to the disaster –and the backlash, both inside Venezuela and abroad, against U.S. support for Delcy Rodríguez during the emergency– made it harder for Washington to treat stabilization as distinct from democratization. In its subsequent statements, the State Department has again paired economic recovery with a commitment to democracy, while explicitly stressing the need for political unity, functioning institutions, and responsible leadership. The shift suggests that the August process is not merely the next scheduled phase of the U.S. strategy: it is also a response to the limits of backing an interim authority that proved unable to govern effectively when the country faced its first major national crisis.

The accountability gap

The strongest argument for institutional reform is also the clearest warning sign: money is already moving faster than oversight. The Financial Times estimated on July 22 that the United States has received more than $13 billion from Venezuelan oil exports since assuming supervisory control over the trade in January. Yet there has been almost no public accounting of how those funds have been held, allocated, or transferred. A citizen-run monitoring platform has identified only one publicly traceable transfer: a $300 million payment in March.

The result is an accountability paradox. The new oil framework was designed partly to prevent opaque intermediaries, sanctions evasion, and discretionary control over export revenue. But the replacement architecture remains opaque in its own way. The barrels are easier to track than the money.

Congressional demands for an independent audit are therefore not a secondary governance concern. They go directly to the credibility of the entire reopening. Foreign companies are being asked to trust a system whose financial flows are not yet transparent, while Venezuelans are being asked to accept that oil revenue is financing stabilization and reconstruction without being shown how.

SECTOR FOCUS: TWO MULTI-MILLION DOLLARS DEALS

Nutresa buys Venezuela’s ice cream leader — a $30 million bet on the reopening

Colombia’s Grupo Nutresa, one of Latin America’s largest food conglomerates and now controlled by the Gilinski family, signed a contract on July 21 to acquire 100% of Industrias Tío Rico, the leader of Venezuela’s ice cream market, in a deal valued at around $30 million. The seller is Mack de Venezuela, a car company that bought Tío Rico from Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever. The transaction, still subject to the customary conditions precedent, hands Nutresa a company with more than 55% of the domestic ice cream market, a production plant in Guacara, Carabobo, a 210,000-square-meter industrial complex, and five distribution centers with national coverage. It also carries a portfolio of names –Tío Rico, Bati Bati, Crema Real, Chocolito, Merengada, Rico Gol, Chocomalta– that function less as trademarks than as fixtures of Venezuelan childhood.

The purchase is the latest move in an ice cream consolidation spree. Nutresa closed its acquisition of Colombia’s Mimo’s in May and signed for Ecuador’s century-old confectioner La Universal in June, having already absorbed Yupi in 2025 — a categorical bet financed, in part, by divestments elsewhere, including its stakes in Colombia’s Starbucks operator and in Bimbo Colombia. Tío Rico is the Venezuela leg of that strategy, and CFO Andrés Bernal has put numbers to the thesis: from roughly $14 million in Venezuelan revenue in 2025, Nutresa expects monthly sales of $8–10 million by the fourth quarter, closing 2026 near $60 million and projecting up to $200 million in 2027. CEO Jaime Gilinski framed the deal explicitly within the country’s economic reopening.

Venezuela’s ice cream wealth. What the headline valuation obscures is that this is not a distressed asset in a dead category. Venezuela ranks among the top three ice cream consumers per capita in Latin America, and the sector sustains a surprisingly deep value chain —one we mapped at last year’s ice cream industry fair. The machinery that once gated entry has collapsed in price, from $8,000–$10,000 a few years ago to $1,800–$2,000 today, seeding a long tail of artisanal producers; nearly every cone in the country, meanwhile, comes from a single supplier, the seven-decade-old Grupo La Florida, which serves Efe, KFC, Farmatodo and Tío Rico alike. Consumption is stable and stubbornly resilient: an impulse category that holds even when discretionary spending does not, which is precisely what makes a dollarized market leader worth buying. A single fast-food chain, Arturo’s, produced and distributed more than 300,000 kilograms of ice cream in 2024 alone to stock its network of over 70 locations: a measure of just how much manufacturing muscle sits behind a category most consumers never think of as industrial.

The strategic logic runs beyond the freezer. Nutresa is positioning the Carabobo complex as an export platform toward Colombia, the Caribbean and the United States, turning a Venezuelan consumer staple into regional manufacturing capacity. And yet, for thirty million dollars, Nutresa is betting on the market leader of a country’s comfort economy.

Cashea raises $100 million, and venture capital starts to re-rate Venezuela

On July 21, the cartoon mascot of Cashea –Venezuela’s buy-now-pay-later app– turned up on the Nasdaq tower in Times Square, hoisting a Venezuelan flag beneath a message congratulating the company on a $100 million raise “to rebuild confidence through credit.” Cashea’s raise ranks among the largest private capital injections –quite possibly the largest– into a non-energy Venezuelan business since Nicolás Maduro’s capture in January cracked the wall that had kept the country off international capital’s map.

Founded in 2022 and led by CEO Pedro Vallenilla, Cashea now counts more than 10 million user accounts and 40,000 affiliated merchants –a base it says reaches over half the country’s adult population– and processes transactions equivalent to 3.5% of Venezuelan GDP, up from roughly 5 million users at the end of 2024. The headline figure is really two rounds compressed into months: a $40 million Series A led by Connecticut’s Spice Expeditions and closed in March, split between equity and structured debt arranged through San Francisco’s Architect Capital, followed by a $60 million Series B led by New York- and Bangalore-based FinSight Ventures in June. That the B doubled the A within a single quarter is the tell – the backers, who include Endeavor Catalyst, did not merely validate the model but moved to accelerate it.

Venezuela’s startup ecosystem. The strategic logic is inseparable from the ecosystem around it. Cashea was built on a vacuum: Venezuelan credit collapsed from roughly 40% of GDP before the crisis of the 2010s to under 3% today, with credit cards all but disappearing. Onto that void it grafted a BNPL model – a down payment in the app, the balance in interest-free biweekly installments funded not by a bank but by the merchant network itself. The anomaly made it indispensable plumbing; the research firm Ecoanalítica found that during the 2023 contraction, stores offering Cashea converted three of every ten visitors even as metropolitan-Caracas sales shrank. It also made the company the marquee case for a startup scene long starved of precisely this. Venezuela hosts around a hundred startups, most founded since 2020, and technology and telecoms now run near 5% of non-oil GDP — the sixth-fastest-growing sector of the recovery. The pattern traces back to Yummy, the delivery-and-mobility app founded in 2020 that proved international playbooks could work if “tropicalized” to a country of fragmented payments and high operational friction, and that functioned as a de facto tech university whose alumni now seed other firms. Necessity did the rest: with credit all but vanished and the bolívar unstable, payment startups like Cashea, PagoDirecto, Ubii and Zinli grew fast in a market where, as one operator puts it, scarcity of supply turns any well-built financial product into a success by default.

Yet financing and viable exits have been the ecosystem’s chronic Achilles heel – thin local venture experience, weak legal certainty, and an almost total absence of exits. That is precisely what makes Cashea’s nine-figure round, underwritten by U.S. and global funds, the loudest signal yet that the wall is giving: institutional capital is beginning to redraw a map on which Venezuela had long been a grey blank.

The return of credit. The paradox is that Cashea raised scale capital on an anomaly it may itself help erase: should formal banking reactivate lending –as several economists expect from 2027– the company loses the near-monopoly on credit that made it essential. Vallenilla’s answer is ambition and reticence in equal measure –a coy silence on the valuation, and on whether Cashea is Venezuela’s first unicorn, paired with a pivot from installment app toward an all-purpose consumer super-app, staffed by a deliberate mix of Venezuelans who stayed, those trained abroad, and a first tentative wave of returnees. Every dollar of the round, he insists, will be deployed at home. It is a wager that the country’s comeback and the company’s are, for now, the same trade.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

The Caracas Stock Exchange spent three weeks in July drifting nominally lower, with the main IBC index slipping around 4% before a modest late rebound left it near 5,174 points – still up about 148% on the year, though with inflation running near 130%, that gain is mostly a monetary mirage. Banking names and the exchange’s own thinly traded listing filled out most of the board, and breadth was minimal: at each close, a few tickers rose, a few fell, and roughly two dozen didn’t budge.

The signal worth reading was in construction materials. Fábrica Nacional de Cementos posted back-to-back weekly jumps for a cumulative surge near 77%, with glassmaker Fábrica Nacional de Vidrio climbing behind it – a cement-and-glass rally outrunning the entire market. In a venue where most prices simply track the exchange rate, that is the clearest domestic bet on reconstruction: the same post-earthquake, reopening wager driving this issue’s deal flow, now priced by Venezuelans in their own bolívares.

THE LONG READ

La Guaira, one month on: an economy running on borrowed demand

“I’m the only one left, but here we are. The way we Venezuelans are – maybe by December we’ll get to eat pan de jamón,” says Naijol Villanueva, owner of the bakery La Reina del Palmar in Caraballeda, invoking the ham-stuffed bread that anchors a Venezuelan Christmas. Her optimism carries a literal edge: hers is the only business on the block that isn’t shuttered or flattened outright.

One month after the double earthquake of June 24, the economy of La Guaira – the coastal state that houses Venezuela’s principal port and its main international airport, a half-hour’s descent from Caracas — is trying to stay upright on whatever terms it can find. Along the corridor from Maiquetía to Caraballeda, the scenes belong to a different kind of dispatch: the blue tarps of World Central Kitchen and Samaritan’s Purse, U.S. marines and navy vessels offshore, the olive tents of a Brazilian military field hospital pitched on a lot where a sign still advertises a vegetable fair. The only commerce visibly moving in daylight had arrived from outside – a tuktuk handing out bottled water. Everything else is inventory on the floor. By the governorate’s own census, just 1,752 of the 7,000 businesses that existed before the quake are still standing.

To map what remains, we conducted on-site interviews with owners and managers across Maiquetía, Caraballeda, Tanaguarena and Naiguatá. The businesses still operating reported running, on average, at about 40% of the capacity they had a month earlier, with more than 70% working below half.

Geography is destiny here. Naiguatá, dependent on beachgoers who have vanished, is the worst hit: Yeli García, whose stall Inversiones Yeli is the only one of eleven still open at Playa Los Ángeles, has earned nothing — not a single bolívar — since the quake, storefront intact and utilities running though it is. In Caraballeda and Tanaguarena, the loss is grimmer still, because the customers themselves are gone. “Most of my clients were in one of the towers that no longer exists,” says Gledys Gafaro, referring to two blocks of the state’s Misión Vivienda public-housing program left uninhabitable. “The rest are in tents.” A walk through the district is a catalogue of it — the pagoda roofs of a collapsed Chinese restaurant poking through rubble, a car wash stacked with mattresses, a shuttered Banco de Venezuela branch as Israeli engineers inspect the buildings beside it, a children’s chemotherapy center in ruins.

And yet, a few kilometers west, Maiquetía tells the opposite story. Chains like KFC, the Greek-yogurt parlor Mykonos and Farmatodo, Venezuela’s leading pharmacy retailer, are running at the top of their capacity; sources at Farmatodo told Ecosistema that its Maiquetía branch saw sales climb more than 30% after the quake. Two of every three merchants interviewed there said business had risen, not fallen. “God-fearing, I wish no one harm — but prosperity comes out of tragedy too,” says Darwin Rojas, a perfume vendor at the Cacique Maiquetía popular market, who reckons he is selling 70% above his pre-quake pace. A heat map from the ride-hailing app Yummy Rides shows Maiquetía as one of the only green zones on a coast otherwise gone dark.

The catch is that this is not recovery – it is anomalous demand, and the merchants know it. The clientele of Rey del Pescado Frito, one of the state’s iconic seafood restaurants, has flipped from weekend visitors from Caracas to the laborers, truckers, police, firefighters and rescue crews the emergency brought in; one lunch counter swapped its fish menu for pork chops and empanadas. The rest is replacement and necessity spending – appliances lost, mattresses bought for shelters. “Who’s going to buy a fridge if they don’t have a house?” one vendor asked. Mairene Vásquez, who manages the four-decade-old hardware store Almacenes Barcelona, put the arithmetic plainly: whoever is out shopping is shopping to survive, and once the shelters empty, the customers leave and unemployment turns brutal. A month in, 65% of those surveyed had already cut staff. One Maiquetía bodega sold two kilos of rice in a week; its largest sale by value was two cans of tuna.

The macro picture matches the counter. The economist Asdrúbal Oliveros estimates La Guaira’s third-quarter activity could fall between 55% and 70% against 2025 levels. A joint report by the Government of Japan and the World Bank, built on the GRADE damage-assessment methodology, puts direct losses in the state near $4.98 billion and projects a national consumption contraction of 1.5% to 2.3% — far steeper locally, in a state that is tourism- and port-dependent yet only about 1.46% of national GDP. Fully 94% of the businesses surveyed expect no improvement over the next six months, and most refuse to restock. “We’re working with our fingernails,” says Leimy Chirinos of the shop Comercial Makka.

Reconstruction is where the investor question lives. “My business depends on when they start rebuilding the road,” says Onorio López of the Naiguatá hardware store Eléctrico La Cascada, cut off from suppliers by debris – half the merchants surveyed named road clearance their single priority. The GRADE report sketches two futures: one financed only by available fiscal resources, which it deems insufficient, leaving recovery incomplete even after a decade; and one pairing an aggressive state response with private investment, in which the state mobilizes $9.8 billion –an eight-point rise in its external-debt-to-GDP ratio– to finish reconstruction in five years and return to the pre-quake growth path by 2032. Between those scenarios sits the same financing gap the rest of this issue keeps circling: merchants unwilling to risk their own capital, interest in insurance products that barely exist, a tax reprieve that amounted to ten days, and an informality the quake laid bare – one company’s entire accounting archive buried in the building it occupied.

But the largest obstacle is not fiscal. “People’s fear of coming into La Guaira is our main challenge,” says Gabriel Landaeta, the lunch-counter owner. “Until the state makes outsiders feel safe, there’s nothing to be done.” A month after the earth moved, La Guaira has every intention of recovering. What it lacks are the conditions to do it – and no reconstruction ledger, however aggressive, prices in the confidence that has to come first.

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A leaner issue than usual, for an event that has rewritten the country’s economic horizon. No sector focus, no long read this week; just the two questions Venezuela econ watchers now have to ask about the country — how big is the damage, and who is going to pay to fill it.

Executive Summary

Venezuela’s economic outlook has been fundamentally reshaped by the June 24 earthquakes. What had been a discussion centered on growth, macroeconomic stabilization, and debt restructuring has rapidly shifted toward reconstruction financing and state capacity. While estimates of direct and indirect losses vary widely—from roughly US$7 billion to US$37 billion—all credible assessments point to reconstruction costs that will far exceed the government’s available fiscal resources. The disaster has exposed not only extensive physical destruction but also the institutional weaknesses accumulated over decades of state deterioration.

The government’s initial response has relied on a combination of limited domestic resources, international humanitarian assistance, and multilateral engagement. Caracas has announced a US$200 million reconstruction fund, while international support has included U.S. humanitarian operations and the creation of a dedicated recovery facility by CAF. Nevertheless, these commitments remain small relative to the financing requirements, leaving Venezuela heavily dependent on future external funding despite limited access to international credit markets.

Financial markets have also adjusted to the post-earthquake environment. The spread between the official and parallel exchange rates has narrowed to its lowest level in nearly two years, supported by weaker demand for foreign currency following the temporary slowdown in economic activity, new Central Bank operating rules, and the reintroduction of U.S. dollar cash remittances into the banking system. While these measures are consistent with a broader strategy aimed at gradually reducing exchange-rate distortions during the second half of the year, the improvement should not be interpreted as evidence of lasting macroeconomic stabilization. Fiscal constraints and persistent monetary imbalances remain unchanged, meaning the durability of recent gains will ultimately depend on the government’s capacity to continue supplying foreign currency without renewed macroeconomic deterioration.

Meanwhile, capital markets reflected the immediate impact of the disaster. Following the temporary closure of the Caracas Stock Exchange, the benchmark index declined 6.0% during the shortened trading week, although it remains more than 158% higher year-to-date. Trading activity continued to be dominated by financial institutions, underscoring the banking sector’s central role in domestic capital markets despite heightened uncertainty.

SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT

The Damage Nobody Can Price

Two weeks ago, the argument about Venezuela was an argument about growth: how much will the GDP grow and when exactly the recovery would show up in people’s pockets. That conversation is over. At 6:04 p.m. on June 24, two strike-slip earthquakes —magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, ruptured 39 seconds apart beneath Yaracuy— became the most violent seismic event the country has recorded since 1900, and turned reconstruction, almost overnight, into the organizing question of Venezuela’s economy.

The trouble, for anyone trying to underwrite that reconstruction, is that nobody agrees on the size of the problem — and the disagreement spans an order of magnitude.

Start at the top. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), working with the modeling firms Ingeniar CAD/CAE and ERN, put first-week physical damage to buildings and infrastructure at roughly $37 billion — close to 40 percent of GDP. More than 60 percent of that, some $24 billion, is buildings: homes, offices, schools, hospitals, the institutional and industrial stock. The remaining $13 billion is infrastructure: ports and airports whose damage throttles the imports a non-productive economy depends on; water and sanitation systems whose failure converts, in the Venezuelan context, almost directly into epidemiological risk; and oil-and-gas assets whose losses chip at the one sector that was supposed to carry 2026. The UNDRR is explicit that this is a floor of a particular kind: it captures direct physical damage only, and excludes the indirect losses from interrupted production, broken supply chains, emergency spending and structural reinforcement. On that logic the real figure runs higher.

Then come the skeptics. The two most prominent public doubters of the UN’s $37 billion are Asdrúbal Oliveros and Omar Zambrano, the two Venezuelan economists whose own firms produced lower numbers on the board. Both argued, on X, that the model overstates damage in states like Falcón, Lara and Yaracuy, and that the quake spared oil infrastructure to a degree the aggregate figure doesn’t reflect.

Their alternatives sit far below the UN’s. Oliveros pegs damages and losses at $7.5–9 billion —about 8.5 percent of GDP— with reconstruction running $12–15 billion, a bill he is candid will outrun any fiscal space the state has. Zambrano’s ANOVA think tank, in a satellite study built with Microsoft‘s AI for Good lab, estimates just $2.37 billion — but only for the replacement of damaged housing along the La Guaira coastline, one component of the loss in one state, which the authors call a deliberate lower bound. Between those two Venezuelan estimates and the UNDRR’s, another UN agency’s middle ground: the UN Development Programme‘s (UNDP) rapid satellite read put direct damage at $6.7 billion and warned that total impact in disasters of this kind runs 1.5 to 3 times higher — toward $20 billion; the USGS modeled losses above $10 billion.

So the loss base ranges, credibly and from serious institutions, from $2.37 billion to $37 billion. That spread is not noise to be averaged away. In a functioning state, a catastrophe produces a single authoritative loss figure within weeks, because the state has the census, the cadastre and the damage-assessment machinery to generate one. Venezuela produces a fifteen-fold spread because that machinery is gone — no updated census, no integrated administrative registry, no installed capacity to assess damage at scale. ANOVA had to rent satellites to count houses precisely because the state could no longer count them. Before a single reconstruction dollar is priced, the most basic input —how much was destroyed— is a matter of contested inference rather than public record.

