Venezuela’s new leader enlists US troops to bring a rogue ship back
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 18 minutes ago
- 3 min read
By ANATOLY KURMANAEV and CHRISTIAAN TRIEBERT
The government of Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, enlisted U.S. military support to return an oil tanker that left the country without permission, according to people close to the Venezuelan government who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
That unlikely pact, the first publicly known instance of military cooperation between the countries since the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, comes as Rodríguez seeks to assert her will on the oil-rich nation amid a redistribution of wealth and power that has followed the sudden change in leadership.
The tanker, called alternatively Olina or Minerva M, left a port in eastern Venezuela late last weekend without the authorization of port authorities or the state oil company in the chaotic hours that followed Maduro’s downfall, according to satellite imagery and the people close to the government.
The state oil company, known as PDVSA, said it was never paid for its crude.
The tanker “launched without payment, nor the authorization of Venezuelan authorities,” PDVSA said in a statement Friday, adding that the U.S. government aided its return. President Donald Trump echoed the claim the same day, saying that the tanker “departed Venezuela without our approval” and was returning to Venezuela “in coordination” with Rodríguez.
Trump said in a recent interview with The New York Times that Rodríguez spoke “all the time” with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a claim confirmed by people close to the Venezuelan leader.
The tanker was carrying 500,000 barrels of oil belonging to a company controlled by a businessperson called Alex Saab, according to internal PDVSA data and the people close to the industry.
Through a representative, Saab denied this, calling the allegations “false, deliberately deceptive and not journalism.”
Saab, a billionaire Colombian based in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, was indicted by the United States on charges of laundering money for Maduro’s government in 2019. He spent two years in a U.S. prison before being released in a prisoner swap.
Multiple people close to the Venezuelan government have said that Rodríguez and Saab belong to different factions of the country’s fractious ruling coalition and that they have a tense personal relationship.
Rodríguez and her brother Jorge Rodríguez together control the country’s economic policy and legislature. Saab owed his lucrative business contracts to his closeness to Maduro, his wife and her relatives, said the people. Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, was captured by U.S. Special Forces and brought to stand trial in New York along with him. Much of her immediate family is under U.S. sanctions.
Saab dominated Venezuela’s oil trade until he was captured on the orders of U.S. agents in Africa in 2020 and extradited to the United States. Although less prominent since he returned to Venezuela, he has continued to obtain contracts to export oil to China. This put him on a collision course with Delcy Rodríguez, who has been trying to impose her will on Venezuela’s main source of export revenue since becoming the oil minister in 2024, the people said.
A joint U.S. Coast Guard and Navy team boarded the Olina outside Venezuelan territorial waters in the Caribbean Sea on Friday and forced the ship to return to port, according to the Pentagon. It is unclear when U.S. service members left the ship.
The close cooperation between Rodríguez and the Pentagon is particularly striking because just a week ago the U.S. military attacked Caracas, killing at least 100 civilians, soldiers and security officers, according to Venezuelan officials. In an interview with the Times in September, Rodríguez denounced the Pentagon in particular for trying to gain control of Venezuelan oil reserves.
But now, U.S. service members are in effect helping Rodríguez assert control of Venezuela and its wealth.
Tensions between Venezuela’s different power factions also appeared to erupt in another setting a day before the Olina was returned. Barry J. Pollock, a lawyer who represented Maduro at his Manhattan arraignment, filed papers with the court Thursday, claiming that another lawyer was “purporting to appear” on behalf of the detained Venezuelan leader.
That other lawyer, Bruce Fein, claims to have the backing of at least some members of Flores’ family.
“I was informed that Maduro’s insiders — including brother-in-law — suspected betrayal and trusted no one in Maduro’s hastily arranged initial representation,” Fein wrote in an email to the Times on Friday.
NOTE: The International Maritime Organization issues an IMO number, a permanent identification number, that remains associated with a vessel throughout its lifetime unlike a ship’s name, which can change frequently. The ship in this article is Olina, also known as Minerva M (9282479).