VENEZUELAN communists hit back on Wednesday at the “imperialist recolonisation offensive” of United States President Donald Trump.

This comes as Mr Trump demanded that Venezuela return assets that it allegedly seized from US oil companies years ago.

Mr Trump used this as a bizarre justification for ordering a “total and complete blockade” against oil tankers travelling to or from the South American country that faces US sanctions.

The US president cited historical US investments in Venezuelan US oil companies dominated Venezuela’s petroleum industry until the country’s leaders nationalised the sector, first in the 1970s and again in the 21st century under current President Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez.

Compensation offered by Venezuela was deemed insufficient, and in 2014 an international arbitration panel ordered the country’s socialist government to pay $1.6 billion (£1.2bn) to ExxonMobil.

Mr Trump said: “We’re not going to be letting anybody go through who shouldn’t be going through.

“You remember they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil not that long ago. And we want it back. They took it — they illegally took it.”

Stephen Miller, Mr Trump’s deputy chief of staff, likened Venezuela’s nationalisation of its oil industry to a heist.

“American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela,” Mr Miller wrote on social media on Wednesday.

“Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”

But Venezuela’s United Nations ambassador Samuel Moncada called for an emergency meeting of the UN security council over “the ongoing US aggression.”

Ambassador Moncada said the US announcement means “the US government is claiming the world’s largest oil reserves as its own, in what would be one of the greatest acts of plunder in human history.”

In a statement, the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) hit out against America’s “imperialist recolonisation offensive and in defence of the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.”

The PCV said: “Washington’s aggression against Venezuela and the Caribbean is not a response to a supposed fight against drug trafficking, but is a part of an imperialist recolonisation offensive aimed at appropriating the natural resources, territories and strategic assets of our nation.”

The PCV also accused Mr Maduro of using the crisis “as a pretext to impose an anti-worker and anti-popular policy, shifting the burden of the crisis onto the majority of the population.”