Caracas denounces being the victim of “the greatest extortion known in our history, of a gigantic crime of aggression in progress” by Washington
The United States’ Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, assured on Tuesday that his country will impose “maximum” sanctions against Venezuela and reiterated that it will use “all its power” to confront drug cartels, amidst the escalating tensions between Caracas and Washington over the alleged anti-drug trafficking campaign with which the latter seeks to exert pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“The United States will impose and enforce sanctions to the fullest extent to deprive Maduro of the resources he uses to finance the Cartel of the Suns,” he declared during a Security Council meeting convened at the request of Caracas, and after his US counterpart, Donald Trump, stated last week that he “does not rule out” the possibility of a war with the Latin American country.
Waltz emphasized that the announced sanctions “include the profits from oil sales used to finance” this group and Tren de Aragua, considered terrorist organizations by Washington. “The reality is that the sanctioned oil tankers are the main economic support for Maduro and his illegitimate regime. These oil tankers also finance the drug-terrorist group Cartel of the Suns,” he stressed.
The US representative reiterated that the Donald Trump administration “does not recognize Maduro or his associates as the legitimate government of Venezuela,” considering the Venezuelan leader “a fugitive from US justice” and the head of the aforementioned cartel.
He thus assured that “President Trump (…) will use all the power and force of the United States to confront and eradicate these drug cartels that have operated with impunity in our hemisphere for too long,” before warning that “the greatest threat to this hemisphere is in our own neighborhood.” For his part, Venezuela’s permanent representative to the UN, Samuel Moncada, denounced being the victim of “the greatest extortion known in our history, of a gigantic crime of aggression in progress” by the United States, which “wants us to hand over our Orinoco River, our Lake Maracaibo, our Margarita Island, our beaches, rivers, plains, and mountains.”
Along these lines, he stated that this “extortion” by the Trump administration is “outside all rational parameters, all legal logic, all historical precedent,” and recalled that Washington “has publicly stated that it wants to annex our country.”
He further warned that “the aggression is continental.” “We alert the world: Venezuela is only the first target of a larger plan. The U.S. government wants us divided in order to conquer us,” he asserted, after reiterating that “the United States is not fighting drug trafficking in the Caribbean; its mission is to seize Venezuelan resources.”
This Security Council meeting is taking place in a context of escalating tensions between Washington and Caracas, after U.S. military attacks against alleged drug trafficking vessels in Caribbean and Pacific waters have already resulted in more than one hundred deaths. In addition, the Venezuelan government has imposed a blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, and in recent weeks its Coast Guard has intercepted several vessels carrying Venezuelan crude oil.
