The Venezuelan Government has prohibited aircraft with Argentine registration from flying over its airspace, including commercial flights of the southern country’s flag company, Aerolíneas Argentinas.
The measure is a retaliation by the Chavista regime against the far-right Executive Javier Milei for the delivery to the United States in February of a Venezuelan cargo plane that had been detained in Buenos Aires since 2022.
The spokesperson for the Casa Rosada, Manuel Adorni, indicated this Tuesday that Argentina has undertaken “diplomatic actions against the Government of Venezuela, headed by the dictator Maduro”, without specifying more details, due to a ban that has been affecting flights for days. Argentines and for which the Venezuelan ambassador in Buenos Aires had already been called to the Argentine Foreign Ministry to notify her of the protest. “Argentina is not going to allow itself to be extorted by friends of terrorism,” Adorni added.
The Argentine Foreign Ministry is preparing a formal protest before the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), requesting the intervention of the body that regulates commercial air traffic. The Venezuelan ban means that Aerolíneas Argentinas flights to destinations in the Caribbean and the east coast of the United States must bypass Venezuelan airspace, with the consequent cost in money and time.
The trigger for the decision taken by Caracas was the delivery last February to the US justice system of a Boeing 747-300 from the cargo company Emtrasur, a subsidiary of the Venezuelan flag airline Conviasa, which had purchased it from the Iranian Mahan Air, a company linked to the Revolutionary Guard of the Tehran regime, considered a terrorist organization by the White House.
The plane was held at the Buenos Aires Ezeiza airport since June 2022, after Washington requested its seizure for violating US sanctions against Iran, although the previous Argentine government of Peronist Alberto Fernández paralyzed the delivery of the device.
The aircraft had flown between Venezuela, Russia and Iran between February and May 2022. The United States maintains that the plane was used to transport opaque cargo and intelligence operations for these three countries in Latin America.
The crew of the plane was 19 people, who were initially also detained in Argentina although they were later allowed to leave the country, including five Iranians, three of whom were former members of the Revolutionary Guard, with the plane’s commander at the head. , who continued to pilot the Boeing despite the sale of the company. In addition, Mahan Air is among the Iranian companies sanctioned in 2008 by the US Department of Commerce.
After the confiscation, the aircraft was flown to Miami and then to an aircraft graveyard in Arizano, where it was scrapped in late February, angering Maduro. “We were informed of a vile, criminal, outrageous act,” the Chavista leader said then. “The vengeful, perverse gringo empire, with all its evil, proceeded to dismantle the Emtrasur plane, the Conviasa plane that had been kidnapped from us,” he added. “They erased the name of Emtrasur and then they dismembered it and chopped it into pieces,” Maduro added.
This conflict further strains the tense relationship between two countries with governments of such opposite signs, after Milei came to power last December. The Argentine president has already had several dialectical exchanges with the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and for the moment has decided not to appoint an ambassador in Caracas, maintaining representation at the level of chargé d’affaires, as in Cuba and Nicaragua.