 "Trump’s new move against Maduro: US sanctions family after seizing oil tanker, censoring 6 vessels")
US President Donald Trump has gone a step ahead and imposed sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s family members as he pushes for regime change in the South American country.
The development in the US-Venezuela rift is an extraordinary move as Trump wages a war on drugs, which he claims are being supplied by gangs based in Venezuela. Washington has already attacked numerous alleged drug boats in the past couple of months, killing several people and inviting questions from within his administration over the use of military force.
The sanctions also come just a day after the US seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.
What to know about the sanctions?
The US Treasury Department, in a statement, said it imposed sanctions on six shipping companies moving Venezuelan oil, as well as six crude oil tankers that it said “have engaged in deceptive and unsafe shipping practices and continue to provide financial resources that fuel Maduro’s corrupt narco-terrorist regime.”
Four of the tankers, including the 2002-built H. Constance and the 2003-built Lattafa, are Panama-flagged, with the other two flagged by the Cook Islands and Hong Kong.
The targeted vessels are supertankers that recently loaded crude in Venezuela, according to state oil company PDVSA’s internal shipping documents.
Franqui Flores and Efrain Antonio Campo Flores, nephews of Venezuelan first lady Cilia Flores, were also hit with sanctions. The two were dubbed the “narco nephews” after their arrest in Haiti in 2015 in a US Drug Enforcement Administration sting operation.
They were convicted in 2016 on charges that they tried to carry out a multimillion-dollar cocaine deal and sentenced to 18 years in prison, but were released in a 2022 prison swap with Venezuela. A third nephew, Carlos Erik Malpica Flores, who the U.S. says was involved in a corruption plot at the state oil company, was also sanctioned.
Quick Reads
View AllUS seizes oil tanker
The United States on Wednesday seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. The confirmation of the seizure came from Trump, who said: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela – a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually.”
“It was seized for a very good reason,” Trump added, declining to say who owned the vessel. Meanwhile, US Attorney General Pam Bondi shared footage of the operation on X, formerly known as Twitter. The grainy, 45-second video showed US forces landing on the tanker from a helicopter.
In a statement accompanying the video, Bondi said that the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the US Coast Guard, with support from the Department of Defence, had “executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”.
With inputs from agencies
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