The Money on the Table, and the Hole It Has to Fill

Against a hole measured in the tens of billions, the relief actually committed reads like a rounding error.

The United States assembled the most visible response: roughly $150 million routed through faith-based groups and UN agencies, wrapped inside a whole-of-government military deployment that Southern Command put at some 2,000 troops —more than 900 on Venezuelan soil, the rest at Caribbean logistics hubs in Puerto Rico and Curaçao— with naval assets, cargo aircraft, and urban search-and-rescue teams from Virginia and California. The optics are hard to miss: the same government that captured Nicolás Maduro in January is now running the control tower at Maiquetía.

While the public support of the United States to the Rodríguez government following the earthquake has resulted in widespread criticism from Venezuelan public opinion, the scale of the U.S. footprint —a military deployment Washington bills as the largest humanitarian operation of the century— suggests that Venezuela’s new protecting power reads the earthquake as an opportunity: to entrench a military presence on Venezuelan soil and, eventually, to steer the reconstruction toward American private capital.

The multilateral money is smaller still. The CAF development bank committed $300,000 in humanitarian aid and then created a Venezuela Recovery and Reconstruction Fund, seeding it with $1 million and waiving its own fees; reporting has put the fund’s target ceiling near $200 million. Set against a rebuild the UN itself frames in the billions, a nine-figure ceiling is a down payment, not a solution — and the fund’s elaborate ring-fencing (segregated from CAF’s balance sheet, independent audits, anti-money-laundering screening on donors) is a quiet, institutional admission of the obvious: money has flowed into Venezuela before and vanished, and no one will give at scale without a visible paper trail.

In Caracas, Delcy Rodríguez announced an initial $200 million reconstruction fund, which she said would be drawn from Venezuelan resources held at the International Monetary Fund and other institutions, and opened a dedicated CAF account, “with all audit mechanisms in place,” to receive housing donations. She confirmed her government is in talks with the U.S. State Department and the IMF to “recover” those resources, and said the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank had offered non-reimbursable cooperation and credit lines. Rodríguez also announced a temporary ban on the export of construction materials, meant to keep cement and steel inside the country for rebuilding. It is the reflexive protectionist move under a reconstruction logic: and it sits in uneasy tension with the other half of the problem, an import channel already constrained by damage to Maiquetía and the port of La Guaira, in a country that has to import to produce. To households she promised six months of direct cash for the hardest-hit and mortgage subsidies of up to 80 percent through local banks; to the reconstruction itself she gave an institutional face — the Gran Misión Venezuela Renace, presented as the “executing arm” for housing and infrastructure, absorbing older housing programs, and handed to Jacqueline Faría, moved over from the transport ministry.

Faría is a career Chavista administrator whose signature project as environment minister was the sanitation of the Guaire river — the cleanup of the open sewer that runs through Caracas, which Hugo Chávez promised in 2005 that he and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega would bathe in within a year. Two decades on, the Guaire is still a sewer: the opposition-controlled legislature counted some $77 million spent for barely a quarter of the planned work. Her new brief is to rebuild what she inherits in ruins — the old ethos of the Gran Misión Vivienda, the Chávez-era flagship that officially claims more than five million homes delivered, at a cost the state has never fully accounted for and which independent tallies put at a small fraction of the announced number, and whose own towers were among those that came down or were heavily damaged in La Guaira. The appointment itself only underscores how little the bureaucracy and institutional habits of Chavismo have actually changed since January.

If Faría’s appointment speaks to the continuity of Chavismo’s bureaucracy, the earthquake exposed the limits of the state it hollowed-out. For six months, Washington’s case for Delcy Rodríguez rested on the idea that she was a disciplined, technocratic administrator — the manager who had wrestled down hyperinflation, kept the oil flowing, and could be trusted to run an orderly opening without the chaos that haunted Iraq. The earthquake was that proposition’s first real stress test, and a state response that arrived two days late and was out-organized by neighbors and private firms was the answer. You can sign oil deals with a hollow state; you cannot rebuild a country with one. And rebuilding is now the task. Venezuela is already attempting the largest sovereign debt restructuring in modern history —some $240 billion in liabilities, a process so fraught it proceeds without IMF participation— inside an economy that has collapsed from $370 billion in 2012 to roughly $111 billion today, the deepest contraction in modern history. Caracas reengaged the Fund only in April; the $200 million Rodríguez now dedicates to reconstruction is, in practice, a thin slice of the country’s limited reserve assets there. With no credit, negligible insurance, and a population far too poor to self-finance, a state in that condition does not rebuild quickly. It accumulates ruins.

None of this is really about the earthquake. What the rubble exposed is a bill coming due for thirty years — the compounded cost of almost three decades of mismanagement and systemic corruption under Rodríguez’s Chavista predecessors, a state stripped to its bones long before the ground moved. Civil-protection units without equipment, firefighters without fuel, hospitals drained years ago of medicine and running water, ministries hollowed of staff and any capacity for planning; a country that has not run a census in fifteen years and whose forensic and morgue services, the Pan American Health Organization found, had already collapsed by the time it fell to them to count the dead. Roughly 70 percent of some 28 million Venezuelans were living in poverty before the first tremor. The disaster was never purely natural. The reconstruction inherits all of it.

Without genuine reinstitutionalization and the slow, unglamorous rebuilding of a state that actually works, there is no reconstructed Venezuela: only a more broken one: more tents, more rubble, and more of the anger already gathering in its streets.

A Quieter Dollar Market—For Now

Venezuela’s foreign exchange market has shifted markedly over the past week following the quakes. The spread between the official and parallel exchange rates has narrowed to its lowest level in roughly two years, the Central Bank has introduced a new daily pricing mechanism, and the first shipments of physical U.S. dollars have begun reaching the banking system. Taken together, these developments have fueled speculation that the country may finally be moving toward exchange-rate unification.

That interpretation, however, deserves caution. The narrowing of the exchange-rate gap is occurring under extraordinary circumstances. The earthquake temporarily paralyzed large segments of economic activity, reducing imports, consumption, investment, and overall demand for foreign currency. As a result, today’s smaller spread reflects, at least in part, a negative demand shock rather than a structural improvement in Venezuela’s macroeconomic fundamentals.

At the same time, authorities have implemented several operational changes. The Central Bank has moved away from relying on a more rigid reference rate and is now publishing a daily exchange rate based on the weighted average of transactions executed through commercial banks’ trading desks, bringing the system closer to a managed floating regime. The transition has been accompanied by official dollar sales—funded largely through oil-sector proceeds—to provide liquidity to the market.

Another important development is the reintroduction of physical U.S. dollar cash remittances from abroad into the banking system. Initial shipments have already arrived and are currently available through a limited number of banks with their own international correspondent networks. Authorities expect additional institutions to join the program in the coming days, allowing a broader share of the financial system to sell cash dollars to both businesses and individuals, with the first phase primarily focused on corporate demand.

Remittances from the diaspora remain one of the country’s sources of hard currency. Ecoanalítica estimates annual inflows at roughly US$4 billion—around 4% of GDP—with effects that extend well beyond household income, supporting private consumption, sustaining retail activity, and injecting liquidity into Venezuela’s increasingly dollarized economy.

Overall foreign currency allocations for July are expected to remain around $1.8 billion according to independent economists, broadly unchanged from June, while the government’s reserve requirement framework remains under review and could see additional adjustments in the coming days.

Yet, the recent measures fit into a broader policy roadmap that the Central Bank appears to be pursuing for the second half of the year. The shift to publishing a daily market-based exchange rate, the reintroduction of physical U.S. dollar cash through commercial banks, and the effort to gradually expand access to foreign currency point toward an attempt to narrow the gap between the official and parallel markets while preserving administrative control over interventions. If accompanied by sufficient dollar supply, the strategy could facilitate a gradual convergence of exchange rates. Its success, however, will ultimately depend less on operational changes than on the government’s fiscal capacity to sustain interventions and avoid renewed monetary financing. In the absence of broader fiscal and monetary adjustment, the recent progress risks proving temporary.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

The Caracas Stock Exchange recorded Bs. 24.9 billion in trading volume between June 30 and July 3, as the Caracas Stock Index (IBC) fell 6.0% over the four trading sessions following the temporary market closure after the June 24 earthquake. Despite the weekly decline, the index remains 158.5% higher year-to-date.

A total of 7,655 equity transactions were executed during the week, representing 5.7 million shares traded. Financial institutions dominated activity, accounting for seven of the ten most-traded stocks, led by Banco Nacional de Crédito, followed by Ron Santa Teresa, Banco Provincial, and the Caracas Stock Exchange itself.

Fixed-income instruments totaled approximately Bs. 1.0 billion, while exchange financing certificates accounted for more than Bs. 20.3 billion in traded value.

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Venezuela’s reopening has drawn a new audience — investors, advisors, and firms evaluating the country from the outside — that needs more than news coverage. This is a shorter pilot for a new version of Ecosistema’s The Venezuelan Business Dispatch, built for that audience: an analytical briefing on the political, regulatory, and business developments shaping Venezuela’s re-entry into global markets. We are planning to change towards a paid subscription model in the coming weeks. We’d love your feedback.

Venezuelan Business Dispatch — Issue #5 Executive Summary

June 2–14, 2026

The core story: Venezuela is not fully opening; it is being restructured under U.S. supervision.

The Legal Architecture (SANCTIONS & REGULATORY)

On June 10, OFAC published six updated general licenses that simultaneously expand and constrain investment. The shift from categorical prohibitions to surgical precision defines exactly what is permitted—and who controls it. Two structural moves stand out: (1) joint ventures with the state are dead; new hydrocarbon, mining, and electricity projects must be fully private. (2) Treasury as financial intermediary—all payments to the Venezuelan government flow through U.S. Treasury-controlled Foreign Government Deposit Funds before reaching Venezuelan coffers. Contracts must be governed by U.S. law and adjudicated in U.S., UK, French, or Singaporean courts. Washington has moved beyond sanctions; it has written the operating manual.

Debt restructuring is underway with Centerview Partners as lead banker (fee negotiation ongoing: Lazard bid $25M vs. Centerview’s $150–200M range). Norm Coleman (ex-U.S. Senate Foreign Relations chair) leads Hogan Lovells as legal counsel ($100K/month). Total defaulted debt: ~$170 billion since 2017.

The Central Bank maintains tight FX quotas and an artificially appreciated official rate (587 Bs/$) to pay public sector workers to mantain clientelistic networks while discouraging manufacturing investment to prevent electricity-demand surge on a grid at collapse. Currency unification has not occurred; the parallel spread remains.

Energy, Mining & Commodities (OIL & DEALS + SECTOR FOCUS)

Crude commercialization continues the process of formalization: a Schlumberger-PDVSA digital partnership, regularization of the “ghost fleet” via OFAC relief, Trafigura hosting at Miraflores, and Delcy Rodríguez’s Asia-Turkey tour reactivating buyers in India and deepening Turkey ties ($3B bilateral target). American Airlines returns to Maracaibo on July 14—a symbolic normalization after seven-year suspension– and the Assembly approves a new cacao law to push Venezuelan chocolate as an strategic sector.

The Impsa electrical saga reveals the mechanism. Argentina’s Impsa (privatized February 2025, controlled by Arc Energy, a U.S. firm with Trump-aligned shareholders) signed an undisclosed addendum to supply 672 MW of turbines—far below Delcy’s announced 2,640 MW. Impsa’s new CEO, Jorge Rafael Salcedo Hernández, previously specialized in OFAC licensing and represented a sanctioned chavista frontman. The contract remains unpublished. No competitive bidding disclosed. This is the template: old patronage networks rerouted toward Washington but the mechanism—discretionary contracts, opacity, concentrated authority—remains structurally identical.

Mining operations (June 13: neutralization of Tren de Aragua leader “Niño Guerrero” in joint Venezuela-U.S. Southern Command strike) appear less like crackdowns than clearing operations. The new Mining Law (April 2026, post-Burgum visit) grants unchecked executive discretion to award concessions to private corporations, gutting environmental review and indigenous consultation. The Arco Minero—three times Switzerland’s size, historically controlled by sindicatos and the ELN—is being repositioned for formal producers under OFAC licenses. Yet, previous state efforts to reassert control over the Arco have been temporary or simply led to power redistribution.

Market Reality (MARKET SNAPSHOT)

The Caracas Stock Exchange moved ~30 billion Bs (~$51M at overvalued official rate) in two weeks. The IBC index fell 4.66% after a 161% YTD surge. The decline is disenchantment, not profit-taking: announced reforms (mining, electricity, hydrocarbons) have proved limited in implementation. No institutional reforms restoring rule of law or judicial independence. Sanctions lift selectively; controls persist. Currency unification absent. No improvement in electricity, wages, or purchasing power. Equities function as currency hedges, not productive investment vehicles. The market is pricing stagnation dressed as reform.

The Consumer Paradox (THE LONG READ)

Panini‘s 2026 World Cup stickers cost $330+ to complete—more than two months’ wages for 64% of Venezuelan households. Some independent estimations put the total cost around $800. Yet the secondary market thrives at Plaza de Los Palos Grandes, the parking lots of Farmatodo and other public spaces. The phenomenon reveals not irrationality but survival through collective meaning-making. Networks, friendships, shared reference in fragmentation. Brands (Coca-Cola, McDonald’s) convert emotional spending into active consumption. The ritual persists despite the economy.

Bottom Line

Geopolitical reorientation coexists with institutional continuity. The intermediaries have changed; the structure has not. Venezuela operates under an informal MOU with the United States: selective sanctions relief, persistent controls, discretionary contracts, and external supervision. For investors, this means regulated access to commodities and energy. For the population, it means limited improvements under external regime management.

SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT

The New Rules of Entry

On June 10, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control published updated versions of six general licenses—46C, 47A, 48B, 50B, 51B, and 52A—that together construct the legal architecture for Venezuela’s 2026 economic opening. These are not minor revisions. The package simultaneously expands the operating space for foreign investors in extraction and energy while hardening the conditions under which they may operate. Washington has moved from broad categorical prohibitions to surgical precision: defining exactly what is permitted, under which corporate structures, with which payment mechanisms, and in which courts disputes will be settled. For investors, the signal is unmistakable—the opportunity exists, but the rules are written in Washington.

The death of the joint venture. The consequential shift appears in licenses 48B and 51B. License 48B, which authorizes the supply of goods, technology, and services for hydrocarbon exploration and development, explicitly prohibits the formation of new joint ventures or other entities in Venezuela for those activities—though it protects existing structures. License 51B replicates the logic for mining. For two decades, the empresa mixta—the joint venture in which the state, through PDVSA or subsidiaries, retained majority ownership—was the only legal pathway for private capital to enter hydrocarbon production. That door has closed for new projects. Any investor now seeking to enter oil, electricity, or mining must do so through a fully private structure, a corporate form that did not legally exist in Venezuela until this year’s reforms to the Hydrocarbon Law, Mining Law, and Electric Service Law. The American sanctions architecture and the new Venezuelan legal framework converge on a single objective: pushing investment away from state control toward private ownership.

Contracts ruled by American law and adjudicated abroad. All six licenses now require that contracts with the Venezuelan government, PDVSA, Minerven, or their subsidiaries be interpreted according to the laws of a U.S. state or recognized jurisdiction. Dispute resolution must occur in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, or Singapore—not in Venezuelan courts. The Treasury clarifies that American law governs contractual interpretation, compliance, breach, remedies, payment obligations, termination, and enforceability, but does not dictate all aspects of the underlying activity in Venezuela. Administrative permits, concessions, labor law, environmental and safety regulations remain subject to Venezuelan legislation. The effect is to anchor legal certainty in forums that international investors consider neutral—a critical concession in a country where trust in the local judiciary is historically low.

The Treasury as financial intermediary. Licenses 46C, 48B, 50B, 51B, and 52A mandate that any monetary payment to a blocked person—that is, the Venezuelan state and its entities—be deposited in Foreign Government Deposit Funds, accounts controlled by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The sole exceptions are local taxes, permits, and fees, which may be paid directly. This applies explicitly to oil and gas royalties, placing all extractive revenue flowing through these licenses under American supervision before it reaches Venezuelan coffers. For the interim government under Delcy Rodríguez, it means surrendering administrative control over rents generated by these operations. The licenses also prohibit payment in gold, debt swaps, or any cryptocurrency issued by or for the Venezuelan government, including the petro.

Minerals: commerce permitted, extraction blocked. License 51B draws a deliberate distinction in the mining sector. Established U.S. entities may export, reexport, sell, buy, transport, process, and refine Venezuelan minerals—including gold—through Minerven, subject to supply-chain due diligence and thirty-day reporting. But the same license forbids exploration, development, mining, extraction, and production of minerals on Venezuelan territory, and blocks joint ventures for those purposes. The distinction is structural: Washington opens the commerce of minerals already extracted but does not enable the extractive act itself. A U.S. buyer may refine Venezuelan gold outside the country; it cannot withdraw it from the mine. The logic mirrors energy policy: commercialize the product, yes; seat American capital in the subsoil, no.

Protection for third parties, carve-outs for adversaries. Non-U.S. entities from non-sanctioned jurisdictions operating within the terms of these licenses generally face no secondary sanctions exposure—a clarification that significantly reduces uncertainty for European, Asian, and Latin American firms. But vetoes remain fixed: none of the licenses authorize transactions involving Russia, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba, or—in hydrocarbon, electricity, and mining—Chinese entities or those in joint ventures with Chinese nationals.

The Price of Restructuring

Investment bank Lazard has proposed a fee of $25 million to replace Centerview Partners as Venezuela’s financial adviser for what is projected to become one of the largest sovereign debt restructurings in decades. The bid, reported by Bloomberg on June 14, represents a fraction of the $150 million Centerview was negotiating with the government as recently as last month, according to draft contract language reviewed by the agency. Centerview had discussed a monthly retainer of $750,000 and a success fee of 0.1% of the total debt amount restructured—a structure that would have yielded $150 million to $200 million for the firm.

The appointment of Centerview without a formal competitive process has drawn criticism from investors and officials regarding transparency and fairness in the selection. The firm’s lead banker, Matthieu Pigasse, is a French financial operator who advised on the 2012 Greek debt restructuring, then the largest sovereign debt operation in history. Pigasse has made two trips to Caracas in 2026, and his entrée into Venezuela came partly through prior advisory work on a potential sale of Citgo, PDVSA’s U.S. refining arm, where he built a relationship with acting President Delcy Rodríguez.

Complementing the financial restructuring, the interim government has retained the international law firm Hogan Lovells as legal counsel. The engagement, formalized in early June through a filing with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit, involves a monthly fee of $100,000 and covers both debt restructuring and government relations support in Washington. Norm Coleman, the former Minnesota Republican senator and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before joining Hogan Lovells in 2011, will lead the Venezuela account. Coleman is a veteran of decades of foreign policy lobbying in Washington and maintains membership on the Advisory Council of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, a bipartisan committee that includes every living former U.S. Secretary of State.

