U.S. forces have captured a second oil tanker and are aggressively pursuing a third as the MAGA administration ratchets up the pressure on Venezuela.
Two sources with knowledge of the ongoing operations told Axios Sunday that the Coast Guard, with support from the military, is charging ahead with plans to seize the ‘Bella 1’ tanker in Panamanian waters. The vessel, which has been under Treasury Department sanctions since 2024, was reportedly en route to reload in Venezuela.
Those maneuvers follow after the Coast Guard seized the ‘Centuries’ tanker earlier on Saturday and the ‘Skipper’ tanker last Wednesday, both also part of Venezuela’s oil transport fleet, under Donald Trump’s rapidly escalating campaign of pressure against the Nicolas Maduro regime.
“President Trump has been clear: the blockade of sanctioned oil tankers departing from, or bound for, Venezuela will remain in full force until Maduro’s criminal enterprise returns every stolen American asset,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X Saturday.
“The [Defense Department], with our partners at [the Coast Guard], will unflinchingly conduct maritime interdiction operations—through OPERATION SOUTHERN SPEAR—to dismantle illicit criminal networks,” Hegseth, 45, added. “Violence, drugs, and chaos will not control the Western hemisphere.”
On Dec. 16, Trump, 79, declared a “total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela. His administration claims these measures target illicit oil shipments allegedly being used to fund narcotrafficking, terrorism, human trafficking, and other criminal networks tied to the Maduro regime.
That announcement followed months of strikes on what the White House claims are narcotrafficking vessels in the Caribbean Sea. Legal experts warn that those attacks may constitute violations of both domestic and international law.
It also came just days before a legally mandated deadline for the public release of fresh documents from the Justice Department’s investigation of disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Critics of the Trump administration have accused the White House of using military operations against Venezuelan assets in the Caribbean as a means of deflecting attention from those documents, coming as Trump faces intense scrutiny of his own, historically cozy relationship with the late pedophile.
“My great fear, of course, is that with the release of that information, which I think will be devastating for Trump, he’s going to do everything in his power to distract,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a Democrat, told the Associated Press earlier on Wednesday.
“What does that mean? I mean, he might take us to war with Venezuela just to get a distraction in the news and take it out of the headlines,” he added.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the DOD for comment on this story.
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