VHeadline editor & publisher Roy S. Carson writes: After taut weeks of disbelief after Venezuela's Environment Minister (MinAmb) Yubiri Ortega de Carrizales to all purposes absurdly pulled the plug on the totality of the country's mining interests, in an unofficially proclaimed ban on all open-cast mining, she's now been put in a corner of her own making by President Hugo Chavez Frias who has ordered both the Environment Ministry and the Ministry of Basic Industries & Mines (Mibam) to "resolve their differences" and get down to working out procedures to get the massive Lazs Cristinas gold mine on-the-road as quickly as possible.

The inter-ministerial bullfighting has stretched over several weeks since Ortega de Carrizales attempted to assume ministerial responsibilities over the mining sector and it was imminently apparent that softly-spoken Mining Minister Rodolfo Sanz' role was being hijacked by the Vice President's very vocal wife.

Ortega de Carrizales was forced, however, into embarrassing retreat after the President himself ordered her to take a "cooling off" pill and facilitate urgent talks between junior ministry officials and Canadian mine operator Crystallex International's Venezuelan-national executives after a key visit to Caracas by Crystallex' Toronto-based Chairman and CEO Robert Fung.

Las Thursday, Crystallex' local representatives met a MinAmb delegation including its veep for Environmental Planning & Administration, Merly Garcia who conveyed the President's instructions that they should require Crystallex to resubmit already-modified "modifications" to the original Las Cristinas Project plans to allow the suitably presidentially-chastised officials to get their skates on and issue the necessary permits before the Las Cristinas brouhaha brought further foreign disgrace and condemnation down on Venezuela and Chavez' own best efforts to win crucial domestic support ahead of November 23 local and regional elections.

The already-modified modifications include additional details to social and infrastructire projects in the area of southeast Venezuela where Crystallex has already blown in excess of $30 million to build health clinics, public water treatment plants and roads; explaining in fuller details the company's already-committed plans to redujce the impact of open-cast mining in the Imataca Rainforest at Las Cristinas by restoring the land to its pre-mining state through the planting of tens of thousands of new trees and a committment to "remediate existing environmental damage caused by illegal miners."

Spurred by the presidential orders, the usually lethargic MinAmb officials are now stressing the importance of Crystallex expediting "the submission of details relating to the suggested request for modifications in order to enable prompt resolution of the Permit" indicating that not only will open-cast mining at Las Cristinas be given the official clearance courtesy of the President of the Republic but that said officials are eager to get both the debacle and the paperwork sorted out in the shortest possible time ... if not sooner!

Environment Minister Yubiri Ortega de Carrizales has reportedly taken the opportunity to catch up on accumulated vacation leave after a busy weekend spent inspecting Caracas waterways and sewers in a so-called "Caraacs Beautification Campaign" which is expected to conclude by the end of July. She meanwhile faces further controversy in the mis-appropriation of $ millions from a low-cost housing project close to Lake Valencia after local residents were forcibly removed from the area two years ago. The evicted townspeople are still whistling in the wind for promised compensation and a massive re-housing project is on hold since the allocated funds have not yet been forthcoming.

At the tail end of the Ortega de Carrizales rout, Crystallex in Toronto says that it has received copies of the official minutes from the Parliamentary Economic Development Committee's deliberations on Las Cristinas (June 4) at which Ministry of Mines officials had confirmed support for Crystallex and its compliance with all procedural and administrative steps up to the point at which MinAmb had initially denied the final permit for the Las Cristinas Project to kickstart.

The outcome of that meeting was a Committee resolution stating that the Las Cristinas project had been in development for a significant period of time with the support of different branches of the government and that delays had been occasioned by "a lack of coordination between the various government branches ... which should be resolved in light of the macroeconomic policies and goals of Venezuela, as well as the social needs of the people and the pre-existing environmental damage."

While it is undoubtedly very much egg on the face of Venezuela's deputy First Lady, the news is certainly good for Venezuela and the Canadian mine operator's future in Venezuela seen against the plethora of negativity that has flooded the international wire serves of recent date.

Questions will undoubtedly be raised at Crystallex International's annual general meeting in Toronto tomorrow morning but Chairman Robert Fung and his executive team in Canada and Venezuela are quietly murmuring their thanks to the God of their own choosing for President Hugo Chavez Frias' eleventh-hour intervention to break a new dawn on the company's long-haul efforts to get to grips with one of South America's largest gold mining resources and initiate the first phases of a 40-year operating contract which is seen as a model on which Venezuela's future mining policies will be founded.

Roy S. Carson