 "Trump’s administration is ramping up pressure on Venezuela with a major Caribbean military deployment that includes the world’s largest aircraft carrier. (AFP)")
The United States on Wednesday seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela , in a major escalation of US President Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the Latin American nation and its autocratic president, Nicolás Maduro. 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”.
Why it matters
In the statement, Bondi noted that the tanker had been sanctioned by the United States for “multiple years” due to its “involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organisations”. Meanwhile, the Venezuelan government made no immediate comment on the seizure.
However, while speaking at a rally in Caracas, Maduro urged citizens to act like “warriors” and be ready “to smash the teeth of the North American empire if necessary”. It is pertinent to note that the draconian leader has been in power in the country since 2013, when he succeeded Hugo Chávez after his death from cancer.
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View AllHe is notoriously known for stealing elections and has clung to power after launching a wave of repression that forced Edmundo González, the apparent winner of the 2024 vote, into exile in Spain. Since August this year, the US has put a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head, launched the biggest naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Apart from this, Washington also carried out a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 80 people. On Tuesday, two US fighter jets circled the Gulf of Venezuela for about 40 minutes. The aircraft flew just north of Maracaibo, one of Venezuela’s most populous cities.
The next day, González’s most important backer, the opposition leader María Corina Machado , was formally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a peaceful and just transition from dictatorship to democracy”.
Machado’s daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, accepted the prize on her behalf, telling the gathering at Oslo that her mother’s struggle to end years of “obscene corruption” and “brutal dictatorship” would go on.