United States Intercepts Another Vessel Near Venezuela
There are still no further details about the vessel or the exact location where the Coast Guard intercepted it.
HAVANA TIMES – The United States intercepted another sanctioned oil tanker this Saturday in international waters of the Caribbean Sea, off the coast of Venezuela, according to US media.
Last week, the government of President Donald Trump seized a vessel that had departed from Venezuela and confiscated the crude oil it was carrying, which, according to reports, was flying a Panamanian flag.
“In a dawn operation today, December 20, the United States Coast Guard, with support from the Department of War, intercepted an oil tanker that had recently docked in Venezuela,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on social media, confirming the operation.
According to Noem, the US “will continue pursuing the illicit movement of sanctioned oil used to finance narco-terrorism in the region.” “We will find them and we will stop them,” she added in the post, which includes a video with declassified images of the operation.
This is the second vessel intercepted in the Caribbean by the Trump administration, which last week seized the ship Skipper and confiscated the crude it was transporting.
Today’s operation was originally reported by outlets such as The New York Times, which confirmed that the detained ship is called Centuries and is not part of the list of tankers sanctioned by the US, according to a US official and two sources in Venezuela’s oil industry.
The newspaper reports that the vessel belongs to a China-based oil company that transports Venezuelan crude to refineries in that country.
Noem did not refer to these reports in her post, and so far Trump has not commented on the matter.
The US president has intensified pressure on Venezuela in recent weeks and recently ordered a total blockade on the entry and exit of the country by oil tankers sanctioned by the US government.
In addition, Trump said last Wednesday that Venezuela stripped US companies of their oil rights.
“Remember, they took all our energy rights away from us. They took all our oil not so long ago. We want it back. They took it from us illegally,” the president told the press from Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington.