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AMY GOODMAN: At least two oil tankers have reportedly arrived in Venezuela in recent days, with other vessels navigating toward the Venezuelan coast, despite the Trump administration’s blockade. Two other tankers approaching Venezuela are not under sanction, are part of a fleet from China.
Venezuela’s state oil company has begun shutting some crude oil wells on account of the U.S. pressure on exports and storage space being filled. They’ve announced daily production will be reduced by 15%.
Meanwhile, the U.S. carried out a drone strike on a remote dock facility last week in the first report of a land attack on Venezuela by the U.S. since the Trump administration’s military pressure campaign began.
Since September, the Pentagon has claimed 30 attacks on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 107 people. The Trump administration claims, without evidence, the boats were carrying fentanyl bound for the U.S., and calls for the people killed — calls the people killed “narcoterrorists.”
For more, we go to Caracas, where we’re joined by journalist Andreína Chávez, her latest piece for Drop Site News headlined “’War of the entire people’: Venezuela’s Grassroots Rise to Resist Trump’s Naval Blockade.”
Andreína, can you start off by talking about the response to this latest news? President Trump said it himself last week. Though he didn’t say there was a CIA land attack on Venezuela, he said there was a U.S. attack. And now, in the days, U.S. administration officials say it was a CIA strike. If you can talk about both that, the killing of people in these boats, and how the people of Venezuela are responding?
ANDREÍNA CHÁVEZ: Thank you so much for having me.
And yes, so, as you know, in the last four months, since August specifically, the United States has been amassing a large military buildup in the Caribbean under the pretext that they are fighting drug trafficking. And under that pretext, they have been bombing dozens of small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and they have killed over a hundred people.
Now, there is absolutely no evidence so far that these people, these civilian boats were actually drug trafficking. There is no evidence of that. And, in fact, if you look at the data, at international data, you will find out that Venezuela doesn’t produce cocaine or fentanyl. So the narrative that the United States is pushing, that these boats were coming from Venezuela and were gathering drugs and they were heading for the United States, doesn’t really rely on any verifiable evidence.
Cocaine and fentanyl are not produced in Venezuela. Cocaine is mainly produced in countries like Colombia, Peru, Bolivia. And only less than 10% of that cocaine produced in those countries passes through Venezuela — less than 10%. That means that more than 80% of the cocaine that is produced in Latin America reaches the United States via land, via Central American nations that are actually allies with the U.S. government, and via the Pacific. So, the idea that these boats are carrying drugs that are coming from Venezuela and heading to the United States is not credible. And in the case of fentanyl, fentanyl is produced in North American countries, and it reaches the United States by land through the Mexican border.
So, basically, the United States is killing people in the Caribbean and the Pacific with absolutely no evidence. In fact, United Nations experts have already made it very clear that these are extrajudicial killings. And even if there was the suspicions that these boats were carrying drugs, the correct procedure will be to seize and to detain the people, to detain people. And the United States is not doing that. They’re just killing them.
And why? You have to ask yourself: Why is the United States simply killing these people, bombing these civilian vessels, instead of doing the correct procedure? But because they don’t really care about the whole drug trafficking issue — they know that these vessels most likely are just civilians and fishermen — they care about pushing the narrative justifying the presence of the U.S. military in the Caribbean. For what? So they can arrive to this exact moment right now, in which the United States, the president, Donald Trump, has announced that Venezuela is now under a naval blockade, a complete and total blockade against Venezuela, and is now seizing oil tankers in the Caribbean, in Caribbean waters.
The first oil tanker was actually seized on December 10, and the tanker was later taken to Texas to unload the oil, because Trump said that the United States would simply keep the oil that these tankers were carrying. The second tanker —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Andreína?
ANDREÍNA CHÁVEZ: — was — yes?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Andreína, I just wanted to ask you about this issue of Trump claiming that Venezuela in the past has taken oil that belonged to the United States. If you could comment about that? And also, you’ve written about the commune movement. Most people in the United States have no awareness of the vast commune movement that’s developed in Venezuela in recent years. If you could talk about the communes, how they arose?
ANDREÍNA CHÁVEZ: Indeed. So, what I was saying about the oil tankers, I mean, the point that I wanted to reach is that the United States said that they’re going to target sanctioned oil tankers, and that’s actually not true. They are targeting any oil tanker that enters and leaves Venezuela. And this is with the purpose of creating economic asphyxiation. That is the purpose. I was actually listening to an interview of Elliott Abrams yesterday, and he was saying — you know, he was the special envoy for Venezuela during Trump’s first administration. And he was admitting that the purpose of the naval blockade is to asphyxiate the Venezuelan economy, so the people will pressure the Maduro government and eventually overthrow the Maduro government.
