First modification:
The incident involving the Boeing 747 that has been stranded in Argentina since June continues to escalate after a Buenos Aires federal judge ordered the seizure at the request of a US magistrate. Nicolás Maduro accused Buenos Aires of “kidnapping” the aircraft and its crew; while the ambassador in Caracas received the deputy who insulted Alberto Fernández. “It does not imply a diplomatic problem,” attenuated the spokeswoman for the Casa Rosada.
Relations between Argentina and Venezuela, which improved markedly after the embassy in Caracas was reopened in July -degraded under the Mauricio Macri administration-, are going through a moment of tension that escalates as the judicial movements on the Venezuelan plane that He has been held at the Ezeiza international airport since June 6.
Last Thursday, the federal judge of Lomas de Zamora, Federico Villena, ordered the seizure of the aircraft at the request of the Washington magistrate, Michael Harvey. The decision, supported and suggested by the Argentine prosecutor Cecilia Incardona, leaves the Boeing 747 at the disposal of the American judge.
This measure by Villena led members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Marshals Service to inspect the aircraft. Harvey approved maintenance tasks and the payment of hangar services and supplies while they study the situation.
This happened after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro attacked harshly saying that the government of his counterpart Alberto Fernández is carrying out a “kidnapping” of the plane and its crew of five Iranians and 14 Venezuelans.
After Nicolás Maduro asked him for the “rescue of our national assets”, thousands of Venezuelan citizens marched in protest of the position of the Argentine Administration.
For his part, Diosdado Cabello, vice president of the ruling United Socialist Party, accused Fernández of “receiving and carrying out orders from imperialism.”
“We do not understand what is the cruelty against our country. He is solely responsible for what happens to that plane and the Venezuelan crew, ”said the senior official.
Yesterday I received a delegation of deputies at the headquarters of our Embassy. During the course of a sincere meeting, I harshly reproached the president of the entourage, deputy Pedro Carreño, for his inappropriate and inopportune insults towards our president 🇦🇷 @alferdez pic.twitter.com/DIVoJ4fS2K
— Oscar Laborde (@oscarlaborde) August 12, 2022
The maximum point of the aggressions came when the deputy of the National Assembly, Pedro Carreño, described the Argentine president as a “puppet, wimp, jalabolas”.
The spokeswoman for the Casa Rosada, Gabriela Cerruti, sought to lower the resonance of the statements during a press conference on Thursday. “We understand that they are expressions of different actors in Venezuelan political life, as, many times, actors in Argentine life have had strong expressions regarding Venezuela and that does not imply a diplomatic incident,” she said.
The Argentine ambassador in Venezuela, Oscar Laborde, received Carreño and 30 other legislators. There he remarked that the attacks on Alberto Fernández were “inappropriate and inopportune” and generated “disgust and anger.”
At the meeting, the deputies delivered a document to demand that the plane be released. “We will not rest until justice is done with the crew and the plane,” the Venezuelan Minister of Transportation, Ramón Celestino Velásquez Araguayán, said today on his networks.
In the letter they also repudiate “the perverse intentions of the US Government. to continue with the actions of seizure of Venezuelan assets”.
Argentina and the United States, different points on the Venezuelan plane
The interests that Buenos Aires and Washington maintain regarding the plane from Caracas that was seized in the last few hours are different.
The South American country acted as an intermediary so that the North Americans can access the plane of the Emtrasur company, but they are not involved in the same causes.
The collaboration treaty between these countries does not require, in a seizure, that the crimes be contemplated by the two laws. For example, the regulations that the US claims were violated are not a crime in Argentina.
Today we went to the Argentine embassy accompanied by a commission from the AN headed by the deputy @PedroCarreno_e to deliver a parliamentary agreement that reflects the sentiment of the Venezuelan and Argentine people in defense of the crew and the plane. The people will win! pic.twitter.com/pFDCNgleDR
– Ramón Celestino Velásquez Araguayán (@rvaraguayan) August 11, 2022
The Argentine Justice retained the plane and its members while investigating possible links with terrorist entities, such as Hezbollah, a group suspected of perpetrating the attack on the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) in 1994, where 85 people died. At the moment there is no evidence of them, that is why they are not imprisoned but retained.
For its part, the US requested that the aircraft be confiscated because it is subject to sanctions, according to its legislation. The transfer by the Iranian company Mahan Air to Emtrasur – a subsidiary of Convisa -, which had an underhand triangulation in the United Arab Emirates, violated export laws, according to the Federal Court in Washington.
Both companies are under restrictions imposed by the United States Department of the Treasury for alleged logistical collaboration for terrorist organizations.
Being parallel incidents, Venezuela is not part of the cause that interests Washington and it will not be able to appeal the sentence.
With EFE and local media
#Tension #rises #Caracas #Buenos #Aires #due #seizure #plane #sights