Photo by mo jo

“Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro described the detention of an oil tanker seized by US military personnel in the Caribbean Sea on Wednesday as an act of piracy.” Orinoco Tribune, 12 Dec. 2025

Trump, the president of the most capitalist nation on Earth, has dealt a blow to the very system upon which his country – and indeed most of the West – considers the bedrock of the economy. A blow that not even the most revolutionary person today would have foretold or thought to achieve. He has trashed the notion of private property and outright stolen a full oil tanker in international waters, like modern pirates, and kidnapped its crew.

Since September, mighty USA navy warships obliterated with military missiles 22 small outboard motorboats mostly in the Caribbean and some in the Pacific, killing at least 87 people. They were unidentified, unarmed, and there was no evidence of drugs. One boat’s two survivors, clinging to the wreckage for an hour were not picked up but obliterated by a second missile later. These killings were all extra-judicial, therefore illegal as there was no due process, no chance of defence, no courts, no judges, no adherence to USA laws or international laws, no respect of human rights or for age-old norms of seafaring rescue. Trump and his buffoonish “secretary of war” were judge and executioner. In other words, it was premeditated murder. By the precedent set at the Nuremberg trials, all who follow illegal orders to murder are also guilty of murder: an individual carrying out illegal instructions on behalf of a superior is not absolved of responsibility under international law.

The killings have been denounced by most Caribbean and Latin American countries, progressive NGOs worldwide, solidarity movements and most non-aligned countries including Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the BRICS, China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the United Nations. France and the UK have spoken out, but only lukewarm nods have come from Canada and the EU. However, human rights experts and international law experts invariably have pronounced that these were extrajudicial, unlawful killings.

But Wall Street remained unperturbed by the murder of seamen and fishermen. The markets were not affected in any real way: murder in the high seas is “not their department”.

Nor have the markets been affected in any significant way by the hybrid war against Venezuela these past years: the sabotages, the mercenary invasions, the cyberattacks, the exclusion from the international financial system, the UK theft of Venezuelan gold, the theft of all Venezuelan foreign assets including its oil company CITGO, and the sanctions impeding the production and sale of oil by Venezuela restricting its ability to import food and medicines. Venezuela was not even allowed to acquire Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic. The list of actions designed to impoverish and destabilize Venezuela goes on. It includes assassination attempts on Venezuelan leaders, the promotion and recognition of a false president, and the death of more than 100,000 Venezuelans due to the 1,000 illegal, unilateral, brutal economic sanctions. The economic cost to the country is staggering: $232,000 millions to the petroleum sector and $642,000 million to the non-petroleum sector. (https://www.dw.com/es/venezuela-perdió-usd-232000-millones-por-sanciones-de-eeuu/a-64374193; https://mronline.org/2023/08/18/how-u-s-sanctions-are-a-tool-of-war-the-case-of-venezuela/)

None of these appalling imposed sufferings of Venezuelans seemed to impress in any meaningful way geopolitics or world markets. After all, what importance did a Latin American country like Venezuela have in the........

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