Governments, Gold, and Control

Repression (Zimbabwe)

When Gold Was the Enemy

In the late 2000s, Zimbabwe’s currency collapsed under the weight of hyperinflation. Amidst the chaos, gold didn’t just become a safe haven it became a threat to state control.

The government's response was swift and severe. Under "Operation Chikorokoza Chapera" (“No More Illegal Mining”), more than 16,000 miners were arrested. Armed crackdowns aimed to choke off informal gold trading, a desperate attempt to salvage the faltering Zimbabwean dollar by monopolising gold flows.

But repression has its limits. Beneath the surface, Zimbabwe’s grassroots economy kept moving quietly, stubbornly, efficiently. Informal networks adapted, persisted, and thrived. Gold moved hand to hand, regardless of the state’s grip.

Repression was the government choice.

Fast forward to 2022: the government reversed course. The launch of the Mosi-oa-Tunya gold coin marked a striking pivot officially sanctioning gold ownership for citizens. It was more than economic policy. It was tacit admission. Trust in fiat had eroded so deeply that gold, once hunted, was now being handed back.

Zimbabwe’s story is not unique but it is instructive. When monetary systems fail, people don’t wait.

They build their own.

Co-option (Venezuela)

Gold Without a Fight

In Venezuela, gold was harnessed rather than hunted.

Unlike the brutal suppression seen in Zimbabwe, the Venezuelan regime chose a different strategy. Instead of waging war on small-scale gold use, it drew a line: gold mining and exports were to be controlled, but everyday transactions? Largely left alone.

The result was a system built on dualities. In the Arco Minero del Orinoco, military units and state enterprises supervised extraction zones with an iron grip. Gold was quietly sold abroad, bypassing sanctions and buying time for a crumbling regime.

But elsewhere in remote towns and border markets gold flakes passed hand to hand like coins. A gram here, a sliver there. No central bank needed.

This wasn’t leniency. It was calculus. Crack down too hard, and you provoke resistance.

Leave the grassroots alone, and you keep the economy breathing just enough to prevent collapse.

In Venezuela, gold became the bridge between authoritarian survival and everyday life. Not through brute force, but through a quiet, calculated tolerance.

Tolerance (Argentina)

The Quiet Allowance

In Argentina, the story isn’t one of crackdowns or co-option. It’s one of quiet tolerance.

Faced with decades of inflation and currency devaluation, the government focused its energy on traditional levers such as capital controls, dollar rationing, and monetary tweaks.

Gold? It barely registered on the policy radar.

And that absence spoke volumes.

Without fanfare or friction, Argentine households turned to gold as a silent reserve. Not bullion bars or state coins, but jewellery handed down through generations.

Wedding rings, family medallions, heirloom coins quietly stashed, quietly sold when the peso buckled.

This common uptick in recycling and refining was and is ritual in many cases when gold price rallies hard against currency.

In moments of economic collapse, these private stores became lifelines converted into dollars, food, or medicine.

What emerged was a kind of unspoken détente: the state managed the formal economy, and citizens safeguarded their own. Gold filled the vacuum not because it was sanctioned, but because it wasn’t stopped.

Sometimes, resilience grows in the spaces government forgets to close.

What These Tell Us About Monetary Trust and Control

Where Trust Ends, Gold Begins

Three countries. Three different postures. One pattern.

Zimbabwe tried to force trust. It didn’t work. When repression failed to kill off informal trade, the government pivoted issuing gold coins not out of generosity, but necessity. Fiat had lost its meaning. Gold was the only thing left that people still believed in.

Venezuela went the other way. Rather than resist grassroots gold use, it absorbed it tightening its grip on mines and export channels while letting the public trade flakes like currency. Gold became both a lifeline and a loophole, propping up the regime even as it sustained local economies.

Then there's Argentina. No mandates. No interference. Just absence. In that vacuum, people quietly returned to gold old rings, family coins, melted down, repurposed, sold off when the peso faltered. It was a silent kind of policy: if you can’t create confidence, at least don’t get in its way.

These are reminders to all of us who have perhaps become naive living in countries with fairly sound economic policy and currency stability. The tide can turn, and quick.

When governments lose monetary trust, the response matters less than the result. People don’t wait for permission. They reach for what’s proven. And gold whether worn on a finger, hidden in a drawer, or minted by the state remains the fallback when belief in paper fades.

And just like that gold takes back its mantle as the ultimate form of wealth protection and monetary medium.