The U.S. intercepted a commercial vessel leaving Venezuela on Saturday, days after President Donald Trump announced a “complete blockade” on all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela as part of the administration’s ramped-up pressure against the government of President Nicolás Maduro.
U.S. Coast Guard members boarded an oil tanker that “was last docked in Venezuela,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said in a post on social media. A video with the post shows helicopters hovering over a vessel as service members rappel on a rope onto a deck.
Noem claimed the vessel showed the “illicit movement of sanctioned oil that is used to fund narco terrorism in the region,” which the U.S. has used as justification to conduct military strikes in the Caribbean Sea.
A person familiar with Venezuela’s oil industry told The Washington Post that the tanker apprehended was carrying oil from a China-based trader with a history of taking Venezuelan crude oil to Chinese refineries. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private business matters.
Reuters and the Associated Press reported that the operation took place off the coast of Venezuela in international waters.
The operation was conducted with support from U.S. military assets, two U.S. officials said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details that had not yet been announced. The U.S. military has at least 11 warships patrolling in the area, including the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford. The Coast Guard is an armed forces branch under the Department of Homeland Security.
U.S. forces in the Caribbean last week seized a sanctioned vessel loaded with oil after it left Venezuela. Since September, the military has also conducted 27 strikes that have killed more than 100 people on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean that the U.S. said were carrying drugs.
As of last week, there were more than 30 tankers in the Caribbean designated by the Treasury Department as sanctioned that could be affected immediately by the blockade, according to analysis from the independent ship-tracking site TankerTrackers.com and global intelligence company Kpler.
Of those, at least 12, including the Skipper, which U.S. forces seized last week, are carrying Venezuelan oil, according to Kpler.
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