The restructuring addresses approximately $170 billion in defaulted debt—the sovereign and PDVSA combined—that has been in arrears since 2017 under former autocrat Nicolás Maduro. Analysts estimate total liabilities, including arbitration awards and accrued interest, could exceed $150 billion. Venezuelan bonds have surged roughly 80% in price since the start of 2026, with securities maturing in 2027 trading near 52 cents on the dollar, implying investors expect to recover approximately 30% of their total claims once accrued unpaid interest is factored in.

Ongoing debt monitoring and assistance talks between Venezuela and the FMI continue.

The Central Bank’s Currency Squeeze

Venezuela’s Central Bank (BCV) has introduced a new regime of monthly and annual quotas for foreign exchange allocation to individuals—a policy shift that signals the central bank’s intention to maintain tight control over the currency market even as broader economic opening accelerates. The move is structurally counterproductive. Rather than contributing to exchange-rate stability, the quota system deepens controls, creates incentives for arbitrage, and limits the formal market’s capacity to absorb demand. The predictable result is intensified pressure on the parallel market and a widening spread between the official and shadow rates.

Six months into the current political process, the BCV has shown no intention of unifying or normalizing the foreign exchange market, as economist Asdrúbal Oliveros recently warned. Instead, the bank has continued to edit controls through successive modifications—redrawing the disaster rather than ordering it.

The underlying political economy of the Rodríguez government is clear: maintaining an appreciated official rate creates fiscal space for the government to pay millions of public-sector employees and sustain the patronage networks inherited from the Chávez era. A devalued, unified market would also risk triggering manufacturing expansion —and the electricity consumption that comes with it— precisely when the grid cannot absorb that load.

The corrective path would run in the opposite direction—expanding the supply of foreign exchange, flexibilizing allocation mechanisms, and recognizing the existence of all currency market segments, including informal ones. Without greater depth, transparency, and policy capacity across the entire market, reducing the spread on a sustained basis will remain elusive.

Electricity: The Impsa Question

On Saturday, June 13, the interim government announced the signing of a historic agreement with Impsa, the Argentine hydroelectric engineering firm, to complete the Tocoma hydroelectric plant and advance work on the national electrical system. The accord promises to add 2,640 megawatts of generation capacity, according to Delcy Rodríguez’s announcement on Telegram—a figure that exceeds what Impsa is seeking for a first shorter-term phase.

The actual scope is more modest. Impsa president Jorge Rafael Salcedo Hernández told Reuters on June 10 that the company seeks to install two turbine units of 216 megawatts each at Tocoma and repair three existing 80-megawatt units at the Macagua facility—adding a total of 672 megawatts, less than 2% of Venezuela’s installed electrical capacity. In the medium term, that will cover various years, the company plans to add what Rodríguez promised. The contract, signed over a decade ago between Impsa and the state electrical corporation Corpoelec, has remained unexecuted due to payment problems and American sanctions. The new understanding takes the form of an addendum that would allow Impsa to export and install turbines manufactured in Mendoza, Argentina—equipment that has sat in warehouse storage for years.

Salcedo’s background raises questions. In 2017, Salcedo Hernández was identified as the legal representative of Samark López Bello in the United States following Treasury Department sanctions on López for having served as a financial operator for Tareck El Aissami, the former Venezuelan minister designated for alleged money laundering linked to narcotics trafficking and imprisioned in an intra-Chavista purge (López Bello was also imprisoned by the Maduro government). Nine years later, Salcedo presides over the foreign company now signing a major accord with Corpoelec. Before assuming the Impsa presidency in July 2025, Salcedo worked as a lawyer in Florida, specializing in OFAC sanctions advisory—including management of licenses for blocked-fund releases and technical support to Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff on sanctions legislation.

Impsa’s own history demands scrutiny. The firm was originally controlled by the Pescarmona family, which maintained contracts with Venezuela during the Chávez era and later faced investigation in Argentina’s “Cuadernos de las coimas” (Bribery Notebooks) case for alleged corrupt payments to kirchnerist officials. Impsa was contracted in 2008 to supply ten Kaplan turbines for Tocoma at an initial cost of $300 million. The Andean Development Corporation (CAF) extended a $600 million loan for turbine acquisition. The project, which began in 2005 and involved Brazilian scandal-ridden company Odebretch, ballooned: the contract escalated to $1 billion, and the final cost exceeded $9.3 billion before work halted in 2014. Only some turbines were installed, with reported technical defects in assembly. Venezuela accumulated a $300 million debt to Impsa for the unfinished work.

Impsa was privatized in February 2025 under Argentine President Javier Milei—the first company-asset sale of his libertarian administration. Control transferred to Industrial Acquisitions Fund (IAF), a U.S.-based holding company with Arc Energy as principal shareholder. Arc Energy is known for ties to Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Among the shareholders and board members are individuals of Venezuelan origin who are listed as Trump campaign donors. During the formalization of the sale, Impsa executives presented Argentine officials with a red cap bearing the phrase “Make Impsa Great Again”—a direct echo of Trump’s campaign slogan.

Transparency remains absent. The government has not disclosed the terms of the new accord, whether a competitive bidding process occurred, or the financial structure governing Impsa’s obligations. Former Vice Minister of Electricity Víctor Poleo warned that the agreement involves “a new Impsa and an executive branch lacking legal authority,” referring both to the company’s foreign ownership structure and to concerns about the legitimacy of the interim government’s contracting authority. The contract terms remain unpublished.

The accord arrives amid the ongoing legislative effort to reshape the electrical sector. On June 2, the National Assembly approved in first reading a partial reform of the Organic Law of the Electrical System and Service, a proposal that would allow mixed-ownership enterprises and private operators to enter generation, transmission, and distribution—ending more than two decades of state monopoly. The reform modifies 31 of the existing 115 articles and introduces 11 new provisions. It now enters a public consultation phase before a second reading.

Yet the Impsa agreement reveals the limits of this opening. The actors willing to move beyond verbal commitments, MOUs and sign binding contracts for Venezuela’s electrical sector are remarkably few—and those few operate in opacity. Their agreements are also remarkaly limited.

The government has disclosed neither the accord’s terms, the bidding process (if one existed), nor the financial structure governing Impsa’s obligations. This is not a technical oversight; it is the reproduction of a familiar pattern. The chavista state historically conducted major infrastructure contracts through discretionary deal-making, opaque patronage networks, and the concentration of decision-making authority in a single executive. Six months after Nicolás Maduro’s capture and formal transition to an interim government, that structure persists. Delcy Rodríguez signs undisclosed agreements with firms of uncertain provenance—Impsa, controlled by an American holding company close to Trump donors and led by a man who once represented a frontman of a disgraced oil czar.

The electrical opening thus becomes a case study in how geopolitical reorientation can coexist with institutional continuity. The old patronage networks have not disappeared; they have been rerouted. The new intermediaries are aligned with Washington and the Trump administration rather than Moscow and the PSUV, but the mechanism—discretionary contracts, absent transparency, concentrated authority, the positioning of trusted operatives in key roles—remains structurally identical to the model it claims to supersede. A formal legal framework for private investment is starting to come to terms. But the conditions under which that investment occurs—secrecy, personalism, the absence of competitive process—suggest that it must be inserted in the political architecture of chavismo.

OIL & DEALS

• Schlumberger & PDVSA — The oilfield services giant and the state oil company signed an agreement to optimize production through digital tools, artificial intelligence, and data analysis. The partnership focuses on well identification, operational efficiency, and strategic investment allocation. Schlumberger CEO Olivier Le Peuch highlighted that the new cooperation phase will deploy digital instruments capable of “unlocking value” from Venezuelan reserves—a statement that carries particular weight given the deterioration of PDVSA’s technical capacity over the past decade.

• OFAC sanctions relief — The U.S. Treasury removed sanctions designations from several vessels linked to the “ghost fleet,” the informal network of ships that moved Venezuelan crude through opacity: name changes, flag swaps, disabled tracking systems. The lifting of restrictions on these vessels signals Washington’s systematic regularization of crude flows, moving informal networks into semi-official channels as part of the broader licensing framework. The ghost fleet had been Venezuela’s primary workaround for sanctions; its formalization marks a shift from evasion to managed commerce.

• American Airlines to Maracaibo — The U.S. carrier announced on June 12 that it will launch daily nonstop service between Miami and Maracaibo beginning July 14, operating with Embraer E175 regional jets. The route marks American’s expansion to its 100th destination across Latin America and the Caribbean, following its return to Caracas in late April after a seven-year suspension. The airline suspended Venezuelan operations in 2019 under the first Trump administration; the resumption signals the normalization of air traffic tied to economic opening.

• Asia-Turkey energy tour — Delcy Rodríguez completed a week-long international tour focused on repositioning Venezuelan crude in distant markets. In India, she met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to reactivate crude purchases from a nation that has rapidly returned to the top tier of Venezuelan oil buyers following January’s geopolitical shift. The visit included a meeting with U.S. Ambassador Sergio Gor, underscoring that American sanctions relief is enabling Venezuela’s reentry into Asian markets. Departing Mumbai on June 8, Rodríguez arrived in Istanbul for high-level meetings with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar. The discussions centered on deepening cooperation across oil, gas, and mining sectors, with both sides reaffirming a stated goal of raising bilateral trade to $3 billion. Turkey, a consistent energy buyer and geopolitical bridge actor, has maintained relationships across Venezuelan administrations. The dual-front strategy reflects the interim government’s effort to diversify crude markets and rebuild institutional relationships severed or frozen under sanctions.

• Trafigura to commercialize Venezuelan crude — On June 12, Delcy Rodríguez hosted Trafigura Group CEO Richard Holtum for high-level talks at Miraflores. Attendees included PDVSA President Héctor Obregón, Oil Minister Paula Henao, and Finance Minister Anabel Pereira Fernández. Trafigura, a Singapore-based commodities multinational, is the world’s largest private metals trader and second-largest crude trader globally. The meeting focused on commercialization agreements and optimizing Venezuelan crude’s positioning in global supply chains—the company’s comparative advantage is its logistics network and institutional access to U.S. and Asian buyers.

• Venezuela’s new cacao legislation — The National Assembly approved a bill to promote and develop Venezuelan cacao, protecting the germplasm, implementing genetic improvement programs, strengthening crop productivity and resilience, and conserving native varieties under agroecological criteria. The legal framework aims to position cacao as a strategic sector for rural and economic development, though execution faces the same bottlenecks of capital and technical expertise that have constrained Venezuelan agriculture for years.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

What Traded

On two weeks between June 1–12, the Caracas stock exchange moved roughly 30 billion bolívares (roughly $51 million in the overvalued official exchange rate). Most of that came from buying and selling company shares (16,000 transactions), but the bulk of volume came from short-term financing certificates—quick money, not real long-term investment. This shows investors are still looking for liquid exits, not actually betting on the market.

What Moved

The IBC (Índice Bursátil de Caracas), the main equity index, opened the period at 5.763 points and closed at 5.440 points, recording a cumulative decline of 4.66% across the two-week window. The Financial Index contracted 3.8% while the Industrial Index posted marginal gains of 0.91%, indicating sector divergence. The weekly closures showed consistent softening: the first week’s -2.85% was followed by the second week’s -2.83%, suggesting sustained pressure rather than abrupt correction.

Within this downward trajectory, individual stocks registered countercyclical movement. Fivenca Private Capital Fund Class B surged 19.99%; Fábrica Nacional de Vidrio rose 8.73%; Fábrica Nacional de Cementos gained 7.37%; and Manpa climbed 6.39%. Gainers were balanced across weeks: six equities rose in the first week, eight in the second. Envases Venezolanos (+6.34%), Banco del Caribe Class A (+2.97%), and Corimon (+1.39%) showed resilience.

The most actively traded securities reflected an institutional bias toward financial stocks. Banco Nacional de Crédito, Mercantil Servicios Financieros, and Banco Provincial dominated aggregate volume—a pattern consistent with retail hedging during volatile periods. Secondary positions went to Ron Santa Teresa (supported by primary offering completion of Class B shares during the period, elevating the company’s capital to Bs 334 million) and the Bolsa de Valores itself, indicating liquidity focus.

What It Means

Year-to-date, the IBC has risen 161% from post-January lows, reflecting early optimism about geopolitical reorientation. The recent 4.66% decline over two weeks signals that optimism has fractured. The decline is not profit-taking but disenchantment. Reforms announced in April and May—mining law, electrical sector opening, hydrocarbon framework—have proved to be limited in implementation. The new electrical law passed first reading in early June; second reading remains pending. More importantly, there haven’t been major institutional or political reforms to reestablish the rule of law and the independence of the branches of government.

For investors and the private sector, the early promise of January—that institutional change was imminent—has given way to recognition of a harder reality: Venezuela is not transitioning towards a liberal democracy with full guarantees; it is being restructured under an informal MOU with the United States. Sanctions are lifting selectively, controls persist despite opening rhetoric, restrictive laws such as the Labor Law have not been reformed and currency unification has not occurred. Transparency remains absent from major contracts. Institutional control remains in the same set of actors that supported nationalizations and mismanaged the economy to the ground.

For the population, the geopolitical opening has produced no visible improvement in electricity service, no sustained wage gains, no reduction in the currency premium that erodes purchasing power daily. The consistent week-over-week decline reflects latent discontent across investor and public constituencies: the promised transformation has become regime management by external supervision, not a profound opening. Equities serve as hedges against currency depreciation, not vehicles for productive investment. The market is pricing stagnation dressed as reform.

SECTOR FOCUS

Mining: Order as Business Development Strategy

On June 13, the Venezuelan government confirmed that Héctor Guerrero Flores, alias “Niño Guerrero,” leader of the transnational criminal organization Tren de Aragua, was neutralized in a combined operation between Venezuelan security forces and the United States in southeast Bolívar state. The announcement came from both President Donald Trump, who stated that U.S. Southern Command executed a “rapid and lethal strike” against Niño Guerrero, and the Venezuelan interim government. The operation concluded a manhunt that had stretched across multiple countries—Guerrero had fled Tocorón prison in September 2023 and taken refuge in the mining areas, where Tren de Aragua used illegal mining zones as operational bases for trafficking and extortion.

The timing and location of the strike reveal a deeper pattern. The operation targeted a remote region that constitutes the heart of a promising gold mining zone. Just days before Guerrero’s death, the Venezuelan military had deployed special forces to the mining settlements of Las Claritas and Kilómetro 88 in Bolívar state. Videos from the area showed military helicopters opening fire, forcing hundreds of informal miners to evacuate. The operations were not isolated tactical strikes but appeared coordinated: security force movements across the Arco Minero, a criminal organization’s leadership eliminated, and territorial control reasserted.

The history of Venezuela’s mining disorder. The Arco Minero—a mineral-rich zone three times the size of Switzerland, created by Nicolás Maduro in 2016 to exploit gold, diamonds, coltan, and other minerals—has become a laboratory for understanding how state failure, criminal enterprise, and geopolitical interest intersect. When Hugo Chávez expelled foreign mining companies in the 2000s, the vacuum did not remain empty. Instead, an informal industry emerged, controlled by criminal armed groups called sindicatos—organizations born from the decomposition of construction-sector unions in Bolívar’s industrial hubs following Venezuela’s economic collapse. These groups have gradually replaced state functions in entire towns and municipalities, operating alongside leftist Colombian guerrilla groups such as the ELN. Yet the boundary between state and crime has always been permeable. According to research by NGOs including SOS Orinoco and Transparency Venezuela, the sindicatos forged alliances with state security elements from their inception—not despite state authority but through it.

Previous military operations to reassert state control have not eliminated organized crime; they have redistributed it. Hundreds of informal miners—the most vulnerable—were expelled in 2022, while the state’s “strategic alliances” or joint ventures with private enterprises consolidate control. Since 2022, a 2023 study by Transparency Venezuela found, the state has been making a comeback through these partnerships: 66% of gold revenue flowed to strategic alliances, while only 20% went to criminal gangs. The sindicatos have lost ground steadily, though the mechanism remains opaque and benefits accrue to those with state connections.

Another example is the military operations to expel the “mining city” that sprouted in Cerro Yapacana National Park, a fragile ecosystem in the Venezuelan Amazon. In 2022 and 2023, Armed Forces operations expelled more than 14,000 informal miners from the park. Yapacana, unlike Kilómetro 88 or Las Claritas, is not a formal part of the Mining Arc: in fact, its located in Amazonas State, where mining is barred since the 1980s. And yet, mining from the Arc has expanded towards Amazonas and national parks like Canaima in the last decade.

The result was presented as one of the most impactful operations against illegal mining in the country’s recent history. But, says SOS Orinoco director Cristina Burelli, the operation was simply a smokescreen: miners soon returned and reported the same old logistics.

And the ecological impact could be null: according to satellite images analyzed in January 2023 by NGO Amazon Conservation, the mines on top of the Yapacana tepui remained intact after the December 2022 military operations. And yet, while reports of gold from Yapacana flowing to the Colombian Amazonian towns continued, the information on the operations’ results are “scarce, opaque and confusion” – and part of a then-wider Army operation to crack down on illegal mining groups.

The legal framework arrives. In April, following a visit by U.S. Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum to Caracas, the National Assembly—controlled by chavismo—approved a new Mining Law opening the sector once again to private corporations, ending Chávez’s nationalization. The law grants the executive unchecked discretion in awarding concessions, according to criticism from human rights and environmental groups, while gutting environmental review and overriding indigenous consultation rights. The law has been harshly criticized for its lack of transparency mechanisms and its executive overreach. The interim government has also begun importing Venezuelan gold and other minerals through commodities traders, signaling the reopening of formal export channels to international markets.

Clearing for capital. The current military operations appear less like a traditional crackdown on illegal mining and more like a clearing operation: making room for formal producers that can eventually export to the U.S. market under licenses authorized by the June 10 OFAC updates. The death of Niño Guerrero—a symbolic blow to the criminal structure that had controlled key mining territories—coincides with the deployment of Venezuelan forces to reassert territorial control. The U.S. commitment is evident: a joint operation, intelligence sharing, and strategic alignment with the interim government’s economic opening objectives.

The environmental and human costs of Chavez’s expropriations. Yet, multinational private companies to insert in a likely new redistribution of power in the Arc are absent. Until the mid-2000s, Canadian companies operated in the area with regulated industrial mining — or at least regulable mining. Hugo Chávez expropriated their assets in 2011. When Chávez expropriated the Las Cristinas mine from Crystallex, for example, he transferred the assets to PDVSA: but the state didn’t have the technical capacity or capital to operate a mine of that scale. The vacuum filled quickly by illegal miners and criminal gangs.

The companies and what followed up had two models whose technical difference is radical. The industrial mining Crystallex and others operated used cyanide in a closed circuit: toxic, yes, but containable and recoverable with adequate infrastructure. The artisanal mining that replaced it uses mercury in the open air, burned directly into the atmosphere, with no capture systems whatsoever. The mercury volatilizes, deposits in soils and rivers, and enters the food chain permanently.

Mercury mining, which is formally illegal in Venezuela, not only polluted rivers and the indigenous Sanemá and Pemón communities that consume the waters and fish: its open air mines also led to a malaria epidemic, the largest in the Americas today.

