US President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that Venezuela’s oil exports have been placed under a “total and complete blockade.” The American president is now demanding that the country hand over its oil to the United States.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest armada in South American history. It will only grow, and their shock will be something they have never experienced before – until they return to the United States all oil, land, and other assets they have previously stolen from us.”
This is what Donald Trump wrote on his own platform Truth social on Wednesday. The US is on the warpath again, and as usual, it’s about oil.
The World’s Largest Oil Reserves
Venezuela has a relatively modest oil production; it doesn’t even make the top ten list of the world’s biggest oil producers. At the same time, the country today is believed to have the world’s largest oil reserves, according to OPEC, as well as the US EIA and Britain’s BP.
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The so-called Orinoco Belt is the main reason for this. Under the soil beneath the Orinoco River in northern Venezuela, there are estimated to be tens of billions of cubic meters of heavy crude oil. And it was only during the 2010s that extraction was considered to be economically viable.
The Orinoco River has its source deep inside the Amazon rainforest, near the border with Brazil. From there, it meanders northwest, forming a border river with Colombia, before veering east toward the Atlantic.
And it is along this final stretch of the river’s flow, before it reaches the ocean, that these enormous oil reserves are located. The world’s largest oil reserves. More oil than both Saudi Arabia and Canada combined.
“Venezuela Is Taking Our Oil”
Up until the mid-1970s, American oil companies were deeply involved in Venezuela’s oil industry. However, in the early part of that decade, a nationalization process began, during which the Venezuelan state increasingly took control over oil production.
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The last highly publicized conflict occurred in 2007, when ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips had their oil fields in Venezuela expropriated. And it is in large part this eighteen-year-old incident that Trump is using as a pretext for military actions against the South American country.
“The USA will not allow criminals, terrorists, or other countries to rob, threaten, or harm our land, and will also not allow a hostile regime to take our oil, land, or any other assets – all of this must immediately be returned to the United States,” he writes on Truth Social.
The US government claims that Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is engaged in “narco-terrorism, human trafficking, murder, and kidnapping” and has labeled his government a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Has Informed Its Allies
On Wednesday, the US president declares a “total and complete blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers en route to or departing from Venezuela.” Something that could be considered an act of war.
This action does not come as a bolt from the blue. For several months, the US has been amassing forces outside Venezuela. Among others, the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, has been stationed in the Caribbean Sea since the beginning of last month.
As early as the end of October, the US government formally informed its military allies, including Sweden, that Nicolás Maduro is not considered a legitimate president and that he is viewed as an “extraordinary threat” to US security.
Samnytt has obtained emails from the American embassy to the Swedish government. The emails reveal that the US will use “all available means” to cut off the Venezuelan government. They also urge the Swedish government to participate in measures against the South American country.