The Maduro Government considers that Trump’s decision violates “international law, free trade and free navigation”, which it classified as a “reckless and serious threat”.
Caracas adds that the US president’s “true intention” “has always been to appropriate the country’s oil, land and minerals through gigantic campaigns of lies and manipulation”, an accusation that he has been repeating for weeks.
“On his social networks, he [Trump] assumes that Venezuela’s oil, land and mineral wealth are its property”, states the Venezuelan Government, reaffirming the South American nation’s sovereignty over its natural resources and its “right to free navigation and free trade in the Caribbean Sea and the world’s oceans”.
Caracas also announces that it will proceed, in “strict accordance with the UN Charter, in accordance with the full exercise of its freedom, jurisdiction and sovereignty, above warmongering threats”, and that its ambassador to the multilateral organization will immediately denounce “this serious violation of international law against Venezuela”.
“Venezuela will never again be a colony of an empire or any foreign power”, states the statement from the Venezuelan Government, which calls on the North American people and the world to “reject this extravagant threat by all means”.
Trump stated on Truth Social that Venezuela “is completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — until they return to the United States of America all the oil, land and other assets they previously stole from us.”
The “total blockade” against oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela represents an important escalation of the North American military operation that has been taking place since August in the international waters of the Caribbean Sea and which, until now, allegedly had as its central objective the fight against drug trafficking organizations operating in the region.
The American president argues in the message published in Truth Social that “Maduro’s illegitimate regime is using the oil from these stolen fields to finance itself, narcoterrorism, human trafficking, murders and kidnappings.”
Last week, the United States Southern Command, which has so far attacked more than three dozen vessels and executed 95 crew members allegedly linked to drug trafficking in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, seized the oil tanker Skipper, which was transporting Venezuelan oil, in international waters.