The United States imposed a blockade on sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela. How does it work?

Asked this weekend whether or how the U.S. government would take over to govern Venezuela after its capture of President Nicolas Maduro this weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instead focused on the application of an American blockade on sanctioned oil tankers.

It is this blockade – announced by US President Donald Trump last December – which will be used as leverage to push for political changes in Venezuela. And that’s the blockade the president is referring to when he talks about ruling Venezuela, Rubio said Sunday on CBS News. Face the nation.

Here is an overview of the origins of the blockade, its implications, its legality and its effectiveness.

Announcement of the blockade

On December 16, Trump announced in a post on his social media platform Truth Social that Venezuela “completely surrounded by the largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America.”

He added that he ordered “a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela.”

This, he said, was in response to the regime being designated a “foreign terrorist organization” for stealing US assets, and “for many other reasons, including drug trafficking and human trafficking.”

Sanctioned tankers are on a list maintained by the US Treasury Department.

When Trump made the announcement, more than 30 ships had been sanctioned by the United States, the New York Times reported, citing figures from independent tracking service Tanker Trackers.

The ships are part of a so-called “ghost fleet” of unflagged tankers that illegally transport crude through global supply chains.

These ships mask their location by changing their automated identification system – a mandatory safety feature intended to avoid collisions – either to become completely dark or to “spoof” their location sometimes give the impression of sailing on distant oceans, under a false flag or with the false registration information of another ship.

“The Maduro regime is increasingly dependent on a shadow fleet of international vessels to facilitate sanctionable activities, including sanctions evasion, and to generate revenue for its destabilizing operations,” the Treasury Department said in a Dec. 31 statement. press release.

Should we even talk about a blockade?

Although Trump has used the term “blockade,” other administration officials, such as Rubio, instead refer to the action as a “quarantine,” targeting illegal activity.

A blockade, according to international law, constitutes an act of war. a bellicose act, that is to say a “global tool of war”, declared Andrew Latham, a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, recently wrote for The Hill.

“Trump, who doesn’t really know much about these issues, used the common sense term blockade, but the technical term, which is the workaround, is quarantine,” Latham said in an interview with CBC News.

(Trump himself seemed to qualify his use of the word blockade in his Truth Social article, with his reference to targeting “sanctioned” oil tankers, which suggests that this was not an act of war, but rather a law enforcement operation.)

As for the legality of a quarantine, Latham says a ship that does not fly the flag or illegally flies the flag of another country is subject to search and seizure.

Mark Nevitt, a law professor at Emory University and former Navy judge advocate general, told The Associated Press last month that there is a legal basis for the United States to board and seize an already sanctioned ship that is considered stateless or claims two states.

But he noted that a blockade is a “wartime naval operation and maneuver” designed to block access by an enemy state’s ships and aircraft. “I think the blockade is based on a false legal pretext that we are at war against narcoterrorists,” he said.

Nevitt added: “It almost seems like a junior college blockade, where they’re trying to assert a legal tool of war, a blockade, but only doing it selectively. »

How many ships were intercepted?

So far, only two boats have been intercepted, but one before the president announced the blockade and the other was not on the sanctions list.

On December 10, a sanctioned ship called Skipper that was heading to China was seized off the coast of Venezuela.

A second ship, the Siècles, was arrested on December 20but he was not on the sanctions list.

In the meantime, U.S. forces plan to intercept another sanctioned vessel, the Marinera, an oil tanker formerly known as the Bella 1, according to CBS News.

Are there any boats breaking the blockade?

In recent days, aat least 16 oil tankers affected by American sanctions have so far we have been able to escape the blockade, in part by masking their true locations or turning off their transmission signals, the New York Times reported Monday.

Fifteen of the 16 ships moving Saturday were under U.S. sanctions for carrying Iranian and Russian oil, according to the Times.

At the same time, Reuters also reported that a dozen tankers loaded with Venezuelan raw and fuel had been leaving the country’s waters since the start of the year, in apparent defiance of the blockade imposed by the US government.

All initially identified vessels are under sanctions and most are now sailing without a known flag or current vessel safety documentation, according to shipping data.

What impact could the blockade have on Venezuela?

Oil exports are Venezuela’s main source of revenue, but exports from the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA, commonly known as PDVSA, the movement stopped last week due to the blockade, Reuters reported.

Without more exports, PDVSA could be forced to deepen the production cuts it began in recent days as storage tanks are full.

All this means that the the blockade could have a significant economic impact on Venezuela. The New York Times reported that if the blockade remains in place, it could lead to the suppression of more than 70 percent of the country’s oil production this year.