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The United States Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, supervised on Thursday the seizure of a second plane belonging to the Venezuelan leftist government that was held in the Dominican Republic, resuming a hard line after the diplomatic approach Washington-Characas.
It is the second plane seized by the United States to Venezuela in less than a year, but the first hard hand gesture of the Donald Trump administration, which in a first period set a battery of sanctions against Venezuela, including an oil embargo, in a I try to overthrow Nicolás Maduro.
Rubio, a radical opponent of leaders of the left of Latin America, witnessed the confiscation of the plane at the end of his first tour as Secretary of State, who took him to five countries in Latin America.
In the presence of Rubio, a Dominican prosecutor and a representative of the forces of the United States order, they hit a poster that said “seized” on the Dassault Falcon aircraft 200 of Venezuelan flag that was on the Military Ajover track of Santo Domingo.
The seizure “is American political marketing,” said a diplomatic source in Caracas on anonymity, remembering that this plane was held since last year after US authorities said that he had violated United States sanctions against Venezuela.
According to the State Department, Venezuela officials used that aircraft to fly to Greece, Turkey, Russia, Nicaragua and Cuba, and had taken it to the Dominican Republic for maintenance.
According to the US government, the device was also used in 2019 by the then Petroleum Minister Manuel Quevedo, to attend an OPEC meeting in the United Arab Emirates.
-First confiscation-
In September of last year, during the administration of former president Joe Biden, another official aircraft of Venezuela, model Dassault Falcon 900ex, was confiscated in the Dominican Republic and transferred to the state of Florida.
The US authorities affirmed by then that he had been bought “illegally” for 13 million dollars through a ghost company and brought from smuggling for the use of Maduro and his allies.
Trump, then presidency candidate for a second term in the White House, called “stupid” the “leaders” for the confiscation of the plane, ensuring that Maduro could buy “a much larger and better with all the money” That the North American country pays Venezuela for oil that it does not need.
The confiscation of Dassault Falcon 900ex occurred in the middle of the intensified political crisis unleashed by Maduro's re -election for a third consecutive mandate, unknown to Washington before fraud complaints.
The Venezuelan opposition claims a triumph at the polls of the diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia, exiled after an arrest warrant against him.
Trump has long promised to take drastic measures against Maduro and in his first term he tried unsuccessfully to dismiss him, after an extensive international questioning about the legitimacy of Maduro's first re -election in 2018.
-Dortations-
On January 31, Richard Grenelll, a special envoy from Trump, traveled to Caracas to meet with Maduro and achieved the release of six American prisoners, in addition to an agreement for Caracas to receive Venezuelans deported from the United States.
Maduro said the conversations were given in a climate of “mutual respect”, but Rubio and other US officials have insisted that the meeting does not change the Washington position.
“Venezuela is a national security problem, not just lack of democracy,” Rubio told journalists on Wednesday in Guatemala.
“This is a government, a regime, which has harmed more than seven million Venezuelans, and all neighboring countries that have had to face the reality of this mass migration,” he said, referring to the Venezuelans who have left.
Grenell also pressed Maduro to accept the return of the deportened Venezuelans of the United States.
Shortly after taking office, Trump stripped approximately 600,000 Venezuelans in the United States of deportation protection.
In June 2022, a Venezuelan-Iraní Boeing 747 plane was immobilized in Argentina and destroyed in the United States in January 2024, which Caracas called “theft.”
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© Agite France-Presse