The question ahead. With U.S. incentives to reshape the mining economy, a new legal framework granting discretionary concessions to private investors, the elimination of the criminal leader controlling key mining territories, and military operations to reassert state control, the Arco Minero now faces a genuine test. Will these operations finally push formalization—allowing international companies to enter under regulated frameworks? Or will they, as in the past, prove temporary, giving way once again to state-armed group power-sharing arrangements? The death of Niño Guerrero and the current military mobilization suggest a shift. But the opaque award of concessions, the absence of transparency mechanisms in the new mining law, and the history of failed clearances counsel caution. Venezuela has executed such operations before. What distinguishes this moment is the explicit U.S. coordination, the synchronized legal opening, and the geopolitical stakes: a commodity essential to new technologies and the green energy transition, controlled by a state newly aligned with Washington, supervised by U.S. enforcement apparatus, and extracted under a legal regime designed to maximize foreign investor confidence.

THE LONG READ

The Panini Economy: How a Sticker Album Reveals Venezuela’s Consumer Paradox

The Plaza de Los Palos Grandes in Caracas has transformed into an informal stock exchange. Crowds gather daily, voices rising above the din, clutching physical lists, scrolling through Excel spreadsheets, exchanging cash. But the commodity being traded is not equity—it is plastic stickers. Barajitas. The official album for the FIFA World Cup 2026 published by Panini, the Italian collectibles company that has lost its license to produce these albums after this edition.

The scene repeats in plazas and storefronts across Venezuela. Every four years, the World Cup generates an unusual commercial dynamic: a market that pulls together collectors both adult and child, forces distributors to recalculate logistics, and creates a wave of media attention. This edition is the most demanding in history. The tournament now includes 48 national teams instead of 32, swelling the total stickers to nearly one thousand—up from 660 in 2022. For Venezuela, the relevant fact is simpler and more painful: the packet price was fixed at $2.20, more than double the 2022 cost.

To complete the album, a collector needs roughly 150 packets, assuming active exchange with others. At Venezuelan prices, that means a minimum outlay of $330, before accounting for the album itself (ranging from $7 to $30), nor the secondary market, nor special pieces. Independent estimates suggest a total cost approaching $800 without peer-to-peer trading. In a country where 64% of households earn $239 monthly, 29% earn $583, and only 7% exceed $1,000 monthly, according to Atenas Grupo Consultor, completing the album is inaccessible for most. In 2022, the equivalent cost was roughly $135—less than an unskilled worker’s monthly wage. Today it represents more than two months’ earnings.

And yet the market thrives. “It’s a product with deep roots in Venezuelan society,” says Alberto Cabrera, a reseller at the plaza. “People have been collecting every World Cup and don’t want to break the chain. That’s why they make the effort.” Adonay Conde, a Caracas collector, echoes the sentiment. “You meet people you don’t know, exchange stickers, form friendships. Adults become children again. That’s something special.”

The formal layer is Inversiones Kaluca, which holds the Panini license in Venezuela and manages import, distribution, and pricing. For this 2026 edition—its seventh World Cup since 2002—the company expects to sell 160,000 albums through 2,500 points of sale nationwide. That slightly exceeds 2022’s 150,000 units but falls far short of 2006 and 2010, when Venezuela ranked fifth globally in packet sales with over 30 million stickers sold.

The second layer comprises the retailers—supermarket chains like Farmatodo, pharmacies, kiosks. Antonio De Medeiros, owner of Librería Chuao in Caracas, describes the mechanics: Kaluca offers an 18% discount on published prices, 20% if paid in dollars. His first order arrived in under two hours and sold out in five days. “There’s been considerable interest,” he says, and he’s planning to reorder. For De Medeiros, the stickers represent a punctual sales lift during the tournament window—the only retail outlet in his zone carrying Panini material.

The third layer is the secondary market. The Plaza de Los Palos Grandes operates as what economists call an efficiency mechanism—a channel reducing transaction costs and facilitating collection completion. A common Cristiano Ronaldo card averages $30; a special golden Messi edition—the most coveted—sells for nearly $500, despite an original price of cents. Here, as in equities markets, negotiation skill and patience matter. The secondary market is not supplementary; it is essential to the ecosystem’s function.

The brand partnerships illuminate something deeper about Venezuelan consumer behavior. Arcos Dorados, owner of McDonald’s franchises, distributes golden-bordered packets through combo upgrades—a mechanism replicating the 1990s Happy Meal logic. But Coca-Cola has achieved something more sophisticated: two exclusive pages in the album reserved for fourteen special player cards available only through labels on two-liter bottles. During the first week post-launch, Coca-Cola bottles sold out in at least eight Farmatodo locations; stickers themselves depleted in 30% of the chain’s 200+ stores.

The insight is not merely commercial. Juan Pablo Noriega, an expert in mass-market brand positioning tied to sports, observes: “Sports have a unique capacity to move collective emotion. When brands connect with that, results are tangible.” In Venezuela’s context, this is more acute. The sticker market offers what brands rarely find: a known operational cycle of less than six months, a consumer segment emotionally and aspirationally driven despite economic constraint, and a mechanism that moves people to act—not merely to see. Coca-Cola does not just advertise; it makes the consumer purchase to complete the album, converting passive exposure into active behavior.

The true bottleneck is not price but supply continuity. Kaluca’s inventory management across 2,500 points must sustain flow until July when the tournament closes, with an additional two-month window for missing stickers. If stock depletes early and reabastement fails, the ritual breaks. The market functions only if the formal channel performs.

What the Panini economy reveals is not unusual consumer irrationality in a crisis. It exposes a paradox: a population simultaneously crushed by scarcity willing to spend months’ wages on ephemeral objects. It is not a contradiction. It is survival through collective meaning-making. The sticker album is not fundamentally about football. It is about networks—the exchange conversations at the plaza, the friendships formed, the shared reference in a fragmented society. For brands, it is a window into emotional spending patterns. For collectors, it is evidence that aspiration persists even when income does not. The World Cup arrives every four years. Venezuela didn’t field a team in this one. But Caracas still gathers to trade, negotiate, and complete what circumstances otherwise render impossible.

Because that’s the golazo: a country’s ability to maintain ritual even when the economy doesn’t allow it.

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Venezuela’s reopening has drawn a new audience — investors, advisors, and firms evaluating the country from the outside — that needs more than news coverage. This is a shorter pilot for a new version of Ecosistema’s The Venezuelan Business Dispatch, built for that audience: an analytical briefing on the political, regulatory, and business developments shaping Venezuela’s re-entry into global markets. We are planning to change towards a paid subscription model in the coming weeks. We’d love your feedback.

SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT

The Plan on Paper: Venezuela’s Economic Framework Meets Its Own Contradictions

Four months into her tenure, Delcy Rodríguez‘s administration unveiled what markets and business actors had been waiting for: a formal economic plan. Presented by Calixto Ortega Sánchez —Venezuela’s sectoral vice president for the economy and its newly reinstated governor at the IMF and World Bank— the framework rests on four pillars: economic growth anchored in extractive industries and productive diversification; fiscal sustainability through better revenue mobilization and debt normalization; monetary and financial sector strengthening to stabilize inflation and the exchange rate; and governance reform through more transparent public institutions.

The plan’s language is measured and technically fluent — the vocabulary of a government that has hired advisors and read the room. What it cannot disguise, however, is the gap between the framework as announced and the conditions in which it must operate.

The plan’s internal contradictions. Even as the four-pillar framework promises fiscal discipline and monetary stabilization, the Central Bank (BCV) expanded the monetary base by 18% in just two weeks of April — well above what stable economies typically do in an entire year. Cumulative inflation for the first four months of 2026 stands at 90%.

The Q1 GDP figures, released by the BCV on May 21, add texture to that picture without resolving it. The economy grew 2.51% year-on-year in the first quarter — a deceleration from the 8.66% recorded for full-year 2025 and the 7% posted in Q4. The headline masks a structural tension: non-oil GDP grew 3.11%, led by financial services and commerce, while the oil sector — the pillar the government’s own growth plan is built around — contracted 2.12%. Construction fell 18.3%. The electricity and water sector shrank 0.99%. The private sector grew 3.52%; the public sector contracted 0.68%.

The UNDP projects full-year 2026 growth at 7.4%, with oil activity recovering to 11.5% growth and production reaching approximately 1.21 million barrels per day. Independent firms in Caracas expect yearly growth close to 12%. Those numbers are achievable — but they depend on conditions the Q1 data suggests are not yet in place.

The recovery is real but uneven, and heavily front-loaded toward extractive sectors rather than the structural diversification the plan describes.

The debt file gets a banker — and a controversy. Venezuela’s restructuring process acquired its most concrete institutional shape this week when the government named Centerview Partners as financial advisor for the overhaul of its more than $150 billion in sovereign and PDVSA debt — one of the largest such mandates in decades. The appointment brings in Matthieu Pigasse, the veteran socialist French banker who advised on the 2012 Greek restructuring, the largest sovereign debt operation in history at the time. His team includes Charles Albinet and Hamouda Chekir, with combined experience across Argentina, Congo, and Ecuador. Rothschild, which had held a mandate since 2024, was passed over. So was law firm Dentons.

The selection itself has become a story. Centerview was appointed without a formal competitive process, according to multiple sources, raising questions about transparency at the precise moment the government had pledged a clean break from Maduro-era opacity. Investor Mauricio Claver-Carone — who holds no formal position but recommended Centerview to Rodríguez and says he consulted the State Department and Treasury in doing so — has drawn particular scrutiny. The government’s stated rationale: Centerview’s experience and absence of conflicts of interest. The bond market deadline that gives this urgency is real: tolling agreements suspending creditor limitation periods expire in 2028, making the window for an orderly restructuring measurable in months rather than years.

The electricity paradox. The most immediate ceiling on any growth scenario is the power grid — and it is getting worse, not better. Venezuela is one of the most energy-intensive economies on the continent, a legacy of decades of subsidized electricity consumption and a major hydrocarbons industry. As oil production recovers and refineries attempt to restart, the demand they place on an already-fragile system is producing blackouts across multiple states. Even in Greater Caracas, businesses, shopping malls and towers with high demand received instructions these weeks to reduce consumption during peak hours, with the 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. window identified as critical.

Cutting power to common areas, escalators, and air conditioning in a tropical country is not a neutral administrative measure — it is a direct hit to commercial space utilization and worker productivity, in an economy whose government has spent four months telling investors the business environment is open for business. Outside Caracas, meanwhile, discontent and disbelief have been brewing for months and hours-long blackouts. And through the whole country –water shortages in Turimiquire in Sucre, bridges collapsing in Yacural in Portuguesa and broken water pipes flooding middle-class El Cafetal in Caracas– derelict infrastructure continues to show the consequences of years of corruption, underinvestment and mismanagement.

OIL & DEALS

The week’s most symbolically loaded development came from ExxonMobil — expelled from Venezuela by Hugo Chávez in 2007 after refusing to accept minority joint venture terms, and a company whose CEO described the country as “uninvestable” at a White House meeting as recently as January 9.

• The New York Times reported on May 21 that Exxon is in advanced negotiations to acquire production rights in up to six oil fields across multiple regions. A team of Exxon employees traveled to Caracas in April to assess the fields offered by the Venezuelan government. Sources told the Times a deal could be announced before the end of May; as of this writing it has not been. The realistic window for final contract signature, after field-by-field engineering due diligence and updated reserve estimates, is more likely the third quarter.

• The air corridor between the United States and Venezuela continued to fill in. JetBlue announced on May 28 its intention to launch nonstop service between Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Simón Bolívar International Airport — the carrier’s first-ever route to Venezuela — before the end of 2026, pending regulatory approval. The airline framed the route around VFR demand from South Florida’s large Venezuelan diaspora. JetBlue becomes the third U.S. carrier to announce Venezuela service in 2026, joining American Airlines and United.

• The connectivity push extends beyond air. Venezuela’s Tourism Ministry is formally pursuing the return of international cruise lines to Margarita island before year-end, under a broader initiative branded “Venezuela Hub.” Swiss company MSC Cruises had already incorporated Margarita into its Caribbean itinerary listings as of March. No confirmed bookings from major lines have been announced, but a German-owned cruiseliner had already returned to Margarita in 2023: the first in 15 years.

SECTOR FOCUS

Sweat Equity: Venezuela’s Homegrown Activewear Industry Finds Its Footing

For most of the past two decades, buying sportswear in Venezuela meant importing it, waiting for someone to bring it from abroad, or paying a premium for products that didn’t always fit the climate or the lifestyle. What local production existed carried a stigma that was hard to shake: made in Venezuela meant lower quality, almost by definition.

That assumption is now being quietly dismantled by a cluster of homegrown activewear brands —Pawer, Cuadro, Port de Bras, Hero, Burpee, and Leva among them— that have built distinct identities, physical retail networks across multiple cities, and product lines that compete on design, fabric technology, and price against far more established regional names. Their emergence is the visible result of two converging forces: the structural collapse of international brand distribution during the sanctions and exchange-control years, which created a vacuum local producers moved to fill, and a post-pandemic fitness boom that turned activewear from a niche category into an everyday wardrobe staple.

The vacuum that started it all. The timing was not accidental. As the representatives and distributors of Adidas, Nike, and similar brands found it structurally impossible to operate normally in a sanctioned economy with capital controls and complex logistics, local brands entered a market that had effectively been vacated at the mid-range. “The crisis and the difficulty of accessing imported products at the time incentivized local production,” says Isabel Martínez, founder of Localness, a platform dedicated to Venezuela’s fashion and textile industry. “But even more decisive was the post-pandemic shift: there was an entrepreneurship boom where many people started building brands as a way to generate income and autonomy.”

The fiscal architecture, however, has not made things easy. Tariffs on finished imported goods remain low —facilitating a flood of Chinese merchandise at highly competitive prices— while textile tariffs rose, ostensibly to protect domestic production. Since Venezuela’s manufacturing base is concentrated in knit fabric and denim, the practical effect was to raise the cost of the technical inputs that activewear brands must source from Colombia, Brazil, or China. The result is a split market: Venezuelan brands that manufacture abroad and compete aggressively on price, and brands produced locally that lack the scale to compete on cost and are forced to differentiate on quality, identity, or positioning.

A market that learned to segment itself. The segmentation that has emerged from this landscape is clearer than it might appear from the outside. At the accessible end, Burpee and Pawer occupy similar price points but with sharply different strategies: Burpee is a female-focused niche brand with a single showroom in Las Mercedes; Pawer has built the most aggressive physical distribution network in the country, with 12 stores from Puerto Ordaz to Acarigua —a footprint no other local brand can currently match. Hero and Cuadro operate in the mid-to-upper range, each with distinct community and product identities. At the premium end sits Port de Bras, which runs a single store in Venezuela but carries international retail presence —Shopbop, Bloomingdale’s, Net-a-Porter— inverting the usual logic and converting its Venezuelan origin into a luxury asset rather than a liability.

The geography of what comes next. The most underexploited strategic opportunity in the ecosystem, by most accounts, remains interior distribution. Only Pawer currently reaches Portuguesa, Bolívar, and Anzoátegui — regions with growing purchasing power and virtually no branded activewear competition. Whoever scales that geography first, through owned stores or local distributors, captures a market that is, for now, essentially uncontested.

What is consolidating is something more than a set of successful small businesses. For years, aspiration in Venezuelan consumer culture was associated with what came from outside. These brands are, in incremental but measurable ways, beginning to relocate that aspiration —building it from the inside, with codes closer to the Venezuelan consumer’s own rhythm. The fitness boom opened the space. These brands are giving it shape.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

Caracas Stock Exchange · May 19–29, 2026

The IBC — he Caracas Stock Exchange’s main equity index, tracking the performance of the exchange’s most liquid listed companies— closed the two-week period at 5,763 points, up from 5,666 at the open: a net gain of 1.72% over ten sessions. Year-to-date, the index is up 176.78%, a figure that reflects bolívar depreciation as much as genuine equity appreciation.

The first week was flat; the second provided the period’s movement. Leading gainers included paper manufacturer Manpa (+14.35%), Banco Nacional de Crédito (+10.71%), and Banco de Venezuela (+6.45%). The banking sector appeared consistently across both weeks’ most-traded lists, alongside Ron Santa Teresa —whose secondary market continues to draw retail and institutional interest— and Fondo Petrolia clase B, the BVC-listed vehicle that finances oil service contractors and has become a reliable proxy for the deal pipeline.

The structural constraints are unchanged: thin liquidity, no international settlement mechanism, and a market where financing certificates —not equity— remain the dominant instrument by volume. The Caracas exchange continues to function less as a capital market in the conventional sense than as a real-time barometer of what a small group of domestic investors believes this economy will become.

THE LONG READ

The Room Where Venezuela’s Next Business Class Is Being Built

Andrés Chacón Korsun is a Caracas-born political scientist and risk analyst, graduate of Sciences Po Paris. He returned to Venezuela last week for the first time in five years and attended the Foro de Perspectivas Empresariales organized by AJE — the Young Businesspeople Association of Venezuela. This is what he found.

The first thing that struck Andrés Chacón Korsun, a Venezuelan risk analyst based in Europe who hadn’t returned to his country in years, when he walked into the Young Businesspeople Association (AJE) forum on May 19 wasn’t any speaker or data point. It was the faces. Former classmates — people from his school years, from basketball courts and beach clubs — now holding business cards and talking about credit lines, foreign exchange operations, and human capital. His generation, he realized, had quietly become part of Venezuela’s business fabric while he was away.

The inert money. The forum gathered some of the most consequential voices in Venezuelan private enterprise. Lorenzo Mendoza, president of Empresas Polar — the country’s largest food and consumer goods conglomerate — opened with a distinction that cut through the usual entrepreneurship rhetoric: building a business and making a deal are not the same thing. The first is a short-term financial exercise. The second is a long-term bet that depends, above all, on generating trust — internally first, with employees, before anything else. On AI, Mendoza described enabling tools across Polar in a deliberately decentralized way, letting adoption happen organically. On shortcuts: he doesn’t take them, and said so repeatedly.

The sharpest numbers came from Joaquín Urbano of Banco Venezolano de Crédito, a major bank. Venezuela’s total banking credit portfolio — for the entire country — stands at roughly $2 to $2.5 billion today, up from under $100 million in 2018 and 2019. That sounds like recovery until Urbano provided the context: it represents 2.5% of GDP. Spain’s is 105%. Colombia’s is 42%. El Salvador’s is 71%. The reserve requirement — the percentage of deposits the government mandates banks keep immobilized — reached 100% during the worst years of the crisis and still sits at around 73% today, leaving banks with only 27% of deposits available to lend. “Financing has to come back,” Urbano said. It wasn’t a slogan. It was a diagnosis.

Venezuela’s human wealth. The forum’s second panel brought the macro weight back in. Political scientist Michael Penfold and economist Ronald Balza put the decade’s damage on the table plainly: two-thirds of GDP gone, a third of the population emigrated, a displacement crisis with the texture of civil conflict but without its form. Balza’s framing, however, was precise rather than simply bleak: 80% of the economy was lost, but 20% survived and chose to grow — not because conditions invited it, but because people made deliberate bets, reinvesting savings from abroad into a country most were leaving. Penfold, who joined a government peace commission in January, noted that surveys now show both chavistas and opposition voters want a systemic alternative — a population that is, in his word, “forward-looking.”

