Spanish
Washington.- US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he wants to keep his plans for Venezuelan oil secret after Washington seized a ship carrying crude oil from the Caribbean country this week.
"It wouldn't be very smart of me to tell you. We're supposed to keep this a little secret," Trump said today during an event in the Oval Office when asked if he intends to seize more Venezuelan oil assets.
Last Wednesday, the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy intercepted and seized a Guyana-flagged vessel sanctioned for illicit crude transfers that was transporting Venezuelan oil, in what represents another step in Washington's growing pressure campaign on the Nicolás Maduro government.
The US Offensive in the Caribbean
Since the summer, the Pentagon has maintained a huge military deployment in Caribbean waters to summarily destroy boats that, according to the Government, transport drugs and belong to networks in which the Executive and the Venezuelan Army are involved. «Does anyone want to go fishing in that area?», Trump joked as he again insisted on the success and legitimacy of this operation in preventing illegal drugs from entering US territory.Since September, Washington has destroyed around twenty of these boats and killed around eighty of their occupants.
Trump said again today that his country will soon begin to carry out ground attacks, but specified: "They are not ground attacks on Venezuela, they are ground attacks on horrible people who are bringing drugs and killing our people." The Republican reiterated that in recent times the U.S. has lost more than 300,000 people due to drugs and that is why the current situation "is like a war".
