On Wednesday, the United States hijacked an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela – a new move in the ongoing aggression against the South American nation by the administration of US President Donald Trump.
Over recent months, the US has gone about wantonly blowing up small boats in the Caribbean Sea along with their passengers, whom Trump has telepathically divined to be drug traffickers.
Exercising his passion for ridiculous overstatement, Trump proclaimed on Wednesday that the seized vessel was a “large tanker, very large, largest one ever seized, actually”.
When asked at a news conference about the ship’s altered destination, Trump advised reporters to “get a helicopter and follow the tanker” – although folks might reasonably be wary of taking to the skies around Venezuela given Trump’s unilateral decree in November that the country’s airspace was “closed in its entirety”.
Of course, the airspace closure hasn’t managed to interfere with continuing US deportation flights to Venezuela.
Regarding the fate of the tanker’s valuable contents, Trump remarked, “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.”
To be sure, this comment doesn’t do much to shore up the US claim that it’s not after Venezuela’s vast oil reserves at all, but is simply trying to guard the hemisphere against nefarious Venezuelan narco-terrorists endeavouring to flood the homeland with fentanyl and other deadly products.
As per Trumpian fantasy, the ringleader of the narco-terror operation is none other than Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro himself.
Never mind that Venezuela has approximately zero to do with drugs entering the US and doesn’t even produce fentanyl.
At times like these, one can’t help but recall US behaviour vis-a-vis another oil-rich nation around the turn of the century, when then-President George W Bush oversaw a campaign of mass slaughter in Iraq based on manufactured allegations of weapons of mass destruction.
But amid all the talk of a potential US war on Venezuela – which Trump has been threatening for months – the fact of the matter is that the US is already waging war on the country.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, newly rebranded as the “Secretary of War”, recently admitted as much when he chalked up US war crimes against Caribbean seafarers to the “fog of war”.
In reality, however, the US war on Venezuela long predates this year’s slew of extrajudicial executions and terrorisation of local fishermen.
After backing a failed coup in 2002 against Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, a socialist icon and thorn in the side of empire, the US imposed punishing sanctions on Venezuela in 2005.
According to the Washington, DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, these sanctions would go on to cause more than 40,000 deaths in the country in 2017-18 alone. Anyone doubting the intentional lethality of coercive economic measures would do well to recall the 1996 response of then-US ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright to the estimate that half a million Iraqi children had thus far perished as a result of the US sanctions regime: “We think the price is worth it.”
Sanctions on Venezuela were then drastically intensified by Trump in 2019, with an eye to assisting Juan Guaido – the little-known right-wing character who had spontaneously appointed himself interim president of Venezuela – in his efforts to oust Maduro.
Those efforts were unsuccessful, and Guaido ended up in Miami, but sanctions continued to wreak devastating havoc. In March 2019, Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo boasted eloquently to the press of the effectiveness of economic warfare: “The circle is tightening. The humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour … You can see the increasing pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering from.”
Indeed, while the official narrative is that sanctions are meant to target the powers that be, it is the general public that pays the price. In the years following Guaido’s failed auto-election, the “suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering from” became ever more apparent, and by 2020, former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas estimated that 100,000 Venezuelans had died on account of sanctions.
In 2021, UN expert Alena Douhan reported that the economic blockade had rendered more than 2.5 million Venezuelans severely food insecure. This is to say nothing of outbreaks of previously controlled diseases, stunted growth among children, and shortages of water and electricity.
It can meanwhile be safely filed under the “can’t make this sh*t up” category that, at the very moment he is going after alleged narco-traffickers in Venezuela, Trump chose to pardon Juan Orlando Hernandez, the right-wing former narco-president of Honduras who was convicted last year in a US federal court.
In October, Trump authorised the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela – the same CIA, mind you, that has been up to its eyeballs in the drug trade since forever. Now with the tanker hijacking, the administration has underscored its acute disregard for anything resembling civilised diplomacy.
The other day, I spoke with a young Venezuelan man whom I met in the Darien Gap in 2023 as he made his way towards the US – one of millions of Venezuelans forced to leave home in search of a life that is economically sustainable.
After almost drowning in the river as he crossed from Mexico into the US, he was detained for a month and then provisionally released into the country. Two years later, he was captured by ICE agents in California, detained for several more months, and then deported to Caracas.
When I asked him his thoughts on Trump’s current machinations in Venezuela, he said simply: “I have no words.”
And as the US barrels towards another surreal war armed with blatant lies, words are indeed often hard to come by.