What Chacón Korsun noticed cutting across every speaker was something harder to quantify: every panelist, without exception, placed the human factor at the center. In contexts where the State cannot guarantee basic conditions, he observed, the company becomes something more than an economic unit — it becomes an institution of trust in the most literal sense. The employer who pays on time when the country doesn’t. The business that stays open when everything around it closes. That pressure, across those who survived, appears to have produced an entrepreneurial ethic forged under duress rather than designed in a business school.

The Next Generation. At the cocktail after the panels, Chacón Korsun writes, two details stood out. A young woman, recently returned after seven years in the United States, back not out of necessity but out of conviction. And two intellectual property lawyers — working in Venezuela, on trademark disputes in an economy where Asian and American consumer brands now compete directly on the same shelves, where a consumer has to check whether they’re buying an Oreo or a Porleo. Both signals, in their own way, pointed to the same thing: an ecosystem sophisticating faster than most observers watching from outside had anticipated.

The credit doesn’t yet flow as it should. The macro conditions remain fragile. The numbers Penfold and Balza put on the table don’t disappear because a forum was optimistic. But AJE itself —more than 200 members from 185 companies, spanning agroindustry, startups, and marketing— was its own kind of data point.

“What stays with me,” Chacón Korsun says, “is what it means that this generation — mine — is betting on staying, on building, on having a long-term vision in a country that for years seemed not to have one. That’s not naivety. It’s perhaps the most demanding form of patriotism that exists.”

Read his whole piece here.

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The Weight of the Ledger: Venezuela’s First Formal Debt Restructuring Bid in a Decade

Venezuela announced this week a formal process to restructure its external debt for the first time in nearly a decade. The communiqué —describing an “integral process” with “sustainable” objectives— lands as Venezuelan bond prices have rallied sharply in recent weeks. For bondholders, it’s confirmation. For the experts studying the architecture, it’s a starting point that’s already behind schedule. Part of that lag is structural: the current sanctions framework defines precisely what is and isn’t permitted.

What GL-58 does and doesn’t do. In April, OFAC —the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the agency that administers Venezuela’s sanctions regime— issued General License 58, which enables the Venezuelan state and state oil company PDVSA to contract legal and financial advisory services to design a restructuring strategy. It does not authorize direct creditor negotiations, bond exchanges, or financial transactions. The conditions for a conversation have been licensed. The conversation itself has not.

The sequencing problem. That gap became apparent the moment the announcement landed. IMF spokesperson Julie Kozack confirmed that Venezuelan authorities had not communicated directly with the Fund beforehand. Leonardo Vera, economist at Universidad Metropolitana in Caracas, calls this a consequential inversion: “They announced a restructuring and hadn’t even consulted —or at least warned— the IMF that they were going to take that decision. That is delicate.”

For Alejandro Grisanti, director at Ecoanalítica, a Caracas-based economic research firm, the correct sequence begins with an IMF technical mission to review official statistics, followed by a formal Article IV consultation — the Fund’s standard annual economic surveillance mechanism, last conducted in Venezuela over twenty years ago. Those two stages alone could take ten to twelve months. A complete restructuring, Grisanti estimates, would take four to five years. The statistical challenge is not procedural — it is foundational. “The most complicated issue here is the actual data, the low confidence in what we know about national accounts and fiscal data,” Vera says. The scrutiny will extend to PDVSA, state banks, non-financial public enterprises, and social security. That data problem, however, is compounded by something more immediate: a structural flaw in what the announcement actually covers.

The scope gap. The announcement targets only the bonds — leaving outside arbitral awards, commercial debt, supplier arrears, and the bulk of bilateral loans, which together account for roughly $75 billion. “Restructuring only the bonds understates the true burden of the external debt and does not resolve the problem integrally,” says Omar Zambrano, chief economist at ANOVA Policy Research, a Caracas-based think tank. Venezuela’s creditor front is more fragmented than Argentina’s 2001 case: bilateral creditors including China, executable arbitral awards against Venezuelan assets abroad, and the real possibility that some creditors move to block agreements reached with others. Most immediate: the U.S. Treasury’s protection of Citgo —a Houston-based refinery that is PDVSA’s most valuable asset abroad and is currently mid-process in a creditor-driven sale near $10 billion— extended through June 19.

What a deal would unlock. Despite those constraints, the incentive structure for getting this right is real. A successful restructuring would restore access to voluntary capital markets, unfreeze roughly $5 billion in Special Drawing Rights —the IMF’s reserve asset— assigned to Venezuela in 2021 but blocked by a years-long dispute over the country’s legitimate government, now resolved with Calixto Ortega Sánchez‘s appointment as Venezuela’s IMF governor. It would also send a credibility signal to private investors currently staying out. JPMorgan has recorded a 50% reduction in Venezuelan country risk by emerging-market measures.

“A poorly executed restructuring today mortgages the possibility of a well-executed one in the future,” Zambrano warns. Without IMF-certified debt sustainability analysis, Venezuela negotiates against professional creditors using their own inferences about Venezuelan capacity to pay — not audited figures. Vera adds the fiscal constraint: “Putting Venezuela to pay debt commitments next year or in two years would be the result of a bad negotiation. We need a balance in which the country consolidates fiscally without severely affecting infrastructure and social deficits.”

Bottom line. The restructuring is a precondition for everything else — market access, multilateral lending, private investment. Venezuela has the window. Whether it has the sequence right is a different question. At the same time, while resolving the debt overhang is necessary to normalize the economy, dedicating too much fiscal and political capital to creditors too early could constrain the public investment, liquidity and productive dynamism the country needs to generate sustainable long-term growth in the first place.

Inflation: Still the Defining Problem

The Central Bank (UCV) released April inflation figures this week. Monthly inflation in bolívares came in at 10.6%, down from 13.1% in March. The direction is right; the pace is not. The cumulative figure for January through April stands at 90%. Annual inflation — April 2025 to April 2026 — sits at 612%, down from 650% the prior month. Economist Asdrúbal Oliveros tracks dollar-denominated inflation independently: year-to-date through April, 4.8%; annualized, 35% — high by any international standard, and a signal that exchange rate distortion is eroding purchasing power even in the dollarized layer of the economy.

The dollar supply picture. Behind the inflation trajectory is a significant shift in how the BCV is managing foreign currency and supplying it to the Venezuelan economy. From January through March, the central bank delivered approximately $1.96 billion to the economy. April saw a notably higher injection — Oliveros estimates around $1.6 billion for the month alone, bringing the January-to-April total to roughly $3.6 billion.

The BCV has rotated through three distinct mechanisms since January 3: direct adjudications —dollar assignments to high-impact sectors, primarily food and pharmaceuticals— which dominated the first weeks after the transition; a formal auction regime, which ran through roughly mid-March; and the current model, a daily intervention in which the BCV sets a reference rate and assigns currency to companies and individuals through the banking system. The gap between the official and parallel rates remains a live variable — and, per Oliveros, one of the three critical levers for bringing inflation down meaningfully. The other two: fiscal discipline, including deficit reduction and spending structure reform, and a redesign of the auction mechanism itself. “Inflation is today the greatest problem the country continues to face,” Oliveros said. Meanwhile, through two weeks in April, the Central Bank expanded the monetary base by 18% according to official data: well over what stable economies tend to do in the span of a whole year.

A 90% cumulative inflation rate in four months is not a stabilizing economy — it is an economy learning, slowly, to slow down. The dollar supply increase is the most concrete policy tool in play. Whether it is enough depends on whether the fiscal and exchange rate architecture changes fast enough to keep pace.

The Honeymoon Has a Price Tag

The possibility of a political transition produced a confidence surge. By April, it was showing its first measurable crack. Ecoanalítica’s Business Confidence Index —built on direct company surveys— fell 2% in April compared to the first quarter. The decline is modest; the direction is not.

On the streets. On the night of May 5 —the day a government-mandated electricity rationing plan nominally expired without a replacement— residents of southern Valencia gathered near a power plant after more than twelve hours without service. In the days that followed, the zone accumulated up to sixteen daily hours without electricity. Provea, Venezuela’s leading human rights organization, documented protests in at least six states —Aragua, Anzoátegui, Barinas, Carabobo, Monagas, and Sucre— over extended blackouts and irregular water supply. In Aragua, the mayor of San Sebastián, Andrés Aular, publicly accused Corpoelec —Venezuela’s state electricity utility— of refusing to install a transformer purchased by the municipality because the donation came from an opposition politician. The community had been without power for six days. In Turmero, residents blocked a major avenue and burned waste after six consecutive hours without electricity. Aragua governor Joana Sánchez responded by threatening to prosecute demonstrators under a domestic statute that criminalizes “incitement to hatred” — a provision critics say has been used to suppress protest.

The electricity protests are the most visible expression of discontent, but they’re not the only one. In Cumaná, the capital of Sucre state in eastern Venezuela, a February 22 earthquake blocked the transfer tunnel of the Turimiquire reservoir — the region’s primary water source — sharply reducing supply to roughly 900,000 people across Sucre and Nueva Esparta states. By April 25, the city had accumulated sixty-two days without pipe-fed water, with rising cases of gastrointestinal illness — particularly among children and the elderly — attributed to contaminated cistern water. In Guárico state, a major rice-producing region in Venezuela’s interior, producers reported more than 30,000 hectares without a defined productive plan and agricultural authorities unresponsive on pricing.

The protests are not, at this stage, politically organized or threatening to the transition. But service failures persisting past the window of post-transition goodwill — met with institutional responses ranging from absent to punitive — are the kind of friction that converts economic discontent into political erosion.

OIL & DEALS

The week’s most significant non-oil activity came from an unlikely direction: Silicon Valley. Two U.S. tech figures made their Venezuela presence public in the same 48-hour window, signaling that the investor class circling the country has expanded well beyond the energy sector.

• Fred Ehrsam —co-founder of Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, and managing partner at Paradigm, one of crypto’s most influential venture capital firms— has made multiple trips to Caracas in recent months and met with senior officials including Delcy Rodríguez and U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. On May 13, Ehrsam spoke at a forum organized by Banco de Venezuela —the country’s largest state-owned bank— before its president Román Maniglia and technical staff, laying out a three-part thesis for Venezuela’s financial transformation: stablecoins as a mechanism for dollar-denominated transactions; cryptocurrency as a pathway to global investment access; and asset tokenization — the conversion of physical assets such as oil, gas, and minerals into tradeable digital instruments on blockchain networks.

• Erebor Bank —a newly chartered U.S. digital bank founded by defense tech entrepreneur Palmer Luckey and backed by Peter Thiel‘s Founders Fund, among others— has pitched senior Venezuelan officials on a correspondent banking arrangement that would restore the country’s access to the U.S. financial system, according to Bloomberg. The proposal involves correspondent lines with Venezuelan banks plus U.S. sub-accounts for their clients, creating a legal pathway for Venezuelan firms to open U.S. accounts and channel cross-border flows. Erebor co-CEO Jacob Hirshman presented the concept to BCV president Luis Alberto Pérez González. The bank received its national charter from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in February 2026 — just three months ago — making it one of the newest federally chartered institutions in the country. Its pitch to Venezuela is its first major public foray into emerging-market correspondent banking.

• United Airlines announced it will resume daily nonstop Houston–Caracas flights beginning August 11, 2026 —becoming the second U.S. carrier to restore service to Venezuela after American Airlines’ Miami–Caracas resumption in late April. United last served Venezuela in June 2017. U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy framed the route explicitly around energy: “This flight will be critical to ferrying oil sector workers into the country as the U.S. and Venezuela work together to expand production.” The Houston hub is the nerve center of U.S. oil operations, and its direct connection to Caracas creates the commercial corridor that the energy deals of recent weeks require. The TSA is also inspecting Venezuelan airports, as American Airlines plans to restart Maracaibo-Miami flights while local airliner Avior Airlines expects to open the Houston-Barcelona route: connecting the U.S. to two main Venezuelan oil hubs.

• Qatar Airways confirmed it will launch twice-weekly Doha–Bogotá–Caracas service on July 22, 2026 — becoming the first Gulf carrier to serve Venezuela and the first airline to operate direct service between the Middle East and Caracas. The route will be operated with Boeing 777-200 aircraft and connects Maiquetía through Hamad International Airport in Doha to markets including Australia, China, Japan, Lebanon, South Korea, and the UAE. The Lebanon connection is particularly notable: Venezuela is home to one of the largest Lebanese diaspora communities in Latin America, a long-underserved VFR market. With Caracas and Bogotá, Qatar Airways adds its 15th and 16th destinations in the Americas.

• A new contract model has been presented by Venezuela’s state-owned PDVSA to international oil drillers as the starting point for negotiations to revitalize its capacity to open new wells. The proposed framework, however, reveals a "maximalist" approach by PDVSA, as it overempowers the Venezuelan state and fosters considerable discretionality in matters of taxation, deal termination, and the ultimate resolution of disputes. A central point of friction within this model is the mandate that all arbitration disputes be solved in Hong Kong arbitration courts rather than traditional Western or U.S. venues. This choice of jurisdiction creates a direct regulatory hurdle, as the Hong Kong arbitration clause does not comply with current OFAC licenses, which generally require adherence to U.S.-recognized legal and financial standards.

SECTOR FOCUS

The Grid That Stalls the Recovery

And Venezuela’s electricity system is running at less than 40% of its installed capacity — and the gap is widening. Of Corpoelec‘s 36,000 MW of total installed generation —the state utility that operates the entire national grid— less than 13,000 MW is currently available, according to independent estimates. Thermal plants, expanded aggressively under the Chávez government through 2013 and never properly maintained, are contributing roughly 2,500 MW, about 13% of their rated capacity. The system rations up to 1,800 MW daily during peak hours — the equivalent of the combined consumption of Caracas and its surrounding metro area — while millions in the interior endure between four and ten hours without power per day. The capital suffers only sporadically. The asymmetry is not accidental.

Miguel Lara, an independent power sector expert who tracks grid data, estimates the system recorded 35 large outages in the first quarter of 2026, against a historic average of three to five per year. National demand runs at roughly 14,700 MW, leaving a structural deficit of at least 1,500 MW. The knock-on effects are already reaching Venezuela’s most important industry: at the Paraguana Refining Center on the northwestern coast — one of the world’s largest refining complexes, with 955,000 barrels of daily installed capacity — repeated blackouts have prevented PDVSA from restarting gasoline-making units, generating fuel lines across the country. “I don’t know which power supply will support the economic reactivation they are talking about,” Lara said. “It’s a very complex problem, a puzzle.” That puzzle is precisely what Washington has been trying to solve — with limited success.

The investors who came and left hesitant. In April, executives from Siemens Energy and GE Vernova — two of the world’s largest power equipment manufacturers — held meetings with officials in Caracas to assess participation in a $100 billion grid reconstruction plan backed by Washington. The central question in the room was not technical. It was how to get paid. Both companies left without commitments, according to two sources involved in the talks, reported by Reuters. “I returned very skeptical from Venezuela,” said one executive who attended. “The power plants have not been properly repaired in 10 years, so the needs are almost infinite. But they still have no clue how we would get paid.”

The Rodríguez government rejected a proposal from foreign firms seeking prepayment for initial repairs and spare parts, citing legal obstacles. Some proposed receiving payments directly from U.S. Treasury-supervised accounts that collect Venezuelan oil proceeds — a workaround that has not advanced. The payment impasse has pushed some operators to find their own solutions.

Spain’s Repsol, one of the few international oil companies already operating in Venezuela, has launched its own procurement process to source independent power plants and supplies, bypassing the national grid entirely. At least $15 billion is needed for a three-year stabilization plan, Lara estimates. Without it, only minor repairs will be made. The scale of the need and the absence of payment guarantees are, for now, moving in opposite directions.

Washington steps in directly. And yet, the U.S. is keen on tackling Venezuela’s energy problem. On May 14 —while blackouts were being reported across Caracas and several states— John Barrett, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Venezuela, met with electricity minister Rolando Alcalá at the Ministry of Electric Energy to discuss a three-phase reconstruction plan backed by President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The plan centers on restoring reliable supply through U.S. technical expertise, investment, and bilateral collaboration. The Embassy shared a photograph of the meeting; no further details on specific commitments or timelines were disclosed. The optics, however, are notable: Washington is now formally engaged on the electricity file at the ministerial level, even as the private sector investors it has been trying to mobilize remain on the sidelines over payment guarantees.

What Corpoelec is asking of business — and who enforces it. Inside Venezuela, the government is managing the crisis from the demand side. In an urgent meeting convened by the Ministry of Electric Energy and Corpoelec with business representatives this week, companies in Greater Caracas with contracted demand of 100 kVA or more were instructed to design and implement energy savings plans targeting a 20% to 30% reduction in consumption.

Commercial establishments were asked —in language described as “strictly voluntary but supervised”— to manage their electrical load daily between 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. A new Energy Inspection Commission was established, empowered to conduct technical audits of individual businesses and establishments. The government said it is evaluating a resolution to reduce commercial operating hours in Greater Caracas as a demand mitigation measure. A mandatory transition to LED lighting was announced. Sectoral working meetings with industry chambers are planned. The enforcement mechanism: supervision of compliance will be carried out by officers of the FANB — Venezuela’s armed forces.

At least $15 billion is needed for a three-year stabilization plan, Lara estimates. Without it, only minor repairs will be made. The scale of the need and the absence of payment guarantees are, for now, moving in opposite directions.

Bottom line. The government attributes the crisis partly to demand growth from the economic opening — not an inaccurate framing, but an incomplete one. The grid is a prerequisite for the recovery, and the recovery is what would eventually pay to fix the grid. Venezuela has not yet found the entry point into that circle.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

Caracas Stock Exchange · May 4–15, 2026

The IBC —the Caracas Stock Exchange’s main equity index— ended the two-week period at 5,665.75 points, essentially unchanged from the 5,709.10 at which it opened May 4. The modest intra-period dip of 0.80% in the first week was nearly recovered in the second, leaving a net change close to flat across ten trading sessions. Year-to-date, the index is up approximately 172% — a figure that looks dramatic on paper but is heavily distorted by bolívar depreciation and is best read as a nominal gauge of domestic sentiment rather than real returns.

What traded. Ron Santa Teresa —Venezuela’s flagship rum producer— led equity volume by a commanding margin in both weeks, suggesting continued retail and institutional interest in the offering’s secondary trading. Banco Provincial, Banco Nacional de Crédito, and Banco de Venezuela appeared in the top ten both weeks. CANTV —Venezuela’s state-controlled telecommunications company, partially privatized— also featured in both weeks, a signal of ongoing interest in infrastructure-adjacent plays. Grupo Mantra clase B appeared in the second week’s top ten for the first time, without an obvious catalyst.

What moved. The first week’s standout was Fondo Petrolia clase B (+16.84%) — a BVC-listed vehicle that finances oil service contractors and suppliers, which has become a reliable proxy for the oil-deal pipeline. Fábrica Nacional de Cementos (+14.81%) continued its rally from prior weeks, linked to restructuring expectations tied to the government’s announced audit of state-owned enterprises. Banco de Venezuela added 11.84%. In the second week, the Bolsa de Valores de Caracas itself — the exchange’s own listed shares — led gainers at +20.81%, a move without a disclosed specific trigger that may reflect expectations of increased trading activity as Venezuela’s financial reintegration advances. Grupo Zuliano rose 12.68%; Fábrica Nacional de Vidrio added 6.60% across both weeks.

