Venezuela Seeks Foreign Partners for Diamond Mining
Minister says gold output this year will exceed four tons.

CARACAS -- Venezuela plans to seek out foreign partners for diamond mining ventures as part of a plan to industrialize the mineral-production process, the minister of basic industries and mining said Monday.

"We're going to try to look for partners in other countries with experience in this area to begin to process and industrialize our diamonds," Rodolfo Sanz said in an interview with state television.

Sanz said the government has a "complete map" of the location of "strategic mineral" reserves, including gold, bauxite, iron, diamonds and uranium, and that the process of certifying those areas was completed thanks to the participation of technicians from Iran and Cuba.

According to the minister, it is essential that Venezuela industrialize the process of extracting its strategic minerals.

Sanz said last month that the Las Cristinas gold mine, one of the richest in Latin America, will be operated by the state beginning next year even though a concession to develop the deposit was awarded in 2002 to Canadian company Crystallex.

"This mine will be recovered and operated" beginning next year by "the national government," Sanz said at that time. He quantified the Las Cristinas reserves at roughly 31 million ounces of gold, with a value of about $35 billion.

The minister said Venezuela's gold output this year will exceed four tons, 1.3 tons of which will be kept in "reserve."

He added that in Venezuela "what has been industrialized thus far is petroleum production and iron mining on a medium scale, but the same must be done with gold, diamonds and uranium for peaceful purposes."

Venezuela is the fifth largest exporter of crude in the world and has the planet's eighth-largest reserves of natural gas. The Andean nation is a key supplier of oil to the United States.

The minister said that Venezuela has an estimated 14 billion tons of "proven and certified reserves" of iron and about 6 billion tons of bauxite, the raw material of aluminum.

"It is the ministry's responsibility to lead this process of industrializing our strategic resources," Sanz said.

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