CARACAS — The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued two new general licenses on Friday, August 21, opening Venezuela’s telecommunications sector to American companies for the first time under a specific, dedicated licensing framework — a category broad enough to explicitly cover radio, television, and news broadcasting alongside internet and phone infrastructure.
New Licenses
General License 61 authorizes U.S. companies and individuals to supply goods, technology, software, and services needed to install, maintain, repair, upgrade, operate, or support telecommunications systems in Venezuela, including transactions with state-run entities such as Conatel (Venezuela’s telecommunications regulator), CANTV (the national telephone company), and Movilnet.
General License 62 separately authorizes negotiating and entering into contingent contracts for investment in Venezuela’s telecommunications sector, laying groundwork for future deals even before they’re finalized.
Jose Ignacio Hernández, a Venezuelan legal expert who follows OFAC actions closely, summarized the intent plainly: the licenses are designed “to allow private investment to rebuild the sector, including CANTV.”
“Telecommunications” Defined
OFAC and the licenses’ accompanying guidance (FAQ 1266, issued the same day) define telecommunications expansively: data exchange, fixed and mobile telephony, internet access, radio and television broadcasting, news agency feeds, and similar services, regardless of the technical medium used, including satellite platforms and undersea cables.
The authorization also covers a wide range of related operational activities: payment processing, logistics, insurance policies, transport, roaming and interconnection agreements, infrastructure leasing, network installation or modernization, cloud storage, monitoring systems, and server support.
Conditions Attached
The licenses aren’t unconditional. Contracts with Venezuela’s government must be governed by the law of a U.S. state or another jurisdiction within the United States, and dispute resolution must take place in the United States, United Kingdom, France, or Singapore — the same jurisdictional framework OFAC has applied to its recent oil, petrochemical, and mining sector licenses.
Companies must also report certain telecommunications transactions to the State Department.
Greater U.S. Involvement
Friday’s telecom licenses extend a sequence of OFAC sanctions relief measures Washington has rolled out across Venezuela’s economy throughout 2026. Earlier this year, OFAC modified several existing general licenses covering the oil, petrochemical, and mining sectors — including licenses 46C, 47A, 48B, 50B, 51B, 52A, and 54A — expanding the scope of activity permitted for U.S. companies established before January 29, 2025 to engage in exporting, marketing, and transporting Venezuelan crude and petrochemical products, and to participate in mining sector activity involving state entities like PDVSA and Minerven.
That earlier package emerged following the Trump administration’s March 5 formal recognition of acting President Delcy Rodríguez’s government before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, part of the broader normalization of consular and diplomatic ties between the two countries after Maduro’s January 3 removal.
Despite this steady expansion of specific, sector-by-sector licensing relief, more than 1,000 unilateral coercive measures imposed against Venezuela by the United States remain in place, according to teleSUR’s reporting on the earlier oil and mining license updates — underscoring that these targeted authorizations represent carve-outs within a broader sanctions architecture that remains largely intact.
Why Media Matters
Because OFAC’s definition of “telecommunications” explicitly folds in radio, television, and news agency broadcasting, Friday’s licenses carry implications beyond pure infrastructure investment. U.S. companies are now positioned to supply the technology, equipment, and technical services needed to install, modernize, or support Venezuelan broadcast media systems — a meaningful development for a country whose media landscape has been shaped for years by state control and, in some cases, deliberate degradation of independent outlets’ technical capacity.
Neither license specifies a timeline for when concrete telecommunications deals might follow, and as with the oil and mining sector licenses issued earlier this year, actual investment will likely depend on how quickly individual companies move to structure agreements that satisfy the licenses’ jurisdictional and reporting conditions.
Given the pace at which Washington has expanded sector-specific licensing throughout 2026 — oil and mining in the spring, telecommunications now in August — additional sector openings, potentially including media-specific authorizations beyond the current telecom framework, remain a plausible next step in the broader normalization process between Washington and Caracas.