What it means. The IBC’s flat trajectory over the fortnight —absorbing the oil deal wave, the Barrett-Alcalá electricity meeting, and the ongoing macro noise without a significant move in either direction— suggests the market has largely priced in the transition optimism of early 2026. The easy re-rating happened in the first quarter; incremental news is now being discounted more carefully. The structural constraints are unchanged: thin liquidity, no international settlement mechanism, a bolívar-denominated trading floor with no pathway for foreign capital, and a market where financing certificates —not equity— remain the dominant instrument. The Caracas exchange continues to function less as a capital market in the conventional sense than as a structured venue for short-term corporate financing and a real-time barometer of what a small group of domestic investors believes this economy will become.

THE LONG READ

Venezuela Tech Week: Two Imaginaries, One Week

Caracas had already seen two major tech gatherings in the last year. The InnovEYtion Summit, organized by EY Venezuela and the Startup Venezuela Summit -both held at Caracas Campus in the former P&G headquarters; one in early 2026 and other in late 2025- drew a specific kind of crowd: founders and executives whose frame of reference is the global ecosystem — engineers who built companies from Miami, Bogotá or Madrid during the crisis years, diaspora capital that measures Venezuela against Sand Hill Road benchmarks, corporate Venezuela looking to modernize despite the regulatory labyrinth in Venezuela. The implicit argument of both events was that the country’s tech moment belongs to the talent that survived despite the system, not to the system itself. In these spaces, the word “resiliencia” has become a sort of mantra.

But Venezuela Tech Week, held May 11–13 at the convention center in the La Carlota airport and park, made a different argument. The three-day congress —organized by the government program Movimiento Emprender Juntos, under the tacit leadership of ride-sharing platform Ridery’s Gerson Gómez and in the compounds of a military airport bombed by the U.S. in January— drew around 700 international guests from 50 countries, according to Gómez, roughly 1,000 total attendees, and 30 international venture capital funds. Its opening panels featured the Minister for Youth Sergio Lotartaro, the Minister of Economy Anabel Pereira Fernández, and BCV governor Calixto Ortega. Its pitch to international investors is a frontier market with 30 million underserved consumers, sectors with low digitization and high demand, and a government willing to sit at the table.

The event frames the State as a co-author. Tech Week ran concurrently with the II International Entrepreneurs Congress, closed this year by Delcy Rodríguez (last year’s closing was presided over by Maduro). At the congress’ closure, Rodríguez announced Startup Venezuela (unrelated to the private Startup Venezuela Summit), a state entity to support the tech ecosystem; which implies the state does not intend to observe from a distance. Gómez’s management style is a model for the state’s tech approach: publicly close to the government since Maduro’s period, he is a member of the Coexistence and Peace Program commission that Rodríguez created after Maduro’s capture and his platform uses Iranian cars imported as part of a 2023 government program to provide affordable transportation.

The distinction between the different events and approach is not semantic. It is the fault line running through Venezuela’s tech ecosystem in 2026, and Venezuela Tech Week made it visible in a way neither previous event quite did.

The reluctance that showed up anyway. A portion of the Caracas tech community kept a deliberate distance from the event. Many of the ecosystem’s most established figures come from families with roots in Venezuela’s pre-Chávez business elite —families that spent two decades navigating or quietly accommodating a political order that disrupted the establishment– or from Venezuela’s historically oppositional professional middle class. The “new political space” heralded by the government since January has not necessarily resolved those tensions. The current government retains figures and structures from the previous period, and the political credit for the economic opening is being claimed by actors who were present throughout the years of contraction. Appearing on a panel co-hosted by government ministers means sharing a stage —and, implicitly, a narrative— that a meaningful part of the private business and tech world is not willing to endorse.

The spillover. And yet, the ambivalence of part of the ecosystem toward Venezuela Tech Week’s governmental framing did not translate into absence: the fair did generate a spillover effect; with multiple events, corporate gatherings and meetings happening throughout the city. The most revealing signal was the Venture Hub 2026, a side-event cluster organized explicitly as a separate initiative from VTW by a coalition of private-sector players: Smartkeep, Impulsa Venture Capital, Caracas Tech Meetup, Startups Latam, and Pygma. The Venture Hub ran four events across the same week —a Pitch Day on May 8 at Smartkeep’s El Rosal offices, drawing 30-plus startups and over 120 C-level operators and investors; a yoga and networking morning; a curated luncheon pairing 20 foreign VCs with 20 selected founders over a Ron Carúpano tasting; and an after-party for 300-plus guests at a local bohemian wine bar.

On the same day as the VTW closing, Venevisión Media —the Cisneros family’s flagship television network, in the middle of its own digital reinvention— announced an alliance with Bunker DB, a Latin American marketing analytics platform used by Meta, TikTok, and Televisa, at its #VVNexus2026 event. The announcement was framed as a media company move, but its subtext was the same as everything else happening that week: the infrastructure of a functioning commercial economy is being rebuilt in public.

Universidad Metropolitana also organized a Demo Day for student-led projects —albeit in alliance with the Tech Week as the fair’s only official side event—- while other organizations, such as state-approved crypto app Crixto and business accelerator Silicon Valley Venezuela, hosted sessions and networking spaces in their offices.

What the startups were actually building. What was new at Tech Week was a cohort targeting state-adjacent value chains: public transportation systems or procurement platforms for government-linked entities, for example. In a market where the public sector remains a dominant economic actor, the calculation is rational. For outside investors accustomed to evaluating startups against private market dynamics, it requires a different frame — one that prices in counterparty risk, regulatory dependency, and the peculiar geometry of doing business close to the Venezuelan state.

The honest read. Patricia Zarraga, Tech Week’s CEO, was careful not to oversell. “Our objective is not to present an idealized vision of the country,” she said before the event, “but to open a serious space so that investors can understand the ecosystem with better information and fewer prejudices.” That is roughly the right framing for what Venezuela’s tech moment actually is. The country is not yet capturing meaningful flows from the regional VC market, which reached $4.1 billion in 2025, according to Crunchbase. Its established business survival rate —1.9% past three years, per IESA’s GEM study— is among the lowest globally. The talent is real; the scaffolding is thin.

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Venezuela’s reopening has drawn a new audience — investors, advisors, and firms evaluating the country from the outside — that needs more than news coverage. This is a shorter version of a future product by Ecosistema, built for that audience: an analytical briefing on the political, regulatory, and business developments shaping Venezuela’s re-entry into global markets. We’d love your feedback.

SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT

The Arithmetic of Recovery: Wages, Prices, and a Central Bank Under Audit

Delcy Rodríguez handed the headline number on May 1: the “ingreso mínimo integral” —Venezuela’s composite income floor, combining base salary and non-wage bonuses— rises to $240 per month, an increase of roughly 25%. Pensions are adjusted 40%, reaching $70. The base salary itself, frozen at 130 bolívares since March 2022, remains untouched — currently worth less than thirty cents. According to Ecoanalítica, a Caracas-based economic research and consulting firm, approximately 70% of Venezuelans earn less than $300 per month.

The structure of the announcement tells the story of the dilemma. Rodríguez’s government is not raising wages; it is raising the envelope around them. The bonification model —in which most compensation flows through non-salary payments that carry no weight in calculating severance, vacation, or profit-sharing— is perpetuated by design. Changing it would require confronting the Ley Orgánica del Trabajo, the 2012 labor law enacted during a petrodollar boom that established unusually generous benefit obligations and has never been updated to reflect the economy that replaced it. For now, the government —while sticking out the possibility of a reform— has chosen not to open that front.

But the structural problem runs deeper than the legal framework. Between 2013 and 2020, Venezuela’s economy contracted by an estimated 75% to 80% — one of the deepest peacetime collapses on record, three to four times worse than the Greek crisis, larger even than the economic losses Ukraine sustained following the Russian invasion. An economy that loses four-fifths of its size doesn’t just produce fewer goods; it loses the companies, the investment, and the workers needed to generate wages in the first place. According to data compiled by FRED —the Federal Reserve Economic Data platform, which aggregates international macroeconomic statistics— formal labor compensation, which historically represented close to half of Venezuela’s national income, has fallen to roughly 10% of GDP. The salary problem is not merely a story of falling purchasing power; it is a story of wage labor ceasing to function as the primary mechanism of income distribution.

The productive base reflects the same collapse. Conindustria, Venezuela’s main industrial federation, estimates that more than 12,000 industrial companies have disappeared in recent decades, while the manufacturing sector operates at well below half its installed capacity. Between 60% and 70% of Venezuelan employment is now informal, according to ENCOVI —the national household living-conditions survey conducted annually by Andrés Bello Catholic University— meaning millions of workers depend on irregular income, small-scale trade, or subsistence activity that cannot sustain stable salaries. More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have emigrated, according to UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration, many of them professionals and skilled workers. “The structural underlying problem is the fall in the country’s productivity, associated with the collapse of its main tradable and export sector,” says economist Asdrúbal Oliveros. Venezuela’s oil production peaked at over 3.4 million barrels per day in the late 1990s, fell below 400,000 bpd by 2020, and has since partially recovered to roughly 800,000–900,000 bpd. The productive capacity that could sustain higher wages has not returned with it.

The fiscal arithmetic further constrains the decision. The Venezuelan state carries a payroll of an estimated 5.3 million active workers plus 5.7 million pensioners —though, as Oliveros warns, “there is a total lack of transparency that makes it very difficult to define what a viable adjustment in the public sector would even look like.” Unofficial figures circulate —roughly 3 million public employees and 5 million pensioners— but the absence of reliable official data prevents any rigorous fiscal debate. As a rough illustration of the stakes: if 6 million people between employees and pensioners received a $50 quarterly increase, the fiscal cost would approach $1.2 billion per year. Economist Jesús Palacios Chacín describes the calibration of the current adjustment precisely: it was designed so that incremental spending does not exceed the additional dollar supply entering the FX market — “to sterilize the effect,” as he puts it. A larger increase would risk a pass-through —wage costs feeding into prices and the exchange rate— that the current macro environment cannot absorb. At the same time, Palacios Chacín projects oil revenues rising up to 70% during the year; further adjustments, he says, are likely.

The private sector’s exposure is more uneven than the headline suggests. Many private salaries already exceed $240 — the more acute risk is salary band compression: as the floor rises, mid-level professionals and senior technical roles are squeezed from below without corresponding adjustments from above. “The operational level usually gets the increase; senior management usually has dollarized packages,” says Antonio Rosamilia, HR director at Farmacias Xana, a Venezuelan pharmacy chain. “The ones caught in the middle are the senior professionals and middle management — and that’s precisely who you can least afford to lose.” His recommendation: widen the distance between the minimum and maximum of each salary band before the floor moves. The sectors best positioned to absorb the adjustment, Palacios Chacín notes, are energy, food, and retail.

Against all of this, the social picture is unsparing. The basic food basket currently runs around $645 per month — a household dependent on the new minimum income needs 2.7 of them to cover food alone. To bridge the gap, the government relies on a parallel structure of direct transfers: the so-called “bonos de guerra” —economic war bonds, a legacy term from the Maduro era’s framing of international sanctions as an economic siege— currently set at $200 for active workers, $168 for retired public employees, and $70 for pension recipients. A new “Bono de Reconocimiento Profesional” — a professional recognition supplement — has been announced for teachers, university professors, healthcare workers, and security personnel. The implicit acknowledgment is clear: the minimum income is not designed to cover the minimum cost of living.

The bank’s new clothes. On a separate front, the Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) took a step that would have been inconceivable six months ago: it announced the engagement of external auditors —two independent firms, one contracted by the Venezuelan government and one by the U.S. Department of State— to verify the origin, management, and distribution of Venezuela’s foreign assets. Deloitte would be one of these firms, according to independent sources.”The country must have full confidence that resources are going where they need to go,” said BCV president Luis Alberto Pérez González. The dual-auditor structure is designed to provide what no Venezuelan institution currently has the credibility to provide unilaterally: a mutually acceptable accounting of what the state actually holds abroad. Among the assets under scrutiny is Citgo —the Houston-based refining subsidiary of state oil company PDVSA, currently mid-process in a creditor-driven sale estimated at around $10 billion, and actively appealed by Caracas. The BCV also confirmed a new agreement between the Corporación Venezolana de Minería, the state mining company, and New York-based capital firm Heeney Capital, framed as a mechanism to diversify hard currency inflows and reduce the exclusive dependence on oil revenue.

The macro picture, meanwhile, holds a structural contradiction that the BCV is navigating in real time. Monthly inflation closed March at 13.1% — a deceleration from 32.6% in January and 14.6% in February, driven largely by transport (+15.6%), housing services (+15.0%), and leisure and culture (+14.5%). The monthly trend is improving. The annual one is not: Oliveros puts annualized inflation over the past twelve months at 650%, with the first quarter alone accumulating 72%. “The annual rate places us in a hyperinflationary scenario,” he said, calling for an urgent stabilization plan. “The main enemy of wage policy, of consumption recovery, and of corporate growth is, at this moment, this level of inflation.”

BCV president Pérez González is projecting a different trajectory. Speaking before public and private bank representatives on April 24, he cited preliminary GDP figures showing growth during the first quarter of 2026 —extending what the BCV describes as 20 consecutive quarters of economic expansion; a number many independent economists doubt— and said the exchange rate gap between the official and parallel rates has been compressed to 29%. He also confirmed that Venezuela now has a governor and alternate governor at the IMF, and signaled a developing working relationship with the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Bottom line. “A structural solution to the wage problem requires rebuilding productivity,” Oliveros says, “and that is not a quick process.” The wage increase, the dual audit, and the BCV’s optimism are all, in different registers, the same argument — that Venezuela is building the conditions for normalcy. The skeptics’ counterargument is equally coherent: an economy where formal wages represent 10% of GDP, where 70% of workers earn under $300 a month, and where the central bank required external validators to be taken seriously is not a recovering economy — it is a baseline. Both readings are accurate. The question is the velocity of the gap between them.

OIL & DEALS

The week of April 28 – May 1 was the most active deal week Venezuela has seen in a generation. On Thursday morning, Jarrod Agen — deputy assistant to the president and executive director of the National Energy Dominance Council, Trump’s interagency body for energy strategy — stepped off the inaugural American Airlines flight from Miami. By evening, the lobby of the JW Marriott in Caracas was, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, filled with “Spanish spoken with a Texas twang” — engineers, lawyers, and emissaries from the U.S. oil industry pitching plans to revive the country’s rundown fields.

• The two American signatories. At Miraflores Palace, PDVSA signed agreements with two U.S. firms: Hunt Overseas Oil Company — the international arm of Texas-based Hunt Oil, one of the country’s oldest independent operators — and Crossover Energy, a smaller Orinoco-focused independent. Both will operate in the Orinoco Belt, Venezuela’s primary heavy and extra-heavy crude province and the foundation of its world-record reserves. A third firm, HKN Energy, also signed a memorandum of understanding. The combined investment is expected to exceed $2 billion, structured through joint ventures under a shared-benefit model. PDVSA also signed a term sheet with Italy’s Eni for activities in the Junín 5 area of the Orinoco Belt. Hydrocarbons minister Paula Henao reported that national oil production has reached 1.208 million barrels per day. Agen framed the aviation and energy openings as inseparable: “How do you get the employees down here?” he said, noting that direct flights create the commercial corridor that investment requires.

• BP signs in Caracas. Two days earlier, on April 29, British oil company BP signed a memorandum of understanding at Miraflores covering development of the Cocuina-Manakin offshore gas field —a deposit that straddles Venezuela’s maritime border with Trinidad and Tobago— plus new exploration rights in the adjacent Loran area. BP also confirmed the opening of a new Caracas office. The Cocuina-Manakin field is particularly significant: its development is linked to Shell’s Manatee operations on the Trinidadian side, positioning the cross-border deposit as a potential foundation for LNG export infrastructure.

• Exxon’s reversal. On the same day the American Airlines flight landed in Caracas, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told analysts on a Q1 2026 earnings call that Venezuela is “a huge resource that’s now opened up more freely to the world” — adding, simply: “I feel positive about what’s happening, the opportunity there.” The shift is notable. In January, Woods had told President Trump at the White House that Venezuela was “uninvestable.” Technical teams from ExxonMobil have since visited the country to assess Cerro Negro, the heavy oil project the company operated before nationalization in 2007.

• Mercuria and Heeney Capital close commodity deals. On May 1, Mercuria Energy Group —one of the world’s largest privately held commodity trading firms, headquartered in Geneva— announced that it had secured, in partnership with New York-based private mining equity firm Heeney Capital, strategic offtake agreements for Venezuelan bulk commodities and gold projects. The deals, advanced alongside Agen’s delegation, are expected to unlock approximately $2.2 billion in annual mineral export value. Mercuria and Heeney are also pursuing additional opportunities in aluminum, nickel, and ferrous products that could represent a further $3 billion annually. The transaction was signed at Miraflores Palace, with James Gilbert, a managing director at Mercuria, in attendance.

• The SPAC play on Maha. On April 28, Blue Water Acquisition Corp. IV —a publicly listed special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a blank-check vehicle designed to take private companies public through a merger— announced a letter of intent to acquire substantially all of the subsidiaries of Maha Capital AB, a Stockholm-based company with Brazilian senior management. Maha’s principal Venezuelan asset is a 40% stake in PetroUrdaneta, a joint venture with PDVSA operating in the Lake Maracaibo region. The deal values Maha equity at approximately $490 million.

SECTOR FOCUS

The Air Corridor Opens

On April 30, American Airlines subsidiary Envoy Air operated the first U.S. commercial flight to Caracas in more than seven years — a daily Miami–Caracas service on a 76-seat Embraer 175 regional jet, dual-class, with Wi-Fi sponsored by AT&T. Initial economy fares launched above $800 one-way; a second daily frequency is planned for late May, with larger mainline aircraft expected to follow. American had been the dominant U.S. carrier in Venezuela before suspending service in 2019 — at its peak, it flew daily to Caracas from Miami and weekly to Dallas, New York, and San Juan.

Venezuelan carrier Laser Airlines launched its own Caracas–Miami flights on May 1 — with a structural asterisk. Because the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration classifies Venezuela as an IASA Category 2 country — meaning it does not meet minimum international aviation safety standards — Venezuelan carriers are currently barred from operating their own aircraft to the United States directly. Laser’s workaround: a wet-lease arrangement with U.S. carrier Global X, which will operate Airbus A320s under Laser’s commercial branding. Global X is the same carrier that operates the bulk of ICE deportation flights — including direct services to El Salvador’s Cecot prison. For passengers, the arrangement means lower fares.

Panama’s Copa Airlines —which never fully abandoned Venezuela and now operates 19 weekly frequencies between Panama City and Caracas— is quietly building the most comprehensive U.S. connectivity network of any carrier operating out of the country. Through its Hub of the Americas at Tocumen International Airport, Copa now connects five Venezuelan cities (Caracas, Maracaibo, Valencia, and Barquisimeto from May 4; Barcelona from June) to 17 U.S. destinations in a single connection: the equivalent of a full North American network, accessed through a single Panama layover.

