President Nicolás Maduro during the celebrations of May Day in Venezuela. LEONARDO FERNANDEZ VILORIA (REUTERS)

From Nicolás Maduro to all Chavismo in power, they have described a new license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the Treasury Department as treason.

The measure brings the creditors of Venezuela's huge foreign debt closer to the possibility of collecting with the auction of the shares of Citgo, the US-based PDVSA refinery, Venezuela's most valuable asset abroad.

The Venezuelan president has said that it is a "slap in the face" to the meeting that Colombian President Gustavo Petro organized in Bogotá with other countries to discuss the country's crisis.

This judicial step, however, comes from a long path that began with Hugo Chávez, who during the years of greatest oil boom achieved more than 5 years.

This week, OFAC said it will not take action "against any person for taking steps to preserve the ability to enforce the rights of bondholders to the Citgo shares serving as collateral," a move that smoothes the auction of Citgo shares. the oil company for the payment of debt and could be a first step to solve the enormous problem of the Venezuelan external debt that does not stop growing.

The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry responded, through a statement, that this "predatory and criminal action" has the objective of causing harm to citizens.

"Donald Trump did not dare to sell it how and when he wanted, and this government has dared," Maduro added this week.

Chavismo, in a turn of history, has described it as "expropriation."

The Department of Justice had already said that it would not "block the forced auction of Citgo shares", in a response to the trial for the lawsuit of the Canadian Cristallex, which in 2008 was dispossessed by the Chavista government of the Las Cristinas mine, in the south of the country.

This company won a lawsuit before the World Bank Arbitration Center (ICSID) that allows it to charge Venezuela 1.4 billion dollars, of which Maduro has already paid 400 million dollars.

But to collect the rest, Cristallex filed a lawsuit in the Delaware Court that in 2018 decided that PDVSA and the Venezuelan Government are the same entity, therefore, Crystallex can collect the debt through an auction of shares of the PDVSA subsidiary.

This possibility was blocked in recent years by the foreign policy of the United States under the mandate of Donald Trump, who ignored the legitimacy of Maduro, re-elected in 2018 in elections considered fraudulent, and established measures to protect Venezuelan assets that prevented embargoes without OFAC licenses.

With Joe Biden, politics has taken a turn, because in the Venezuelan field things have also changed.

The end of the interim government of Juan Guaidó, who was the only legitimate authority for the United States, has forced Washington to review its measures on assets.

In License 42 issued this week, the actors are updated and the Assembly elected in 2015, from which Guaidó emerged and which continues sessions from exile with a small group of parliamentarians who meet by Zoom, is authorized to renegotiate the debt with creditors, although specific licenses will be required to enter into agreements.

They have also left in writing that neither the Maduro government nor the Assembly elected in 2021, with a Chavista majority, have a candle in this funeral.

The possibility of the 2015 Assembly, now chaired by Dinorah Figuera, to negotiate with creditors has several legal challenges to overcome, such as the fact that the Venezuelan Constitution only authorizes the President of the Republic for these functions.

Other cards are also played in the lawsuit in US courts.

That same Friday, four days after the OFAC license, the Citgo auction was suspended, which in turn opens the compass to new agreements that do not imply that Venezuela loses this asset.

The step taken by the United States somehow resolves the institutional limbo in which the opposition remained after the dissolution of the interim last December and which forced the US government, for example, to "take custody" of the Venezuelan diplomatic headquarters in United States that were under the control of Guaidó's diplomatic representatives, who have been removed with him.

It is this parliamentary group elected in 2015, in the eyes of the United States, the last democratically elected institution in Venezuela.

But amid the lobby and pressure from creditors, License 42 has once again strained relations with Maduro.

Washington had restored dialogue with the oil country a year ago in the context of the collapse of the energy market that was unleashed by Russia's war in Ukraine.

