US President Donald Trump has announced a “total and complete blockade” of all US-sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela — an escalation that amounts to economic warfare against an entire nation. The White House now couples this measure with a reckless designation of the Venezuelan state as a “foreign terrorist organization,” boasting of a naval armada encircling the country.

Blockades are instruments of collective punishment. They do not distinguish between a minister and a midwife, a general and a granjero. In a country that relies on its oil exports as a lifeline for its domestic economy and its support for sister nations such as Cuba, severing maritime routes is a deliberate strike on food, medicine, energy, and millions of livelihoods across the Caribbean.

We have seen the logic behind this escalation before. In 2019, as Washington ratcheted its brutal sanctions, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the “circle” tightening around Venezuela and acknowledged, “the humanitarian crisis is increasing by the hour.” Those words were but a confirmation that a policy premised on strangulation was “working” as intended, precisely by deepening civilian suffering to force political outcomes.

Today’s blockade doubles down on that same doctrine — what has now been coined the ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine: the imperial license that Washington has granted to itself to trample fundamental rights and international law in service of a project of hemispheric domination.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller described Venezuelan oil as the fruit of “American sweat, ingenuity and toil.” This claim is an outrageous inversion of history and an incitement to theft. Venezuela owns the world’s largest proven oil reserves by virtue of geological endowment and generations of labor by Venezuelan workers — not US corporations or US taxpayers. In 1976, Venezuela legally nationalized its petroleum industry to reclaim control over its primary source of wealth, a sovereign act recognized under international law.

The real theft has been ongoing for decades: the United States and multinational oil companies extracting profit from Venezuelan natural resources under conditions of unequal exchange, and today’s blockade seeks to formalize that expropriation by force.

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela — and its neighbors across Latin America and the Caribbean — enjoy the rights of sovereign equality and the fruits of regional stability that their peoples have won over decades of struggle. The region has endured a century of blockades, coups, and coercion dressed up as “freedom.” We reject categorically the transformation of sanctions into siege warfare and the normalization of starvation as statecraft.

From the Progressive International, our call is for solidarity in defence of sovereignty: for the workers who keep the power plants running; for the nurses and teachers who hold together public services; for the campesinos and comunas who feed their communities; for the students who carry forward the promise of the Bolivarian Revolution.

The Progressive International will continue to document the US assault on international law, and to build the broadest front of solidarity — Latin American, Caribbean, and global — to secure peace and a dignified future for the Venezuelan people.

Sovereignty is indivisible: an attack on one is an attack on all. We must resist the normalization of siege as a legitimate act of economic statecraft; we must protect the integrity of the UN charter; and we must insist that these coercive measures be lifted immediately.

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