Spanish
Caracas,.- The president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, asked this Wednesday the farmers and fishermen of the country to be prepared to "break the teeth" to the United States, which maintains a military deployment in the Caribbean under the argument of combating drug trafficking and which Caracas calls a "threat".
"The same productive hands we have are the hands that grab the rifles, the tanks, the missiles to defend this sacred land from any invading empire, from any aggressor empire," said the president in a march for the 166th anniversary of the Battle of Santa Inés, in Caracas.You may be interested in: http://Trump announces that the U.S. confiscated an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela
Maduro said that in these times one must be like "warriors", working, producing, building, with the country functioning and "prepared to break the teeth of the North American empire, if necessary". "It should be noted that a powerful public opinion movement has arisen in the world rejecting the military aggression of the United States against Venezuela and the Caribbean," he added. The mobilization in Caracas coincided with the awarding, in Oslo, of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, absent from the ceremony, but who after 11 months of remaining in hiding in her country is expected in the Norwegian capital. This Wednesday, US President Donald Trump announced that his country intercepted and seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, raising tensions between Washington and Caracas. "We have just seized a tanker off the coast of Venezuela, a large tanker, a very large one, the largest ever seized, actually," the president declared at the start of a round table with businessmen at the White House. The Bloomberg agency had first reported exclusively, citing sources familiar with the case, that a tanker sanctioned by the United States had been seized by Washington off the coast of Venezuela. The American company Chevron is working on drilling tasks with the Venezuelan state-owned company Pdvsa, protected by a license from the Treasury Department that exempts it from sanctions. The Trump administration has increased pressure on the Maduro government, which it accuses of leading an international drug trafficking network as the alleged leader of the Cartel de los Soles, something Caracas vehemently denies. Since September, the U.S. Armed Forces have destroyed more than twenty vessels allegedly loaded with drugs in the Caribbean and the Pacific, in incidents in which more than 80 crew members have died. Trump has promised on several occasions that attacks will "soon" begin within Venezuelan territory, while Maduro has called on his citizens to unite against American threats and enlist in citizen militias.
