Venezuela's interim president moves to offer state assets back to private owners, reversing the Chavez nationalizations

Venezuela's interim government is preparing to hand pieces of the state back to private hands. President Delcy Rodriguez said in a televised address on Thursday that she has instructed officials to assess non essential assets held by the state and determine which can be offered to the private sector or returned to their former owners. This process is already well advanced, she said.

The instruction reaches into the core of the Chavez era settlement. Under Hugo Chavez, the nationalization of key projects and industries left more than a dozen international arbitration claims against Venezuela, most of them still unsettled. In April, Rodriguez appointed a government commission to audit state assets, including infrastructure in energy, power and mining. She gave no details on Thursday about how the offers or returns would be carried out, which assets are first in line, or how former owners with arbitration claims would be treated.

Energy is furthest along. Rodriguez said 44 energy contracts are currently being negotiated under the state oil law approved in January, and that the government counts 61 oil agreements signed, without providing details. Important negotiations are also under way in mining, she said, covering gold, aluminum and iron. A separate Reuters examination of the largest arrangement, the deal that gave North American Blue Energy Partners control of 17 oilfields, found the company's promise to lift output fourfold to more than 1 million barrels a day running into dilapidated infrastructure, idle machinery and a workforce thinned by decades of exodus. About 80 percent of the roughly 4,000 inactive wells in the Maracaibo basin need repair. The country's overall crude output has stayed near 1.2 million barrels a day in recent months, according to official figures. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who returned to Venezuela this week, told reporters in Caracas on Thursday that she had not seen that contract and that it fell short on transparency.

Rodriguez paired the economic opening with two political signals. She said she has instructed law enforcement agencies not to arrest people without a warrant, and she announced four planned quarterly increases in the national minimum wage in 2027. She also named diplomat Oliver Blanco, previously vice foreign minister, as the country's new top diplomat. The address came a week after Venezuela saw its first nationwide opposition protest in nearly two years. Machado, back in the country, is calling for a new electoral process and elections in 2027. She praised President Trump's role in Venezuela's recent changes. No election timetable has been agreed.