Retrofitted criminal networks are being used to trade gold for the subsidized food rations that's propping up the regime.
Good
piece from Bloomberg on the criminal alliance between the new best
friends, Venezuela's Maduro and Turkey's Erdogan-and the
ColombianLebanese raking in the billions along the way... As They say,
My Enemy's Enemy, is My Friend...
"With the coup attempt," Erdogan said at a news conference earlier this year, "we met Maduro. It has been a good beginning."
Maduro and Erdogan in Istanbul in October 2016.
Photographer: Kayhan Ozer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Within weeks of the July call, Maduro announced his first trip to Turkey. Before the end of 2016, that Turkish Airlines route between Istanbul and Caracas was inaugurated, and delegations from the two countries started crisscrossing the Atlantic to forge deals. They began to construct a secretive business network, one that could operate out of reach of financial sanctions imposed by the U.S. It would be a network that trades in two powerful currencies for Venezuela: gold and food.
Maduro was saddled with a near-worthless currency, the bolívar, that had been bludgeoned by years of hyperinflation. Profits from his country's massive oil reserves, which had funded the Venezuelan government for decades, were evaporating because of falling prices, a neglected and crumbling infrastructure, rampant corruption, and international isolation. Venezuelans were starving, and Maduro's approval rating had plummeted. So he grasped a financial lifeline in gold, one of the only resources of value he had left.
In August 2016, Maduro announced that a state mining company called Minerven would be the sole official gold buyer in the vast tracts of jungle, savanna, and rolling hills where mining had long been clandestine and unregulated—essentially legalizing a business lorded over by murderous gangs. He sent in troops to force miners to comply and began hoovering up ore from open-pit mines. (Through a spokesman, Victor Cano, the mining minister, declined to comment for this story.) Maduro also started cashing in on the billions of dollars' worth of gold bars that Chávez, who was loath to invest in U.S. dollars, had stockpiled. The sell-off carried hints of desperation. According to sources in Venezuela's central bank, the government secretly sold the bank's massive collection of rare gold coins, dating to the 18th century. The coins, box upon box of them, were thrown together in a single 30-ton sale in late 2017, and Venezuela accepted a price based on their weight alone, not their collectible value.