Demand for additional U.S. routes is unlikely to plateau any time soon: the 1.2 million Venezuelans living in the United States —concentrated in South Florida but extending across Texas, the Northeast and beyond— represent a permanent VFR base, while the commercial, financial and educational ties that once made Venezuela a top-seven source of tourist arrivals to the U.S. in the late 1990s, and sustained a significant flow of Venezuelan students into Boston-area universities well into the 2010s, suggest a latent demand that direct connectivity alone will begin to unlock.

Airbus sees a hub. At the Wings of Change Americas aviation conference, airlines flagged Caracas as a potential regional hub — and Airbus backed the idea. Arturo Barreira, Airbus president for the Americas, described Venezuela as “an exceptional aviation market,” citing the country’s historical role: until the 1990s, major carriers connected Venezuela to South America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. The two decades since represent one of the most dramatic aviation contractions on the continent. “While globally traffic has multiplied, in Venezuela it has been reduced three to four times in the last 20 years,” Barreira said. “It is a market with very important underlying potential.” His geographic case for Maiquetía as a hub is straightforward: “Venezuela is at the center of the Americas. With an A320 you can serve both Montreal and Buenos Aires. For that, it’s perfect.”

Barreira’s aircraft thesis is specific: regional routes built around the A320neo and A321neo airplanes; major long-haul markets —the United States, Spain— requiring the A330-900 and A350 combination. He noted the A350 can even connect Caracas to Beirut, a route that would serve one of the largest Lebanese diaspora communities in the Americas. The diaspora angle, he argued, will generate substantial VFR — “Visit Friends and Relatives” — demand across the U.S., Spain, Italy, France, and even Lebanon. The caveat is structural: Venezuela currently operates the oldest commercial fleet in the hemisphere, with an average aircraft age exceeding 30 years, much of it narrowbody jets with accumulated cycles approaching the limits of useful life. Fleet renewal is not a near-term prospect — “the conditions have not yet been given for many financiers to put assets in the country,” Barreira acknowledged — but he added: “Without a doubt it will be a market we are waiting for. What we have seen since the beginning of the year confirms it.” The comparison he offered for Venezuela’s potential trajectory: Colombia, which rebuilt its aviation sector from near-collapse into one of South America’s most competitive markets over roughly two decades.

Meet the New Venezuelan Consumer

The most comprehensive consumer psychographic study conducted in Venezuela in years was presented in late March by economists Asdrúbal Oliveros and Jesús Palacios Chacín, consultant Alejandro Guzmán, and BAM Consulting, a small marketing firm led by Isabela Hernández — 1,000 responses across the country, crossing variables of value, purchasing behavior, geography, and generation. The portrait that emerges is of a consumer the crisis transformed but did not destroy.

What they value. Roughly 80% of respondents research before spending — through websites, social networks, acquaintances, or micro-influencers. Even in the Poor Urban stratum, the figure stays above 70%. The improvised purchase has lost ground. That information arrives paired with a tight budget, and the combination produces specific behaviors. Brand loyalty follows income: as earnings rise, so does consistency in preferring known brands. In the poorest strata, up to 15% say they “never” follow brand preference. When the money reaches, the trusted brand wins; when it doesn’t, whatever is available wins. Comfort as a purchasing driver is similarly stratified: 70% of the upper stratum says they “always” choose what makes them most comfortable — the highest figure across the scale.

The aspiration inversion. Two findings run counter to intuition. It is the lower strata — Poor Urban (36%) and Popular Middle (34%) — who most frequently choose products that make them look successful or improve their social image, outpacing the upper stratum (26%). Aspiration intensifies where the wallet is thinnest. Beauty spending, Oliveros was emphatic, is the category the crisis never fully broke. What changes in a downturn is the brand, not the habit — beauty fulfills an emotional and social function that transcends the product. In all strata, around 20% invest consistently in personal image; in the upper stratum, that rises to 30%. Education is similarly resilient: regardless of income level, investment in training and self-improvement appears as a central aspiration across all cohorts — one of the few constants the crisis did not erode.

The consumer who is coming. Oliveros provided the macro frame: approximately 2.5 million Venezuelans will move up from the poorest strata over the next year. Add the estimated 11% of the diaspora — around 800,000 people — planning to return, according to NGO Venezuelan Diaspora Observatory. Combined: roughly 3.3 million new or upgraded consumers entering the market. “What will come back when purchasing power recovers is in the Venezuelan DNA,” Oliveros said. Pre-crisis studies documented a consumer who disliked walking between stores and preferred buying everything in one place. Today, the consumer comparison-shops out of necessity. That is not a new person — it is the same person under different constraints.

Oliveros’ recommendations are precise: design value propositions that reduce perceived risk, not just sell attributes — sell certainty of functionality. Make pricing a strategic tool, not a static exercise; in an impoverished market, price errors exclude entire segments. And abandon income-based segmentation as the primary lens: the average Venezuelan consumer already researches, already distinguishes, already decides — with a limited budget. The brands that understand that will be positioned to capture the recovery. The ones that assume their budget defines their ambition will not.

Also worth noting. Months before the Oliveros and BAM study, market research firm Atenas Grupo Consultor presented its own market study at a Caracas sector forum that arrives at a compatible —and in some ways starker— conclusion. Venezuela, Atenas argues, is not one market but three overlapping ones: 64% of the population operates at Nicaragua-equivalent income levels (averaging $239 per month); 29% resembles Colombia ($583 per month); and only 7% reaches Costa Rica-equivalent purchasing power ($1,383 per month). Three Venezuelas sharing the same shelf, reading the same price tag from entirely different financial realities.

One structural shift Atenas flags that deserves attention on its own: private-label products —store brands like Farmatodo‘s own-label lines or Gama‘s house-brand goods— now represent a market estimated at $65 million, up 40% year-on-year, with the number of private-label categories growing 12%. In their first weeks on shelf, a private-label product sells three times more than an equivalent commercial brand; by the end of the first month, four times more. 88% of consumers identify at least one pharmacy private-label, and 81% find it trustworthy in personal care. The private label is no longer a discount fallback — it is a category of its own, and one that incumbent brands are underestimating at their own cost.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

Caracas Stock Exchange · April 20–30, 2026

The IBC —the Caracas Stock Exchange’s main index— ended the two-week period at 5,709.10 points, down from 5,859.72 at the open of April 20, a modest pullback of roughly 2.6% over ten trading sessions. Year-to-date, the index is still up approximately 174% — a figure that looks dramatic on paper but is heavily distorted by bolívar depreciation and best read as a nominal gauge of domestic sentiment rather than real returns. Total volume across both weeks reached approximately Bs 15.3 billion, the bulk of it concentrated in financing certificates rather than equities — a reminder that the exchange functions less as a capital market in the conventional sense than as a structured venue for short-term corporate financing.

What traded. Banco Nacional de Crédito (BNC) led equity volume in both weeks by a wide margin, followed by Banco Provincial, Banco de Venezuela, and Mercantil Servicios Financieros — banking stocks accounting for the majority of the top ten in both periods. The pattern is consistent with prior weeks: in a market where foreign portfolio access remains effectively nonexistent and the investable universe is narrow, financial sector names absorb the bulk of available liquidity. CANTV —Venezuela’s state-owned telecommunications company, partially privatized— appeared in both top tens, a signal of renewed interest in infrastructure-adjacent plays.

Ron Santa Teresa’s offering. The most structurally significant event of the fortnight was Ron Santa Teresa completing the first round of a public offering of Class B shares — the country’s flagship rum producer tapping the exchange as a capital-raising venue. The operation reached Bs 565 million in total volume, placing 53% of the offered shares (approximately 1.53 million). It is a small transaction by any international standard, but its symbolic weight is considerable: a well-known Venezuelan consumer brand using the local exchange to raise growth capital is precisely the kind of activity the market needs to attract if it is to evolve beyond a financing-certificate venue.

What moved. In the week of April 20–24 — which coincided with the Chevron deal, the Repsol announcement, and the LG57 license — Clabe Capital B led gainers at +19.90%, followed by Fondo Petrolia B (+12.68%), the BVC-listed investment vehicle that finances oil service contractors and suppliers. Fábrica Nacional de Cementos rose 7.33%, continuing the rally linked to restructuring expectations tied to the Rodríguez government’s announced audit of state-owned enterprises. Mercantil Servicios Financieros A added 6.64%. The second week was quieter across the board, with the index giving back some of those gains as the deal-week enthusiasm settled.

What it means. The market absorbed a dense sequence of signals —sanctions relief, major oil deals, aviation reopening, multilateral reengagement— and nudged slightly lower rather than surging further. That is arguably a sign of maturity in domestic sentiment: the easy re-rating has already happened, and incremental news is being discounted more carefully. The structural constraints remain unchanged: thin liquidity, no international settlement mechanism, a bolívar-denominated trading floor with no pathway for foreign capital— and the exchange remains, as ever, less a barometer of Venezuela’s economy than of what a small group of domestic investors believes that economy will become.

THE LONG READ

Venezuela 2040, According to EY’s Summit: Jack-Of-All-Trades

“Don’t ask what Venezuela’s role will be in 2030 — 2030 is already here, that’s three years away,” said Micky Malka, head of venture capital firm Ribbit Capital —early backer of Coinbase, Nubank, and Robinhood— speaking via video from Palo Alto. “Ask what Venezuela’s role will be in 2040. Are we a country that exports raw energy? A refiner? Or a services economy?” He paused, then reached for a very Venezuelan word: todero — jack-of-all-trades. A Venezuelan term for someone who does everything, fixes everything, figures it out. It was the most honest possible frame for the InnovEYtion Summit 2026, the second edition of EY Venezuela‘s technology and innovation conference — held at Caracas Campus, the former headquarters of Procter & Gamble, now repurposed as something between a coworking space and a symbolic statement about what comes next.

The event drew entrepreneurs, startup founders, corporate executives, and international speakers across two packed days. Adriana Cisneros, CEO of the Cisneros Group, appeared on video from Miami to announce she was packing to return to Venezuela. Alberto Afiuni, EY Venezuela’s country managing partner, asked whether Wave Tech — a tech startup coworking hub operating inside Caracas Campus — might one day connect with Ruta N in Medellín, or with Silicon Valley. “This has nothing to envy Silicon Valley,” said Alex Gómez, Innovation Lead at accelerator Innoven, at a private Demo Day for ten startups. “Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”

And the ten startups that presented at the Demo Day —young founders, occasionally dressed in the tech bro uniform of the American coasts, more often not— made a grounded argument: that Venezuela’s structural dysfunctions have become, paradoxically, a product specification. Every startup in the room was solving a friction so specific to this economy that it would be nearly invisible anywhere else.

Fina, led by Enrique Rivas, targets small commerce — where Excel and manual processes still dominate — with an integrated platform for inventory, sales, and finance. It already counts 3,500 clients. MotoGo, from Oliver Laufer, runs a motorcycle subscription model for delivery workers and urban laborers, eliminating the barrier of upfront ownership in a country where mobility and income are directly synonymous; 140 active clients, 27,000 on the waiting list, and a projected addressable market of $4.8 billion tied to the 2 million motorcycles already in circulation. Rial, presented by Rafael Graziani, consolidates bolívar, dollar, and crypto accounts through a single AI-organized interface — a product that exists because millions of Venezuelans manage three currencies simultaneously as a matter of daily survival. More than 3,000 daily active users. Quoota, led by Carlos Guruceaga, offers payroll-backed microcredit for workers without access to formal financing — already connected to 330 companies and 32,000 employees, including PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Santa Teresa, and Farmatodo.

The pattern across all ten is consistent: not abstract disruption, but infrastructure built on top of a country that still operates, in many respects, at half capacity. The banking panel at the Summit made this explicit. Fernando Alonso of BBVA framed the macro challenge as doubling GDP in five years. Jorge Nogueroles of BNC brought it back to earth: credit in Venezuela currently runs at 2–3% of GDP, against pre-crisis levels approaching 40%. There is no credit bureau. The legal framework for cybersecurity is outdated. The goal, as Juan Carlos Dao of Bancaribe summarized it, is a 24/7 bank with real intermediation capacity — which, in Venezuela’s current context, is not a modest ambition. It is nearly starting from scratch.

The other economy. Beyond the startups, the Summit surfaced a harder conversation about what Venezuela’s non-oil economy actually consists of — and what it could. According to Inclusion Consulting Group (ICG), the consultancy led in part by former Fedecámaras president Jorge Roig, Venezuela went from 580,000 companies a decade ago to approximately 480,000 today. Of those, 70% operate in commerce and services; only 6% in manufacturing. Yet among the top 100 companies ranked by the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce (VenAmCham), 20% are manufacturers. The implication Roig draws: manufacturing generates employment and productivity in ways that services cannot, and it is being systematically underbuilt.

The geography of economic activity reinforces the point. According to ICG, 80% of Venezuelan companies are distributed across 10 cities; 56% across just five. The diversification challenge is not only sectoral — it is spatial. And it collides with a deeper structural gap: Venezuela has too many lawyers, Roig said, and too few genetic engineers, data scientists, and AI specialists.

The export bottleneck is equally concrete. Andrés Chumaceiro of Ron Santa Teresa noted that exporting from Venezuela currently takes 70 days and requires approval from 14 government entities. In Panama, the equivalent process takes one week. Pedro Luis Angarita, president of Farmatodo, offered the inverse of that friction as a competitive signal: the chain’s delivery service is already faster than equivalent services in the United States. “Imagine that in a Venezuela with higher purchasing power.”

What the InnovEYtion Summit demonstrated is that the conversation about what comes after oil is no longer speculative — it is operational. Founders are building on it, banks are being redesigned around it, foreign executives are flying in to evaluate it. Whether the scaffolding holds long enough for the structure to take shape is, as always in Venezuela, the open question. But the todero impulse —the instinct to figure it out, to do what’s needed with what’s available— was visible in every startup pitch, every panel, every conversation in the Plaza Central of Caracas Campus. It is not a plan. It might be enough to start with.

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Venezuela’s reopening has drawn a new audience — investors, advisors, and firms evaluating the country from the outside — that needs more than news coverage. This is a shorter pilot for a new version of Ecosistema’s The Venezuelan Business Dispatch, built for that audience: an analytical briefing on the political, regulatory, and business developments shaping Venezuela’s re-entry into global markets. We plan to launch officially in the coming weeks. We’d love your feedback.

SANCTIONS & REGULATORY CONTEXT

Venezuela’s Financial Plumbing Gets a Reset — From Washington and Caracas

On April 14, OFAC issued General License 57, authorizing financial service transactions with public banks Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV), Banco de Venezuela, Banco del Tesoro, and Banco Digital de los Trabajadores. Two days earlier, Delcy Rodríguez had delivered a sweeping economic address outlining reforms on wages, labor formalization, state-owned enterprises, tax policy, and infrastructure. Taken together, the two moves represent a coordinated — if still incomplete — attempt to reopen Venezuela’s financial architecture from both ends: Washington clearing the pipes, Caracas trying to rebuild what flows through them.

The LG57. The license doesn’t unblock frozen assets, but it restores basic plumbing: account management, wire transfers, correspondent banking, card processing, digital payments, and remittance flows — functions that had been severely restricted or eliminated since the BCV was sanctioned in 2019. The significance is structural. The BCV is the nexus between international reserves, the FX market, and the domestic banking system. “When the BCV is sanctioned, the consequences cascade across the entire financial system,” says Alejandro Grisanti, director of Ecoanalítica. Many mid-size banks globally rely on their central banks to facilitate dollar correspondent transfers — that channel was effectively closed.

LG57 creates a legal pathway for correspondent banks, payment processors, and remittance platforms to re-engage. It improves the BCV’s ability to channel dollars into the domestic banking system and reduces friction in cross-border transactions. But it facilitates dollar flows — it doesn’t create them. Oil revenue still operates under U.S. supervisory architecture, and years of reputational risk don’t vanish with a license. Grisanti notes that FX distortions persist and institutional credibility remains a work in progress.

The multilateral breakthrough. On April 17 —three days after LG57— both the IMF and the World Bank announced the formal resumption of dealings with Venezuela under the Rodríguez government, ending a seven-year freeze. The IMF’s last full economic assessment of the country was in 2004; the World Bank’s last loan was in 2005. Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said the Fund is “committed to actively engaging with Venezuela” and indicated that IMF lending support is likely once the necessary groundwork is completed. For investors, what this unlocks is significant: the resumption of formal data-gathering and technical advice by the IMF —which has had zero visibility into Venezuela’s economy for two decades— is the precondition for any sovereign debt restructuring, any new lending program, and the release of approximately $5 billion in Special Drawing Rights currently earmarked for Venezuela. It also sends a reputational signal to international banks still hesitant to re-engage.

New BCV president. The same day, Delcy Rodríguez appointed Luis Alberto Pérez González as acting president of the BCV, replacing Laura Guerra —Maduro’s former sister-in-law— who resigned. Pérez had been serving as the BCV’s vice president since 2025. His prior roles include VP of BANDES (Venezuela’s development bank), positions at the securities and insurance superintendencies (Sunaval and Sudeaseg), and —notably— a stint as Vice Minister for the Oversight of Eco-Mining Development, the government body linked to the Orinoco Mining Arc. His sister, Ammy Pérez González, currently heads Sudeban, the banking superintendency. The appointment places a low-profile PSUV loyalist with a financial-sector résumé at the helm of the central bank at the precise moment it regains access to the international financial system — a combination that will be watched closely for signals on monetary policy independence.

The Rodríguez agenda. On the domestic side, the economic address signals structural intent — though execution remains the open variable.

A salary increase takes effect May 1, though Rodríguez did not specify the amount or whether it applies to the minimum wage — frozen since March 2022 — or to broader bonus-based public-sector compensation. The language (”responsible increase”) suggests a conservative nominal adjustment, with the bulk of compensation remaining in the existing bonus structure. The announcement came amid escalating labor protests, including a 2,000-person march toward Miraflores.

On formalization, the government acknowledged what economists have said for years: Venezuela’s labor economy suffers from acute “precarization” — the replacement of legal benefits with informal payments. A tripartite commission (government, private sector, workers) will design a new labor framework. The scale of the problem is documented: according to CEDICE, a small business typically spends 945 hours navigating 68 legal procedures just to begin operating.

Perhaps the most significant signal: a commission — with private-sector participation — will audit public companies and determine which assets are “truly strategic” and which have become fiscal drags. Outside hydrocarbons, this opens the door to transfers, joint ventures, or asset sales. The risk is clear: without open tenders, published criteria, independent valuations, and public oversight, the process could replicate the opaque privatizations of post-Soviet Russia.

A National Economic Council has been convened to redesign the tax system. Separately, the government signaled that recovered frozen assets abroad would be directed toward oil, gas, and mining capacity on one hand, and basic services — electricity, water, roads, healthcare, education — on the other. Technical delegations from Western companies Siemens Energy and General Electric have already visited to assess critical electrical infrastructure, including the Guri hydroelectric complex.

Bottom line. LG57 opens a channel; Rodríguez is trying to rebuild the economy that uses it. Neither move is sufficient on its own. Better dollar routing, rebuilt correspondent relationships, and multilateral reintegration would represent a material shift — but they depend on the same thing Rodríguez’s reforms depend on: policy consistency, institutional credibility, and a judiciary that can function as a reliable arbiter. An investor can tolerate macroeconomic uncertainty. What’s intolerable is the absence of the rules. Economic reform and institutional reform remain the same agenda.

