Sanctioned Oil Tankers Flee Venezuela in Defiance of U.S. Blockade

[Igel]

3. The official excuse was that they lacked the proper forces for taking the 3rd tanker.

Now, if it's just crewed by a bunch of sailors armed with GPS devices, that's a lame excuse.

But it was the 3rd, and if I were going to be Maduro for a day at the time I would have made sure that either I had armed forces on that ship or that the customer at the other end had it well defended. Meaning it wouldn't be a small group of Coast Guard needed as they lowered themselves from choppers, but a large group of Coast Guard being shot at with selective-fire weapons from secure positions as they lowered themselves from choppers that were themselves taking fire ... maybe with bits of high velocity lead, maybe with RPGs. (I'd make sure of the RPGs. Think making the ship into a hedgehog. Covered with its own spit. No, wait, that's not the right part of the analogy. Covered with spines.)

Were that the case--and I'm confident that Maduro being Maduro and having no sound advisors either in Venezuela, the PRC, Cuba, Russia, or even perhaps Brazil, such an idea never presented--the official excuse would make a whole lot of sense.