On December 10, the U.S. seized a fully loaded oil tanker that had just left port in Venezuela. The attack was launched from the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford, which is part of the huge armada that the U.S. has amassed in the Caribbean Sea to threaten Venezuela. Attorney General Bondi “proudly” posted a 45-second video of the operation on X, showing armed troops descending onto the ship's deck from helicopters. 

The seizure of an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast is a major escalation of Trump's criminal aggression toward the sovereign nation of Venezuela. It’s too early to know if these fascists will impose a full blockade of Venezuela's oil. But their threat to do so is already making shipowners, operators and maritime agencies involved in transporting Venezuelan oil reconsider whether to sail from Venezuelan waters as planned, fearing their ships could be seized next. 

The Trump fascist regime is now using the threat of causing economic collapse in Venezuela as their latest move to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power. The fascist Trump regime knows that oil exports are what keeps Venezuela's fragile economy going. And they are fully aware of the tremendous harm continued seizures would bring to the people of Venezuela. The sanctions imposed on Venezuelan oil by Trump in 2017 and 2019 led to what has been called “the worst depression in the history of this hemisphere.” 

Bondi stated that the FBI, Homeland Security, and Coast Guard executed “a seizure warrant [issued by a U.S. federal judge] for a crude oil tanker, called the Skipper, used to transport U.S.-sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran.”¹ The tanker had been sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022 for “oil smuggling.” The U.S. claims it is part of a global network of hundreds of tankers, known as the “shadow fleet,” that transports crude oil for governments like Venezuela, Iran, and Russia, whose oil revenues have been sanctioned by the U.S. and its allies. (China is the largest buyer of crude oil from Venezuela and Iran, which it receives through third-party countries or on “shadow fleet” tankers.)

How fitting that the law-violating attorney general Pam Bondi announced this—for this takes the Trump regime’s international lawlessness and aggression to a new level. Bondi’s claim that the Skipper was seized in accordance with domestically imposed sanctions has no standing in international law. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea does provide a “right to visit” a “stateless” ship (one not registered with any country) on the high seas, but the U.S. is not a party to that convention.² Nevertheless, the next day the Trump regime imposed sanctions on half a dozen more ships accused of carrying oil from Venezuela, without presenting evidence.

The day before the oil tanker seizure, a pair of U.S. Navy fighter jets flew over the Gulf of Venezuela. And on December 12, they flew over the nearby islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao. Described by the U.S. as an “expanded security operation targeting illicit trafficking networks,” these fly-bys are the closest U.S. warplanes have come to Venezuela's airspace since the September 2 start of their serial murders of people on small boats in the waters near Venezuela. These strikes have killed close to 90 civilians so far. And Trump has again declared that land strikes on Venezuela are imminent, saying in an interview last week that “we’re going to hit ’em on land very soon, too.”

A Major Escalation

The seizure of the Venezuelan oil vessel brings the region closer to the brink of war, with every day bringing greater dangers. As we described the situation recently, “What was a dangerous and flammable situation just had several more gallons of gasoline poured on it by a madman playing with a box of matches.” These moves pose extreme danger to the people of Venezuela, Colombia, to all of Latin America, and the whole world. Any war launched by the Trump fascist regime would be a criminal outrage. 

A Conscious Policy of Mass Starvation: Made in USA

Oil exports make up nearly 90 percent of Venezuela’s export revenue. If the U.S. seized more Venezuelan oil tankers and put a halt to Venezuelan oil exports, that would have a devastating effect on the economy, and make the dire economic situation faced by the Venezuelan people far worse. Their current hardships are the result of the vicious Trump sanctions that were inflicted on Venezuela in 2017 and 2019. As the Revolutionary Communist Group, Colombia, wrote last year:

The majority of those who claim to denounce the precarious situation of the Venezuelan people fail to identify, deliberately or out of ignorance, who is most responsible: U.S. imperialism....

... The situation that the masses are experiencing in Venezuela is unbearable. It is estimated that about half of the population is in poverty, about 6.5 million Venezuelans suffer from hunger, and at least 7.7 million people (a quarter of the population) have left Venezuela and have been displaced, mainly to Colombia, the United States, Chile, Peru, and Spain. 

... U.S. economic sanctions began in 2017 under the Trump administration. The United States restricted operations, transactions and negotiations with the Venezuelan government, and in 2019 intensified these sanctions in order to hinder the marketing of Venezuelan oil on the international market. 

A report just released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research sees a similar great danger in this moment:

Tens of thousands of Venezuelans died in just the first year of the Trump sanctions, and many more in the years that followed. This economic collapse is mainly because the sanctions cut off access to the international financial system and blocked vital foreign exchange earnings from oil exports; and so [today] Venezuela is threatened with another devastating return to hyperinflation.

The Trump regime knows full well the consequences of their actions.  This is in fact their aim—to use the weapon of mass starvation, among other threats, to oust Maduro. 

You do not have to support the Maduro regime to vehemently oppose—in the streets—what your government is doing in Venezuela. In fact, we in this country have a responsibility to mount protest against what is being done in our name. 

Stop ALL U.S. Attacks on Venezuela!  No War!  The Fascist Trump Regime Must Go NOW!