How U.S. Treasury Is Helping Venezuela Rebuild

Kejal Vyas and Ryan Dubé capture the scale of

Venezuela’s reconstruction challenge in “U.S. Faces a Quagmire in Venezuela” (World News, July 20). However, reconstruction depends not only on the availability of capital. It also depends on whether that capital can move into Venezuela.

On July 27, the U.S. Treasury took an important step toward reconnecting Venezuela to the U.S. financial system. It issued an enforcement policy designed to give U.S. financial institutions greater confidence to support Venezuela-related activities authorized by the Office of Foreign Assets Control. Subject to the policy’s conditions, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network will generally refrain from taking supervisory or enforcement action when U.S. financial institutions provide authorized Venezuela-related services and make reasonable efforts to comply with U.S. anti-money-laundering requirements. This matters because even when the U.S. government permits a transaction, banks usually still refuse to process it because of the compliance risks associated with jurisdictions considered high risk.