President Trump announced on Tuesday that the United States would impose a blockade on all “sanctioned tankers” going to and from Venezuela, in an escalation of the administration’s monthslong pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
Mr. Trump announced the move in bellicose terms.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” he wrote on social media. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.”
The move could lead to a drop in revenues that the Venezuelan government and its state-owned oil company get from oil exports. But the announcement left much unclear, including how many oil tankers would be affected. Mr. Trump did not define what he meant by “sanctioned tankers,” and it was not apparent exactly which oil tankers the United States planned to try to intercept.
Last Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard and law enforcement officers, with support from the Pentagon, seized a tanker in the Caribbean Sea that was carrying Venezuelan oil for Cuba and China. A federal judge had issued a warrant for the seizure based on the fact that the tanker had recently transported oil from Iran, which is under strict U.S. sanctions.
In his announcement, Mr. Trump wrote that the United States would carry out the blockade until Venezuela returned to the United States “all of the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us.”
The U.S. military has been building up a large force in the Caribbean in recent months, and Mr. Trump has threatened strikes inside Venezuela. Since September, the U.S. military has been carrying out airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, many of them near Venezuela, in a campaign that has killed at least 95 people in 25 attacks.
Mr. Trump has said those attacks are aimed at stopping drug trafficking to the United States, but Venezuela is not a drug producer, and cocaine that transits through the country and the waters around it is generally bound for Europe. Many legal experts say that the attacks are illegal and that the military is killing civilians.
Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department for The Times.
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