President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is ordering a blockade of all “sanctioned oil tankers” into Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country’s dictator Nicolas Maduro in a move that seemed designed to put a tighter chokehold on the South American country.
Trump’s escalation comes after U.S. forces last week seized an illegal oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast, a bold move that followed a buildup of military forces in the region. In a post on social media Tuesday night announcing the blockade, Trump said Venezuela was using oil to fund drug trafficking and other crimes and vowed to continue the military buildup until the country gave back U.S. oil, land and assets.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
Pentagon officials referred all questions about the post to the White House.
Venezuela’s government released a statement Tuesday accusing Trump of “violating international law, free trade, and the principle of free navigation” with “a reckless and grave threat” against the South American country.
“On his social media, he assumes that Venezuela’s oil, land, and mineral wealth are his property,” the statement said of Trump’s post. “Consequently, he demands that Venezuela immediately hand over all its riches. The President of the United States intends to impose, in an utterly irrational manner, a supposed naval blockade on Venezuela with the aim of stealing the wealth that belongs to our nation.”
The U.S. buildup has been accompanied by a series of military strikes on narcoterrorist boats in international waters in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The campaign, which has drawn scrutiny among U.S. lawmakers, has killed at least 95 people in 25 known strikes on vessels.
Trump has warned for weeks said that the U.S. will move its campaign beyond the water and start strikes on land.
The Trump administration has defended the strikes as a success, saying they have prevented deadly drugs from reaching American shores.
The Trump administration has said the campaign is about stopping drugs headed to the U.S., but Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles appeared to confirm in a Vanity Fair interview published Tuesday that the campaign is part of a push to oust Maduro.
Wiles said Trump “wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle.”
Tuesday night’s announcement seemed to have a similar aim.
Venezuela, which has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and produces about 1 million barrels a day, has long relied on oil revenue as a lifeblood of its economy.
Since the U.S. began imposing oil sanctions on Venezuela in 2017, Maduro’s government has relied on a shadowy fleet of illegal tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.
The state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., commonly known as PDVSA, has been locked out of global oil markets by U.S. sanctions. It sells most of its exports at a steep discount in the black market in China.
Francisco Monaldi, a Venezuelan oil expert at Rice University in Houston, said about 850,000 barrels of the 1 million daily production is exported. Of that, he said, 80% goes to China, 15% to 17% goes to the U.S. through Chevron Corp., and the remainder goes to Cuba.
In October, Trump appeared to confirm reports that Maduro has offered a stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in recent months to try to stave off mounting pressure from the United States.
“He’s offered everything,” Trump said at the time. “You know why? Because he doesn’t want to f—- around with the United States.”
The U.S. Navy has 11 ships, including an aircraft carrier and several amphibious assault ships, in the region.
Those ships carry a wide complement of aircraft, including helicopters and V-22 Ospreys. Additionally, the Navy has been operating a handful of P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft in the region.
All told, those assets provide the military a significant ability to monitor marine traffic coming in and out of the country.
In November, the Trump administration announced it was designating the Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization. The term Cartel de los Soles originally referred to Venezuelan military officers involved in drug-running, but it is not a cartel per se.
Governments that U.S. administrations seek to sanction for financing, otherwise fomenting or tolerating extremist violence are usually designated “state sponsors of terrorism.”
Venezuela is not on that list.
In rare cases, the U.S. has designated an element of a foreign government as an “FTO.” The Trump administration in its first term did so with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an arm of the Iranian government, which had already been designated a state sponsor of terrorism.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.