On Wednesday, the United States hijacked an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. This is the latest move in the ongoing invasion of the South American country by the administration of US President Donald Trump.
In recent months, the United States has been recklessly blowing up small boats in the Caribbean with passengers who President Trump telepathically predicted were drug traffickers.
Displaying his passion for ridiculous hyperbole, President Trump declared Wednesday that the seized vessel was “a large tanker, in fact a very large, largest tanker that has ever been captured.”
Asked at a press conference about the ship’s diversion, President Trump advised reporters to “get a helicopter and go after the tanker.” However, given President Trump’s unilateral order to “completely close” the country’s airspace in November, people may be understandably wary of venturing into the skies around Venezuela.
Of course, the airspace closure did not impede the continuation of U.S. deportation flights to Venezuela.
As for the fate of the tanker’s valuable contents, Trump said: “The oil will be stored.”
Admittedly, this comment does little to shore up the US argument that it is not targeting Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, but merely trying to protect the hemisphere from nefarious Venezuelan narco-terrorists who are flooding the mainland with fentanyl and other dangerous products.
In President Trump’s fantasy, the mastermind behind the narco-terrorism operation is none other than Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Never mind that Venezuela has little to do with drugs coming into the US and doesn’t even produce fentanyl.
At times like these, one can’t help but recall the actions of the United States against other oil-rich nations around the turn of the century, when then-President George W. Bush was overseeing a genocidal operation in Iraq based on fabricated allegations of weapons of mass destruction.
But for all the talk about a possible U.S. war against Venezuela, which President Trump has been threatening for months, the reality is that the U.S. is already waging war against Venezuela.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, newly renamed “Secretary of the Army,” recently acknowledged as much when he classified U.S. war crimes against sailors in the Caribbean as a “fog of war.”
But in reality, the U.S. war against Venezuela began long before this year’s mass extrajudicial executions and acts of terror against local fishermen.
The United States imposed punitive sanctions on Venezuela in 2005 after it supported a 2002 coup attempt against Maduro’s former president, Hugo Chávez, a symbol of socialism and a thorn in the empire’s side.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic Policy Research, these sanctions will result in more than 40,000 deaths in the country from 2017 to 2018 alone. Anyone who doubts the intentional lethality of coercive economic measures would do well to remember then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright’s 1996 response to an estimate that 500,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of the U.S. sanctions regime. “We think the cost is worth it.”
Sanctions on Venezuela were then significantly increased by President Trump in 2019, with the aim of supporting the efforts to overthrow Maduro of Juan Guaidó, a little-known right-wing figure who voluntarily appointed Venezuela’s interim president.
Those efforts failed, and Mr. Guaidó was forced to go to Miami, but the sanctions continued to wreak havoc. In March 2019, President Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, eloquently explained the effectiveness of economic warfare to reporters: “The circle is getting tighter. The humanitarian crisis is growing by the minute…You can see the pain and suffering that the Venezuelan people are suffering is growing.”
Indeed, while the official narrative is that sanctions target the powerful, it is the public who pays the price. In the years following Guaido’s failed automatic election, the “suffering suffered by the Venezuelan people” became increasingly clear, with former UN Special Rapporteur Alfredo de Zayas estimating that by 2020, 100,000 Venezuelans had died as a result of sanctions.
In 2021, UN expert Alena Duan reported that the economic blockade has left more than 2.5 million Venezuelans severely food insecure. This is not to mention outbreaks of previously controlled diseases, stunted growth in children, lack of water and electricity, etc.
On the other hand, the fact that at the very moment he was pursuing suspected drug traffickers in Venezuela, President Trump chose to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the former narco-right-wing president of Honduras who was convicted in a US federal court last year, could safely be raised in the “you can’t make this up” category.
In October, President Trump authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela, which, mind you, is the same CIA that has been monitoring the drug trade all along. The recent tanker hijacking incident has highlighted the government’s complete disregard for anything resembling civilized diplomacy.
The other day I spoke with a young Venezuelan man I met at the Darien Gap who is heading to America in 2023. He is one of the millions of Venezuelans who have been forced to flee their homes in search of economically sustainable livelihoods.
After nearly drowning in a river while trying to enter the United States from Mexico, he was detained for a month before entering the country on a provisional basis. Two years later, he was captured by ICE agents in California and held for several more months before being deported to Caracas.
When I asked him what he thought about Trump’s current machinations in Venezuela, all he said was, “I have no words.”
And as the United States plunges into a new, unrealistic war armed with outright lies, it is often at a loss for words.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
