The general Vladimir Padrino López, defense minister of the Venezuelan regime, described Donald Trump's government as arrogant and overbearing.
“The imperialists will want a weak, submissive government here, one that gives them everything easily, just as it has been all along. As long as there is an independence project here, anti-oligarchic and anti-imperialist, we will have the boot of imperialism on us, because they will always want to subjugate us with their arrogance and imperial overconfidence,” the military official said during a meeting with militias.
According to a report by the state agency Telesur, Padrino emphasized the "technological and scientific advancement of the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB), which quietly found sovereign solutions to complex technical problems, demonstrating that national talent is capable of overcoming the dependency imposed by the blockade."
The general's statements come amid a growing atmosphere of tension following the recent seizure by the U.S. of three oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela.
This Sunday, a third vessel was seized in international waters near Venezuela, the oil tanker Bella-1, flying the Panamanian flag.
According to a government source confirmed to Bloomberg, the ship was headed to Venezuela.
The Bella-1, linked to the company Louis Marine Shipholding Enterprises, which is in turn associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, has been sanctioned since June 2024 by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Treasury.
On Saturday, for its part, the U.S. government declassified images of the seizure of this second oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.
"In an action before dawn this morning, December 20, the U.S. Coast Guard, with the support of the Department of Defense, detained an oil tanker that was last docked in Venezuela," said Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on X.
"The United States will continue to pursue the illicit trafficking of authorized oil that is used to finance narcoterrorism in the region. We will find them and stop them," he added.
Additionally, the first of the ships seized last week, with a capacity exceeding 320,000 tons of crude, was transporting oil destined for Cuba and was part of an illegal network that trafficked sanctioned crude oil from Venezuela and Iran.
The U.S. imposed energy sanctions on Venezuela in 2019, leading buyers and refiners to turn to a "ghost fleet" or "shadow fleet" of tankers that mask their location, and such a fleet is considered vulnerable to potential punitive measures from Washington.
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