US Coast Guard seizes sanctioned vessel off | Political News

U.S. forces on Saturday stopped an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela for the second time in less than two weeks as President Donald Trump continues to ramp up stress on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The pre-dawn operation comes days after Trump announced a “blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers coming in and out of the South American nation and follows the Dec. 10 seizure by American forces of an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed that the U.S. Coast Guard, with help from the Defense Department, stopped the oil tanker that was last docked in Venezuela. She also posted on social media an unclassified video of a U.S helicopter touchdown personnel on a vessel called Centuries.

A crude oil tanker flying under the flag of Panama operates under the identify and was lately noticed close to the Venezuelan coast, according to MarineTraffic, a project that tracks the motion of vessels around the globe utilizing publicly obtainable data. It was not immediately clear if the vessel was under U.S. sanctions.

“The United States will continue to pursue the illicit movement of sanctioned oil that is used to fund narco terrorism in the region,” Noem wrote on X. “We will find you, and we will stop you.”

The motion was a “consented boarding,” with the tanker stopping voluntarily and permitting U.S. forces to board it, according to a U.S. official who was not approved to remark publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Pentagon and White House officers didn’t immediately reply to a request for remark.

Trump ,following the first tanker seizure, of a vessel named the Skipper, this month vowed that the U.S. would perform a blockade of Venezuela. It all comes as Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric toward Maduro and warned that the longtime Venezuelan chief’s days in energy are numbered.

And the president this week demanded that Venezuela return property that it seized from U.S. oil firms years in the past, justifying anew his announcement of a “blockade” against oil tankers touring to or from the South American nation that face American sanctions.

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Trump cited the misplaced U.S. investments in Venezuela when requested about his latest tactic in a stress marketing campaign against Maduro, suggesting the Republican administration’s strikes are at least considerably motivated by disputes over oil investments, along with accusations of drug trafficking. Some sanctioned tankers already are diverting away from Venezuela.

“We’re not going to be letting anybody going through who shouldn’t be going through,” Trump told reporters earlier this week. “You remember they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil not that long ago. And we want it back. They took it — they illegally took it.”

U.S. oil firms dominated Venezuela’s petroleum industry until the nation’s leaders moved to nationalize the sector, first in the Nineteen Seventies and again in the twenty first century under Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Compensation provided by Venezuela was deemed inadequate, and in 2014 an worldwide arbitration panel ordered the nation’s socialist authorities to pay $1.6 billion to ExxonMobil.

The concentrating on of tankers comes as Trump has ordered the Defense Department to perform a collection of assaults on vessels in the Caribbean and japanese Pacific Ocean that his administration alleges are smuggling fentanyl and other unlawful medication into the United States and past.

At least 104 people have been killed in 28 identified strikes since early September.