WHISTLE BLOWER ALERT: When does a naval blockade stop being law enforcement? When does it become what it actually is: piracy on the high seas?

The answer, apparently, is when Washington decides that international law is an inconvenience rather than a constraint.

The US Coast Guard is currently pursuing vessels in international waters near Venezuela. This month alone, they have already seized two oil tankers.

On Saturday, an armed tactical team boarded a Panama-flagged vessel in international waters.

Another pursuit is underway. The Trump administration refers to this as sanctions enforcement. Venezuela calls it piracy. International law suggests Venezuela has the better argument.

The United States is a party to the 1958 Convention on the High Seas. This is stated under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

It is prohibited to seize foreign-flagged vessels on the high seas without flag state consent. Exceptions are made for cases of piracy, the slave trade, or statelessness.

Domestic sanctions, no matter how enthusiastically proclaimed, confer no authority under international law. They do not grant permission to board and seize vessels in international waters.

Yet here we are, watching the United States seize tankers. They pursue vessels and announce a total and complete blockade of a sovereign nation’s oil exports.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared the current status quo with Venezuela intolerable and vowed to change that dynamic. His deputy, Stephen Miller, went further, claiming that Venezuelan oil rightfully belongs to the United States because American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela’

Read that again. A White House official is asserting American ownership of another nation’s natural resources based on historical corporate involvement.

This is colonial logic dressed in policy jargon. It is the United Fruit Company’s playbook updated for the 21st century. This should alarm anyone who values international law and national sovereignty.

The historical precedent is not on America’s side. Venezuela nationalized its oil industry in 1976 under President Carlos Andrés Pérez, a process completed by Hugo Chávez in 2007.

While ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips received arbitration awards, this does not transform sovereign nationalization into theft. Nor does it grant the United States military authority to seize vessels in international waters decades later.

The principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources is established international law. Venezuela’s oil belongs to Venezuela, full stop.

Trump’s claim that Venezuela ‘stole’ American oil, land, and assets is historically illiterate propaganda.

A sovereign nation exercised its right to control its own resources. This is a right recognized in international law. American corporations once profited from Venezuelan oil. This does not make it American property. Similarly, British investment in Indian railways did not make India British property in perpetuity.

But the oil is merely the prize. The justification being peddled to the American public is drugs.

The administration claims these vessels carry narcotics funding ‘narco-terrorism.’

Yet, it has provided precisely zero public evidence to support this assertion. None.

Meanwhile, since September, US forces have conducted at least 28 strikes on alleged drug boats, killing 104 people.

One strike involved a follow-up attack that killed survivors clinging to wreckage in the water and what multiple legal experts have called a clear war crime.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime flatly contradicts the administration’s narrative.

The majority of drugs entering the United States do not come from Venezuela or through the Caribbean. They come from Colombia and Peru, transported via the Pacific coast.

Venezuela is not even identified as a cocaine-producing country by the UN. This is not a war on drugs. It is a pretext for regime change dressed in counter-narcotics clothing.

We have seen this film before, and we know how it ends. Between 1898 and 1994, the United States successfully intervened to change governments in Latin America 41 times.

Once every 28 months for an entire century. Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Nicaragua throughout the 1980s.

The pattern is consistent. Economic interests clash with a sovereign government’s policies. Corporate lobbying intensifies. Dubious intelligence claims emerge about threats to American security. Military intervention follows.

In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company’s land was redistributed to peasants.

The CIA engineered a coup. 250,000 people died in the subsequent four decades of military dictatorship.

In Chile, Salvador Allende’s democratic socialism threatened American corporate interests. Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup installed a regime that killed 28,000 people.

In Nicaragua, the Contras received American backing despite a congressional ban, leaving 30,000 dead.

Now Marco Rubio is the same man who championed Elliott Abrams as special envoy to Venezuela in 2019. Elliott Abrams was convicted for his role in Iran-Contra. Rubio declares Venezuela’s status quo ‘intolerable’ and promises to change the ‘dynamic.’

The administration has taken action. Trump calls it ‘the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America.’ They have deployed it off Venezuela’s coast.

It is seizing oil tankers in international waters. It is killing boat crews without trial or evidence. And Venezuela, conveniently, possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Source. Paul Knaggs:

QUOTE: ‘The enemy is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission. It is a destiny imposed by the Deity. We regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets. We civilize savage, senile, and paranoid peoples. Sometimes, we blunder accidentally into their oil wells.’ ~ John Flynn, 1944.

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