By Jorgelina do Rosario and Manuela Tobias The World Bank could loan Venezuela as much as $5 billion over the next two years, as the country resumes relations with the Washington-based lender, a top official said.

Susana Cordeiro Guerra, vice president for the Latin America and the Caribbean region, said the lender is assessing how it can support Venezuela priorities “if the conditions are right,” adding that the figure would come from a mix of its public and private sector arms.

The financing would “support reforms and priority investments in infrastructure and social sectors,” Cordeiro Guerra said in an interview on the sidelines of the IMF-World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok.

The bank has identified a first operation of $500 million and is focused on water and electricity projects, she said. It could also lend up to $2 billion during the first year if Venezuela clears arrears with other multilateral lenders.

“We have developed a pipeline of projects that we can provide financing to, that we are comfortable with, that we would like to move forward, and we are waiting for the arrear settlement to be able to move forward,” she said. The last loan extended to the country was in 2005.

Venezuela has over $2 billion of overdue principal and interest to the Inter-American Development Bank. The oil exporter is also in arrears with the Development Bank of Latin America.

Any support would also be conditional to the bank’s executive board approval, Cordeiro Guerra added.

The bank and its sister institution, the IMF, resumed engagement with the government of Venezuela in April, under acting president Delcy Rodríguez.

The bank also aims to hire a resident representative soon in Venezuela, Cordeiro Guerra said, adding that the bank plans to open an office in Caracas before the year ends. The World Bank is engaged with Venezuela “intensively” on establishing their macro fiscal framework and supporting its debt restructuring, which some private calculations estimate at around $170 billion.

The bank’s engagement in Latin America has surged in recent years amid a wave of market-friendly governments also aligned with US President Donald Trump.

The bank is preparing a comprehensive lending package for Colombia, where President Abelardo de la Espriella took office in August. They will provide three separate loans for spending efficiency, the energy sector and the health sector, Cordeiro Guerra said, without disclosing numbers.

Some of the loans to Colombia mirror the structure of what the bank has already approved for Argentina in June, when the country got a commercial loan of as much as $2 billion with a 95% guarantee by the World Bank.

The bank is also in talks for more loans next year to Argentina. “We are definitely in discussions and will support the government in their liquidity needs at different points in time in a strategic way throughout the year,” she said. The country faces elections and more than $25 billion in debt maturities next year.

In Barbados, they are planing to extend the same type of loan to help with payment regulation and digital government payments.

“We want to reward the reformers,” Cordeiro Guerra said. “It’s about doing the hard work and actually implementing reforms about fiscal consolidation and macroeconomic stability.”She pointed to Paraguay, Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Panama as implementing private sector-friendly reforms and growing at over 4% annually through fiscal consolidation and setting examples for the rest of the region.