Venezuela will not be able to access the $ 5 billion (€ 4.17 billion) Special Drawing Rights of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over the dispute over the legitimacy of Nicolás Maduro on the Latin American front.
According to the Fund’s bases, Venezuela would be one of the main beneficiaries of IMF resources worth $ 650 billion (more than 540 billion euros). The body’s goal with these funds is to boost global liquidity, as well as help emerging and low-income economies deal with rising debt from the pandemic.
IMF financial assistance would have been equivalent to 81% of the country’s current international reserves, which has been mired in an economic recession for more than seven years.
However, Venezuela will not be able to access these resources, which most countries will receive through their central banks if approved by the Fund, as more than 50 countries (including the United States) consider the leader of the opposition, Juan Guaidó, the legitimate leader of the country since 2018.
“The ongoing political crisis in Venezuela has led to a lack of clarity in the international community, as reflected in the IMF member, in terms of official government recognition,” the IMF spokesman said. , Gerry Rice, in an interview with ‘Bloomberg’, where he states that the Latin State will not be able to access Special Drawing Rights “until a Government is recognized.”
This decision is another setback for the Maduro government, which has been isolated from a global financial network due to US sanctions.
Conflicts over the relationship between Venezuela and the IMF date back to at least 14 years, when former President Hugo Chávez pledged to sever ties with the Washington organization because, according to him, it only served the interests Americans.
This lack of relationship between the two parties has led to the body not conducting an assessment of the Venezuelan economy under Article IV for 14 years, which has led many economists at the Washington-based institution to have had to carry out ‘blindly’ the country’s macroeconomic forecasts.
Venezuela’s Special Drawing Rights reserves were only 12.5 million dollars (10.4 million euros) last month, a figure well below the $ 3.6 billion (3,000 million euros) recorded on 2009 as a result of the global financial crisis, according to IMF data.
Currently, more than two-thirds of Venezuela’s international reserves are in gold. The country faces problems in obtaining resources through the sale of bullion, both by U.S. sanctions and by the conflict over the recognition of the legitimate leader of the country.