U.S. President Donald Trump announced a naval blockade of "sanctioned oil tankers" leaving or heading to Venezuela, in a new escalation of his pressure campaign on the Nicolas Maduro regime.

"Today I am ordering a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela," he wrote Trump on his social media accounts, days after US forces seized an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast.

“The illegitimate Maduro regime is using the oil from these stolen oil fields to finance narcoterrorism, human trafficking, murder, and kidnapping,” the Republican accused in his message on Truth Social.

Trump also said that the US fleet concentrated in the Caribbean “will only continue to grow” until Venezuela returns “to the United States of America all the oil, land, and other assets that they previously stole from us.”

Ship Seizure and Assault

Washington shook the oil market on December 10 by assaulting and seizing a tanker that was sanctioned by the Treasury Department and had just left Venezuela loaded with oil.

The United States kept the ship and the crude oil, which was described by the president's administration as Nicolas Maduro accused of “blatant theft.”

At the same time, Washington announced sanctions against six companies in the crude oil transport sector and six tankers.

Internationally isolated, Venezuela is forced to use these “ghost” ships, which load Venezuelan crude at a price far below market value, in order to place it and circumvent the financial sanctions against it.

Blockade would cause difficulties for Caracas

A blockade of its ports to oil traffic would mean enormous difficulties for the regime, analysts agree.

The inclusion of these shipping companies and vessels directly on a sanctions list “is a very significant escalation,” Francisco Monaldi told AFP.Director of the Latin American Energy Program at the Baker Institute (Texas), when that announcement was made.

Those six ships were in Venezuelan ports when the measure was announced, the expert detailed. “They are waiting for [each ship] to leave the country to stop it,” he explained.

“That, combined with the fact that some ships may literally be saying 'I'm not going back to Venezuela,' could lead to a drop in both the price and the volume exported. If exports also fall, the problem Venezuela has is that it doesn't have much capacity to store crude oil. So, it has to stop production or shut down a certain part of production,” he explained.

The United States has deployed a large flotilla in the Caribbean and the Pacific, led by the aircraft carrier “USS Gerald Ford,” the largest in the world.