US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro.
The US president confirmed the operation on Wednesday. “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela – a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually,” he said. “And other things are happening so you will be seeing that later and you will be talking about that later with other people.”
“It was seized for a very good reason,” Mr Trump told reporters, declining to say who owned the vessel.
Two US officials told Reuters the operation was led by the US coast guard, but did not name the tanker or say specifically where the interception happened. A senior Trump administration official told Bloomberg that the US had conducted a “judicial enforcement action on a stateless vessel” that was last docked in Venezuela.
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Venezuela’s government made no immediate comment on the seizure but speaking at a rally in Caracas, Mr Maduro urged citizens to act like “warriors” and be ready “to smash the teeth of the North American empire if necessary”.
Mr Maduro has been in power since 2013, when he succeeded Hugo Chávez after Chávez’s death from cancer. Widely believed to have stolen last year’s presidential election, Mr Maduro 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, the US has put a $50 million bounty on Mr Maduro’s head, launched the biggest naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and carried out a series of deadly air strikes 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.
On Wednesday, Mr González’s most important backer, the opposition leader María Corina Machado, was 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”.
Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil and, although years of mismanagement and corruption have done severe damage to its oil industry, oil exports remain Venezuela’s main source of revenue. The main customer is China.
The objective of this week’s reported tanker seizure was not immediately clear.
In an interview last week, Joe Biden’s former chief Latin America adviser, Juan González, said that at around the time of last year’s election he had pushed for the US to station two navy destroyers off Venezuela’s coast “and even impose an oil blockade”.
That never happened, but Mr González believed one possible way out of the current crisis might be for the Trump administration to push Maduro into accepting a recall referendum, perhaps in 2027, but threatening “real hardline consequences” such as a blockade if the result was not respected.
“I think it is potentially a viable option where there should be a very credible and aggressive snapback associated with it,” González said, adding: “Imposing an oil blockade would shut down the entire economy.”
“It’s less aggressive [than a land strike] but it’s still considered an act of war,” added González, who was the national security council’s senior director for the western hemisphere during the Biden administration.
“He [Trump] could take unilateral action by blocking oil tankers from leaving or entering the country, and that I think would precipitate Maduro’s departure.” – Guardian