But this step has unleashed anti-United States rhetoric on the part of Chavismo and further stalls attempts to resume dialogue in Mexico between Chavismo and the opposition.

“The Maduro government will very likely continue to be reluctant to return to negotiations in Mexico because it is not clear that the US government is willing to relax or lift sanctions,” says Mariano de Alba, a senior analyst at Crisis Group.

“For the Government, the key thing about the recent license is that it insists on giving relevance to the 2015 National Assembly, a body that naturally the Government does not recognize.

To this is added that as time passes, a possible easing of sanctions becomes less attractive to Maduro because his main interest, which is to have access to higher income, becomes more unlikely to crystallize before the 2024 elections. .

In other words, even with a significant easing of sanctions today, it is not clear that the steps the US might take would translate into higher revenue before the polls.

The prevailing conclusion in the Government is that the returns or benefits of negotiating - which is what the Bogotá meeting requested - "are not clear."

Biden's attempt to build bridges with Maduro has crashed with the impossibility of the parties to agree on the concessions and their chronology.

The Government of Maduro considers that the US Government should facilitate the constitution of the fund of 3,000 million dollars, provided for in the Social Agreement signed last November in Mexico, as a starting point.

On the other hand, the United States believes that Maduro must first start making political-electoral concessions.

“It is very probable that the relationship will continue cold, but without this meaning a total collapse, because the US, with the tools it has from the sanctions regime, could also be seeking to use those prerogatives to maintain some access to Venezuelan oil.

It is already doing so through Chevron, in competitive conditions that favor it compared to other oil companies that do not see it as easy to invest and have a relationship with PDVSA and state companies while the sanctions regime and the threat of secondary sanctions are maintained." , points out Alba.

a monstrous debt

That of Cristallex is, for now, the only one of the litigations that is close to being collected since the appeals of the Government of Venezuela have been exhausted.

But it is not the only debt that it is trying to collect with Citgo, a company with almost 5,000 gas stations in the United States and valued at about 10,000 million dollars.

Venezuela's total debt amounts to about 170,000 million dollars, more than three times the current GDP.

Some 30,000 million are owed for more than 50 international arbitrations for expropriations carried out during the first years of the revolution, of which little more than half have ended in payment sentences for the country, among which are included those of Owen Illinois, I know Phillips and Exon.

Another part of the debt is in what Russia, China and other suppliers owe, a black box that is difficult to estimate.

But the largest commitments involve about 100,000 million at the moment, they are made up of debt and PDVSA bonds and their interests.

In 2016, Maduro put 50.1% of the shares of the PDVSA subsidiary in the United States as collateral for the issuance of bonds maturing in 2020.

A decision that was made behind the back of the Assembly, which then opposed it and which questioned the legality of that kind of Citgo mortgage through a lawsuit in a New York Court that has not yet been defined.

The country went into

a year later and in October 2023 the six-year term expires from the start of the default in which investors can sue.

The Treasury's decision not to intervene in the actions that bondholders take to collect themselves has put a huge line of creditors at Citgo's door.

"By international conventions, creditors can charge from all sides, with Citgo shares, assets, dividends, accounts receivable and even with the confiscation of oil tankers, as happened a year and a half ago," explains the lawyer specializing in arbitrations. Ramon Escovar Alvarado.

The country is exposed to these possibilities of systematic dispossession by creditors.

The lobby to restructure the debt will begin to intensify and should be a topic to be discussed at the negotiating table in Mexico and beyond.

There should be an agreement between governments, creditors and multilateral organizations to renegotiate the debt so that the bankrupt country can obtain international financing to face the recovery, something that cannot happen while the general sanctions exist.

“Foreign debt is the biggest problem and challenge we have as a society and it transcends the political.

There is no way for Venezuela to be viable if that is not resolved," says Escovar.

The "monstrous" debt inherited from Chavismo, according to his calculations, is equivalent to each Venezuelan owing at least $5,000 for the measures taken by the government.

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