Venezuela & ALBA News, 12.15.2025:
Venezuelanalysis: Trump Administration Ramps Up Oil Sanctions, Targets Tankers The US Treasury levied new sanctions against the Venezuelan oil industry as the White House looks to strangle the nation’s most important revenue source. The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) blacklisted six shipping companies for allegedly transporting Venezuelan crude. The US Coast Guard led the seizure of an oil tanker carrying Venezuelan crude. The Skipper, which had been blacklisted by the US Treasury in 2021 for allegedly transporting Iranian crude, was commandeered in international waters while carrying an estimated 1.6 million barrels of crude bound for Asian markets. Caracas condemned the move as “international piracy”. The recent tanker seizure is expected to hit Venezuelan oil revenues through higher shipping and insurance costs. PDVSA is forced to rely on intermediaries and levy significant discounts to place crude cargoes in international markets.
TeleSur: Non-Aligned Countries Reject Illegal Actions and Escalation by the US Against Venezuela Seizing a merchant ship “carrying out peaceful and legal activities” and declaring an air blockade without UN authorization contravenes international law. The Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement rejected Washington’s illegal actions against Venezuela and warned that “the growing presence and activities of extra-regional military forces, including deployments involving assets with advanced capabilities, increase risks to regional peace, security, and stability, undermining the very Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean
as a Zone of Peace.” Full statement.
Roger Harris: Who’s the Dictator – Venezuela’s Maduro or Ukraine’s Zelensky Within the narrow spectrum of establishment punditry, “dictator” functions as a term of opprobrium reserved for governments Washington designates as enemies. By this measure, Maduro is the dictator, while Zelensky is sanctified as democratic. Zelensky has banned opposition parties, shuttered critical media, arrested political opponents, closed trade unions, sent security forces into churches, and persecuted speakers of Ukraine’s main second language. Ahmed al-Sharaa, former Al Qaeda “terrorist” and now head of Syria after a US-backed coup, was welcomed to the Trump White House. A week later, the “benevolent monarch” from a country that does not even bother to hold national elections – Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – graced the Oval Office. Meanwhile, since Hugo Chávez’s 1998 victory, Venezuela has held over 20 national elections.
Ukraine is widely recognized as being caught in a war. Yet the deadly hybrid war against Venezuela is rendered invisible – reduced to merely “sanctions” against an errant regime or at most “pressure.” Causalities in the Ukraine war are mourned, but the over 100,000 fatalities by US sanctions in Venezuela are ignored. Since Hugo Chávez’s 1998 victory and the initiation of the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela has held over 20 national elections. Stripped of moral pretenses, Washington’s discourse reduces to a simple calculus: allies are democratic by definition, adversaries authoritarian by decree, The empire’s issue is not democracy, but domination.
Vijay Prashad: Why did Trump send his warships to Venezuela? Trump’s escalation against Venezuela is about more than oil, it is about regaining control over the “natural” zone of influence of the US while its hegemony is slipping. Trump came to office saying that he was opposed to military interventions that did not further US interests. His formula is not for or against war categorically, but about what the US would gain from it. A close reading of the 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States shows that there is a renewed emphasis on the Western Hemisphere. Trump is ready to revive the belief that any problem can be solved by military force, even when other tools exist. The Trump Corollary promises to use its “military system superior to any country in the world” to steal the hemisphere’s resources.
Granma: Our America is in Caracas, for Peace and Sovereignty; The People’s Assembly In “a peaceful, joyful, dignified, and sovereign Caracas,” the People’s Assembly for Sovereignty and Peace in Our America took place, even though the empire has sought to turn it into “a theater of military operations.” More than 500 social leaders, intellectuals, artists, jurists, academics, parliamentarians, political parties, workers, and indigenous peoples have gathered in Caracas as a show of resistance. The Assembly addressed combating unilateral coercive measures and other actions of economic and social suffocation, defending the rights of migrants, the shared future of the continent, as well as climate emergencies.
Struggle/La Lucha: Pentagon GPS jamming blocks Venezuela peace conference delegates Speakers at the news conference denounced Washington’s attempted sabotage of the People’s Assembly for Sovereignty and Peace in Our America. Many delegates planning to attend the peace conference in Caracas were prevented from traveling by the Pentagon’s jamming of Global Positioning System (GPS) signals, which disrupted airline flights to Venezuela. The GPS jamming follows Trump’s illegal declaration of a “no-fly zone” over the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, a blatant violation of the country’s sovereignty.
60 Minutes: The CIA-Venezuela Cocaine Connection (1993) Drug smuggling with CIA approval before the Chavista era.
Video: Gary Webb: The Man Who Exposed The CIA Connection to Crack Cocaine
Video: Gary Webb speaking on CIA, cocaine and the Contras (1998)
Daniel Ortega: The Colonialist, Imperialist Powers have not drawn the lessons history offers them, because wherever colonialism was established, they have always been defeated in the end and the Peoples liberated themselves Progress was made in [US/Israel-Palestine] Peace Agreements, but the rulers of the State of Israel do not respect these Agreements, and they continue every day to murder People who are on their own land, from which they want to banish them or end up burying them…
What is the solution [to drug trafficking]? It is necessary … to control the borders of the United States so as not to allow drugs to enter… to control the neighborhoods of the US, of the US cities, where the drugs are distributed, where the drugs are sold, where there is drug dealing, where gangs are everywhere. And then, controlling the major US banks, where those who sell drugs in the US place their money, and where they have millions and millions of dollars. The President of the US gains nothing by threatening the Latin American People. Because his problem is there in his own house, where those buying drugs do so every day, and where those who are selling the drugs do so every day…
The three [Nicaraguan neoliberal] governments backed by the US ruling class left the Country running out of Energy such that there were blackouts every day. For us that situation was very difficult, because, we were taking office in a country full of energy blackouts. [How could we solve the problem?] But how, we were saying to ourselves, if we don’t have any oil and we don’t even have enough generating plants here to guarantee energy? And President Chavez immediately ordered some generating plants which they had bought in Asia and were coming for Venezuela and which were in transit in Cuba at that time, be moved immediately to Nicaragua. And here those generating plants arrived, and the oil also arrived, which the Bolivarian People provided to us, as they did to many countries.
Granma: WHO Report on Violence against Women Physical and sexual violence destroys or shatters the lives of countless women, a global pandemic of the worst kind; however, containment is barely progressing, and the outlook remains uncertain. “It is one of the oldest and most widespread injustices in human history, and yet it continues to be one of the least addressed,” lamented the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO). Nearly one in three people, around 840 million women, “have suffered intimate partner violence or sexual violence at some point in their lives, a figure that has barely changed since 2000.” In the last 12 months, 316 million women—11% of those over 15 years of age—were victims of this type of aggression. Over the past two decades, there has been little progress in efforts to eradicate this scourge.
Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement 
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