So, why is this happening? The whole military operation in the Caribbean, what’s behind it? It is the United States wants to control the oil in Venezuela. It wants the oil. And President Trump said it. He said that he believes that Venezuela owes oil to the United States, that the United States was robbed at some point of all the oil, that it belongs to them, that is in Venezuelan soil.
Why does Trump believe that? Because in the early 2000s, the Venezuelan government, led by Hugo Chávez, nationalized Venezuela’s oil industry. That meant that all these corporations that were working in Venezuela, they now had to transfer ownership to the state. So, joint ventures will be — will have a mixed ownership in which the state, Venezuelan state, will have a majority stake. And that was part of Venezuela’s sovereign reindustrialization, sovereign renationalization of these resources, with the aim to be able to put this money, this revenue of the oil exports, into the Venezuelan people.
A lot of corporations, especially ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, they didn’t like the idea that the Venezuelan state was going now to have a majority stake in joint ventures. So they decided to leave Venezuela, and they abandoned their oil facilities in Venezuela. And they began claiming through international arbitration — they began trying to claim some sort of compensation for this nationalization process.
And right now what Trump is saying is that Venezuela oils — owns oils — that Venezuela needs to give the United States all this oil that, according to him, was stolen simply because we nationalized our own resources. So, that is what Trump is saying.
And actually, very recently, he said — he claimed that he was bombing a drug facility in Venezuela, in a port in Venezuela. And just to clarify, there’s actually no verifiable evidence that this attack happened, so far. We don’t have any evidence. There is no witness that this attack happened. We don’t know the location of the alleged attack. The Venezuelan authorities have not said anything acknowledging that there has been a strike in Venezuelan land. So, we don’t know anything about that. And it’s important to clarify that we don’t have actual confirmation about it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Andreína, we only have —
ANDREÍNA CHÁVEZ: Now, when you were asking about —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Andreína, we only have a little bit of time left. Could you talk about the communes, how they have arose —
ANDREÍNA CHÁVEZ: Yes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — and their role in trying to prevent regime change by the United States?
ANDREÍNA CHÁVEZ: Indeed. So, the Venezuelan communes and Venezuelan popular organizations in general have responded to Trump’s claims that he owns the Venezuelan oil with a very strong response, saying that they’re going to defend sovereignty, that they’re going to defend Venezuela’s self-determination.
And they also send this message. I was speaking with Lana Vielma, who is a spokesperson for El Maizal Commune, and she reminded me of something that is very true. Venezuela is not the same country that it was 10 or five years ago. Right now Venezuela doesn’t depend on essential imports to be able — for people to be able to eat or to have medicine. We’re now producing almost 100% of the food that we consume. And that is because Venezuela’s popular organizations during the worst times of the economic crisis in between 2017 and 2020, when Trump applied the first sanctions against Venezuela, during those times, we learned that we needed to diversify the economy. We learned that we needed to create a sovereign production, that we needed to create sovereign distribution systems in Venezuela, so we couldn’t be led to a starvation, which is what the Trump administration is trying to do right now. They’re trying to starve the Venezuelan population by creating this naval blockade. So Venezuelan communes are pledging alliance to defending the country from these — from this imperialist attack.
For those who don’t know, Venezuela has a communal movement. Communes in Venezuela began to form around 2009, and they were part of Venezuela’s political transformation into a more socialist society. The whole point of communes is that people from the same communities or who share the same territory, they unite, and they organize to manage their own resources, to manage their own communities. In the case of rural communes, they organize to produce food, to produce services, to process food, and to distribute that within their own communities and even communities beyond the commune. So, this is the response that Venezuelan communes and popular organizations in general are giving in the face of this new —
AMY GOODMAN: Andreína —
ANDREÍNA CHÁVEZ: — economic sabotage.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you for being with us, and encourage people to read your article at Drop Site News. Andreína Chávez, speaking to us from Caracas. The article, “’War of the entire people’: Venezuela’s Grassroots Rise to Resist Trump’s Naval Blockade.”
Next up, Israel bans dozens of humanitarian groups from operating in Gaza beginning January 1st. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Shel Shel,” “Carry Carry,” performed here in New York by the Palestinian Youth Choir.
