The Trump administration secured a multimillion-dollar gold export deal with Venezuela this week, deepening a commercial relationship built on the disputed foundation of a January US military raid that international legal experts and UN bodies have condemned as a violation of international law.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum brokered an agreement requiring Venezuelan state mining firm Minerven to supply commodities trader Trafigura with between 650 and 1,000 kilograms of gold doré bars for delivery to US refineries.
At roughly $166,000 per kilogram, the shipment could be worth up to $166 million. Trafigura also holds Venezuelan oil contracts exceeding $1 billion, making the Swiss firm the primary commercial conduit for both of the country’s most valuable resources under US oversight.
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Burgum praised Venezuela as “a rich, rich country” with “unlimited” opportunities for US collaboration. Trump posted on Truth Social that Rodriguez was “doing a great job” and that “the oil is beginning to flow.” Rodriguez, meanwhile, announced she would submit a mining law overhaul to the legislature within days, opening the sector to “large foreign companies.”
Rodriguez assumed the interim presidency after the January 3 raid killed approximately 100 people and saw Maduro flown to New York on federal drug trafficking charges. Trump warned her in January that if she “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
UN human rights experts called the January operation a “grave, manifest and deliberate violation of the most fundamental principles of international law,” warning that Venezuela’s natural resources “must not be cynically exploited through thinly veiled pretexts to legitimise military aggression.”
The deals also draw scrutiny under the UN’s Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources principle, which prohibits stronger states from using force or coercion to extract resources from weaker ones.
Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said Trump’s stated intention to extract Venezuelan wealth violated the country’s “political independence, territorial integrity, and permanent sovereignty over its natural resources.”
Wednesday’s gold contract is the third extraction deal brokered under US oversight since January. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves alongside significant deposits of gold, diamonds, bauxite, and coltan — resources that, until January, were flowing primarily to Russia, China, and Iran.
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