OIL & DEALS

• Chevron signed an asset swap with PDVSA on April 13 — signed in the presence of Rodríguez — raising its stake in Petroindependencia JV from 35.8% to 49% (the legal ceiling for a private partner) and gaining development rights over Ayacucho 8 through its Petropiar JV. In exchange, Chevron relinquished the Loran offshore gas field and its 25.2% stake in the smaller Petroindependiente JV in western Venezuela. Executives have said the company could increase Venezuelan output by roughly 50% within two years — from around 260,000 bpd to approximately 390,000 bpd. The company currently accounts for about a quarter of Venezuela’s total production. However, minority partner Suelopetrol (a Venezuelan-owned company with 1% stake in Petroindependencia) publicly stated it was neither informed nor consulted about the share transfer — a governance complaint that, however small the stake, touches the investor-critical question of legal certainty in Venezuelan JVs.

• Shell is expected to take over the Loran gas field — a 7.3 tcf deposit shared with Trinidad and Tobago — in a separate deal, linking it to its Manatee operations on the Trinidadian side. Shell also closed a deal for the Carito and Pirital oilfields in eastern Monagas, producing light and medium crudes plus natural gas.

• Repsol announced today (April 16) that it has reached an agreement to regain operational control of its Petroquiriquire JV in eastern Venezuela, after its license was revoked by Washington last year. The company plans a 50% production increase within 12 months from its current ~45,000 bpd and targets a threefold increase within three years. PDVSA owes Repsol an estimated $4.55 billion for past gas and oil deliveries; the new deal includes payment guarantees. Separately, Repsol and Eni signed agreements last month to secure gas production at Cardón IV (Perla field), the largest offshore gas discovery in Latin American history.

• Production & exports: Venezuela produced 1.095 million bpd in March (up from 1.021 million in February). Crude exports averaged 1.09 million bpd — the highest in six months — driven in part by shipments to India’s Reliance Industries amid disruptions from the Iran conflict. Oil Minister Paula Henao has set a 1.3 million bpd target for year-end.

• American Airlines announced it will resume daily Miami–Caracas flights on April 30 via Envoy Air (Embraer 175), becoming the first U.S. carrier to restore a direct route since 2019. The State Department downgraded Venezuela’s travel advisory from Level 4 to Level 3 (”Reconsider Travel”) in March. Demand is expected to be high: Venezuelan carriers Avior and Laser are also reportedly seeking authorization to launch their own Miami routes. Until the mid-2010s, Caracas had daily and weekly direct service to Miami, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, New York, and San Juan — a network that collapsed alongside the country’s economy and diplomatic relations.

MARKET SNAPSHOT

Caracas Stock Exchange · April 13–17, 2026

The Caracas Stock Exchange’s IBC index closed the week at 5,859.72, up 5.48% over five sessions and up 181.4% year-to-date — though that figure is heavily distorted by bolívar depreciation. Total weekly volume came in at Bs 7.1 billion (around $14.8M at the official rate and $11.5M at the black market rate) across equities, fixed income, and financing certificates. By any international standard it’s tiny, but the Caracas exchange is less a trading venue than a real-time barometer of domestic investor sentiment.

What traded. Ron Santa Teresa —the country’s flagship rum company— led equity volume by a wide margin, followed by investment firm PIVCA, Banco Provincial, and paper manufacturer Manpa. Banking stocks (Provincial, BNC, Mercantil, Banco de Venezuela) accounted for four of the top ten. Banco de Venezuela —a state-owned bank included in LG57’s scope— appeared in the top ten for the first time in weeks.

What moved. Fábrica Nacional de Cementos (FNC) led gainers at +35% for the week. The 1907-founded cement maker —a former subsidiary of Lafarge Venezuela expropriated by the Chávez government in 2008— has called an extraordinary shareholders’ assembly for April 23 tied to a government resolution on the “Corporación Socialista del Cemento,” suggesting the rally may be linked to restructuring or denationalization expectations that align with Rodríguez’s announced audit of state-owned enterprises. Fondo Petrolia (+26.8%) —a BVC-listed investment vehicle launched in October 2025 that finances oil service contractors and suppliers— also surged, riding the wave of Chevron, Shell, and Repsol deals announced the same week. The Caracas Stock Exchange’s own listed shares rose 24.3%.

On Friday’s close, only four stocks declined: Proagro (-1.97%), Manpa (-1.93%), Fondo Sivensa (-1.20%), and Banco Provincial (-0.77%). The industrial index outpaced financials, closing up 5.86% versus 1.36%.

What it means. The rally reflects a domestic bet on normalization — LG57, the Chevron deal, the Repsol announcement, and Rodríguez’s economic agenda all landed in the same week. But liquidity remains extremely thin, foreign portfolio access is effectively nonexistent, and the exchange operates in bolívares with no mechanism for international settlement.

SECTOR FOCUS: THE GROUND FLOOR

I. A New Mining Law — And the Controversy Around It

On April 9, the National Assembly unanimously approved a new Organic Mining Law, replacing a 1999 Chávez-era decree. The law — introduced by the Rodríguez government following U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum‘s visit — is the third major legislation since January, after a bureaucratic streamlining law and a Hydrocarbons Law reform.

The investment framework. The law’s most significant departure is on dispute resolution: the prior regime confined conflicts to Venezuelan courts; the new one explicitly incorporates international arbitration. It also breaks with the state-monopoly model — mining can now be conducted through mixed companies regardless of state ownership share, or through fully private enterprises. New institutions include SUNAMIN (a mining superintendency), a National Mining Fund (funded by up to 1% of gross production), and a centralized geological data bank. Concession applications must receive a response within 45 days.

Fiscal concerns. Economist José Guerra notes that royalties of up to 13% plus a 12% mining tax bring the total burden to roughly 25% — above the global average. Executive discretion over rate-setting compounds the uncertainty.

The environmental backlash. Fifteen civil society organizations — including SOS Orinoco, Provea, and Clima21 — issued a joint statement calling the law “a veneer of legality to the systematic plundering of the Amazon and the Guiana Shield.” Key objections include environmental impact assessments are mentioned but not required as a precondition for concessions; territorial exclusion zones depend on land-use plans that are largely outdated or nonexistent; and the new National Mining Guard, under the Guardia Nacional, formalizes military control over extraction zones — a structure linked to documented human rights abuses.

Since the Orinoco Mining Arc was created in 2016 — covering 12.2% of Venezuelan territory, an area three times the size of Switzerland — the environmental damage has been described by scientific organizations as the worst in the country’s modern history. Mercury contamination exceeds WHO thresholds in indigenous Pemón communities. Mining activity has expanded beyond the Arc into formally protected areas, including UNESCO World Heritage Site Canaima National Park.

What’s actually happening on the ground. The new law enters a sector where formal joint ventures between foreign companies and the state have effectively disappeared since 2020, replaced by a murkier structure. According to research by Transparencia Venezuela, gold production in the Arc is now divided among three actors: the state (through the BCV and state mining companies), military and paramilitary groups that operate mines directly, and private businessmen working through “strategic alliances” — a legal figure in which private companies or connected individuals partner with state entities, often holding majority stakes.

By 2023, these strategic alliances captured an estimated 66% of gold production revenue, while criminal organizations —including Colombian guerrilla groups— retained roughly 20%, and the central government received only about 13% combined through the BCV and national treasury. Gold is Venezuela’s second-largest revenue source after oil, with total production estimated at over 45 tonnes annually and valued at more than $3 billion. The new law, combined with OFAC’s GL-51 licensing U.S. companies to buy Venezuelan gold, aims to formalize this sector and channel production through legitimate structures. But for incoming foreign operators, the due diligence challenge is substantial: establishing successful ground operations amidst these groups and distinguishing clean concessions from those entangled with the existing alliance network, criminal actors, or military-linked operations will be the real test of the legal framework.

The U.S. link. SOS Orinoco connects the law to OFAC’s General License 51, issued in March, which allows U.S. companies to purchase, import, and refine Venezuelan gold — creating, in the organization’s view, a pathway for conflict-tainted gold to enter global supply chains.

Investor takeaway. The law delivers what foreign miners have requested: international arbitration, private ownership structures, and defined timelines. But the fiscal regime may need recalibration, and ESG-sensitive capital will find the environmental and human rights record a material obstacle. Watch for implementing regulations and early concession activity. The formalization of military control could further complicate operations for investors and foreign companies, particularly given the already challenging landscape shaped by criminal groups and Colombian guerrillas that exert de facto control over many mining sites—and in some cases, local governance itself.

II. The Broken Entrepreneur Funnel — And Who’s Trying to Fix It

Venezuela’s early-stage entrepreneurial activity rate (TEA) fell to 7.7% in 2025 — down from 11.7% in 2024 and 22.7% in 2023 — according to the latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) study conducted alongside local UCAB and IESA universities. The ecosystem lost an estimated 1.3 million entrepreneurs in a single year, leaving roughly 1.4 million active. For years, entrepreneurship served as the default response to collapsing formal employment. The GEM data suggests that even that escape valve is narrowing.

The report describes the ecosystem as a “broken funnel”: many initiatives launch, very few survive. 77.8% of early-stage ventures are “nascent” — under three months old, not yet paying salaries. The established business rate (those surviving past three years) sits at 1.9%, among the lowest globally — a ratio of roughly 4:1 between early-stage attempts and actual businesses. Nearly 90% of entrepreneurs cite “making a living because jobs are scarce” as their primary motivation.

“Venezuela has good raw material — people with motivation to start things,” says Aramis Rodríguez, IESA professor and one of the researchers behind the study. “But the fundamental problem is context.” Without access to conventional credit, amid a decelerating economy and persistent FX distortions, family savings — the primary funding source — have been exhausted. “Venezuela works as a laboratory, but when it’s time to scale, the scaffolding isn’t there.”

Financial analyst Francisco Sanabria pinpoints the bottleneck: “Growth, complexity, insertion into formality — those are the factors that drive mortality. Not the launch, but the moment the venture needs to start looking like a company.”

The GEM’s recommendations point in a single direction: stop counting launches, start engineering survival. Public sector: measure how many ventures make it past three years, not how many register. Banks and corporates: adapt financing to self-employment realities and pull entrepreneurs into value chains as suppliers, where stable demand matters more than isolated credit. Academia: train for resilience in adverse conditions, not for textbook markets.

Enter Polar. On the other side of the equation, Empresas Polar —likely Venezuela’s largest private company— announced a program to develop at least 1,000 new businesses over the next 15 years. The initiative, led by Fundación Empresas Polar, has three pillars: mass training built with public and private universities; non-reimbursable seed capital with managerial mentoring for projects selected by an independent jury; and value-chain integration — strengthening agricultural, industrial, and distribution suppliers within Polar’s own ecosystem.

The timing is not incidental. According to Inclusion Consulting Group, Venezuela went from 580,000 companies a decade ago to roughly 480,000 today. EY estimates an even lower number. The GEM data confirms the pipeline is thinning, not expanding. “Venezuela needs more companies, more formal employment, and more dreams made real,” said CEO Lorenzo Mendoza at the launch.

Why it matters. The GEM describes the disease; Polar is attempting a –although limited– treatment. If the country’s largest private company is investing in supplier development and ecosystem building, it reflects both a long-term bet on recovery and a recognition that corporate growth requires a broader base of functional businesses around it. For foreign firms evaluating market entry, the quality of the local supplier and distribution network is a material variable. The broken funnel isn’t just an academic finding — it’s an operational risk. Polar’s program is the first serious private-sector attempt to address it at scale.

THE LONG READ

Adriana Cisneros Billion-Dollar Bet to Rebuild Venezuela

In Venezuela, it’s news when the news actually covers the news.

Since January 3, long-standing private television channel Venevisión — after years of state-led censorship — expanded a cautious shift that had begun before the 2024 presidential election and started reporting openly: the opposition, María Corina Machado, the reopening of the U.S. Embassy, Enrique Márquez‘s White House visit, even the labor and student protests emerging in what Delcy Rodríguez calls the “new political space.” The channel has been fined dozens of times, according to media industry sources. It kept going.

On April 13, Venevisión relaunched its flagship evening newscast with Shirley Varnagy and Luis Olavarrieta as anchors — both suspended from their radio programs last year, reportedly for covering Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize — ending a decade in which the Venezuelan superstar news anchor appeared to be an extinct species.

The shift coincides with the channel’s 65th anniversary. But Adriana Cisneros, who leads from Miami the powerful family conglomerate that owns Venevisión, is framing it as deliberate reinvention. “We realized we had to redefine ourselves as a media company,” she said at a press conference at the Caracas Stock Exchange. The question she posed to her management team: “If you were starting a media company from scratch today, what would it look like?”

Her answer is a multiplatform strategy: content, data, and technology across news, sports, live events, and streaming through Venevisión Play, paired with a “smart advertising” unit built on a proprietary data intelligence platform called Bunker — designed for current advertisers and those expected to arrive as the market opens.

But the bigger play is the fund. Cisneros is raising a $1 billion-plus vehicle to invest in the Venezuelan economy. She frames it in systemic terms: infrastructure, logistics, telecoms, and energy are the “arteries” of a functional economy. When they fail, everything fails. The fund is also evaluating real estate, agriculture, and petrochemicals, while excluding mining and hydrocarbons.

Two-thirds of the capital is already in “soft commitment” — U.S. and Latin American family offices, select institutional investors, individual backers, and sovereign wealth funds from Arab Gulf states. CFO Ariel Prat emphasizes the structure: registered in the United States, designed for long-term institutional deployment, built with rigorous compliance. “It’s a very American structure — it’s not private equity,” he says. “It’s not opportunistic capital. We know when we want to enter; we don’t know when we want to leave.”

The investment thesis rests on Venezuela’s installed industrial capacity and energy potential. “The growth capacity is exponential,” Prat says. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel — you have to fix the car and get it running.” The expectation is that as political guarantees solidify — an election date, for instance — more cautious capital will follow. “Some don’t care what water they drink. Others insist on Evian.”

Cisneros beyond the fund. This year, Tropicalia — the eco-conscious luxury hotel Cisneros developed with Four Seasons — opens in Miches, Dominican Republic. She sees Venezuela’s coastline as a future destination for sustainable luxury tourism alongside brands like Rosewood and Four Seasons, though she acknowledges the path requires major airport and airline reforms. She has proposed to the Universidad Metropolitana that it add luxury tourism to its new Sustainable Tourism program.

Meanwhile, FISA — the conglomerate’s consumer products division — is reportedly attracting foreign groups interested in distribution partnerships, adding another dimension to the Cisneros Group’s re-positioning strategy.

Cisneros talks about moving Venezuela “from the resilience mindset to the growth mindset” — attracting diaspora talent while retaining the adaptive talent that navigated the crisis from inside the country.

There is something almost anachronistic about a Cisneros addressing the press from the Caracas Stock Exchange. But there is also something familiar about the instinct to arrive first — the same impulse that led the family into cola, television, and beauty pageants across previous generations. If Venezuela does reinvent itself, Adriana Cisneros wants to be in the founding photograph. And, if possible, behind the camera.

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After a Long Silence, the Central Bank of Venezuela Published Economic Data. We Break It Down.

Gustavo Sandoval

Venezuela is reopening its economic black box with hard numbers on the table. After more than a decade of silence, the Central Bank has resumed publishing data—revealing an economy where inflation hit 475% in 2025, remains the highest in the world, and even reached 617% year-on-year by February 2026.

Growth tells a similarly uneven story: after a 14.7% rebound in 2022, momentum faded, exposing structural limits and sectoral imbalances. The renewed transparency—tied to early engagement with the IMF—signals a shift toward normalization, but questions over data credibility and persistent distortions highlight the core challenge: Venezuela now has visibility, but not yet stability.

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Bonus: Raising wages in Venezuela is an obvious social necessity, but the current economy can hardly sustain it. After losing nearly 80% of its size, with high informality and low productivity, the urgency to increase salaries collides with an economy that today has very limited capacity to pay them. Read the Spanish-only story here.

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Risk, Rally and Recalibration: International Investors Land in Venezuela in Search of Opportunities

María Cristina París

Caracas is suddenly full of international investors. In hotels, offices, and bars across eastern Caracas, foreign funds, entrepreneurs, and executives are conducting quiet due diligence as Venezuela reenters global financial conversations after January 3. Interest spans oil, bonds, real estate, agriculture, and startups, but institutional capital is moving cautiously: funds are looking for structured deals, legal guarantees, and downside protection before committing serious money.

For now, opportunistic capital is positioning itself in debt and equities, while sectors like energy, agriculture, finance, and infrastructure emerge as the backbone of a potential investment cycle. The opportunity is enormous—but only if Venezuela can turn hype into credible structures that global capital actually trusts.

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Burgum in Caracas: Us Seeks to Explore Investments in Critical Minerals and Gold

The visit of U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to Caracas signals a dramatic shift: Washington is no longer looking at Venezuela only through the lens of oil, but as a potential supplier of critical minerals—nickel, coltan, rare earths, and even gold—central to America’s technological and defense competitiveness. Behind diplomatic language and talk of “technical cooperation,” the real strategic play lies in the Guiana Shield, where the United States hopes to build a nearshored supply chain to reduce dependence on China.

But the opportunity comes with hard limits: mining regions are controlled by armed groups, tied to corruption, and linked to severe environmental destruction. Even as deals emerge—like Trafigura’s gold contract and OFAC-style licenses expected for the mining sector—the central tension remains: Venezuela sits atop resources the U.S. urgently needs, but unlocking them requires unprecedented transparency, institutional reform, and real control over the violence-ridden Arco Minero.

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What to Expect from the Venezuelan Economy in 2026? Key Takeaways from the Ecoanalítica Forum

Tony Frangie Mawad

Venezuela’s economy has entered a new phase. After January 3, business confidence flipped almost overnight, with expectations shifting from stagnation to a rare “miracle-economy” outlook driven by double-digit growth. Ecoanalítica’s projections show a country where investment—not consumption—becomes the new engine, with finance, telecom, and oil leading a broad rebound.

But the same recovery sits atop deep structural limits: cheap but unreliable electricity, a population with incomes under $300, and a credit system far too small to fuel expansion. Inflation remains high but is finally slowing, while exports—especially oil—are being reoriented back toward the United States. What emerges is an economy with real momentum for the first time in years, but still constrained by fragility, infrastructure decay, and the need for sustained institutional clarity.

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Venezuela Returns to the Oil Map: These Are the Opportunities and Limitations of the Reopening

Gustavo Sandoval, Miguel A. Rivas Espinoza, Tony Frangie Mawad

Venezuelan oil is back on the geopolitical map. With U.S. officials in Caracas, new OFAC licenses, and refiners like Valero and Citgo already buying Venezuelan crude, the country has re-entered the North American energy chain for the first time in years. Traders, service firms, and risk-tolerant “wildcatters” are moving in, while Chevron and other incumbents quietly expand.

Yet the road to a true boom is long: institutional instability, heavy-crude challenges, regional competition, and the enormous investment needed to rebuild production still weigh heavily. If legal clarity holds and Washington’s monitored opening continues, Venezuela could add hundreds of thousands of barrels in the next two to four years—and potentially millions over the next decade. For now, the comeback has begun, but its scale depends entirely on whether this fragile new framework endures.

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