The case of the plane of the Venezuelan company Emtrasur, which remains detained at the Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires, not only has a political background to affect the image of the governments of Venezuela and Iran through the journalistic treatment of various media outlets right-wing orientation, but also involves an electoral strategy for the presidential elections in Paraguay, scheduled for 2023, even more so with the decision taken this Tuesday by the Prosecutor’s Office of that country to raid the Guaraní airport, located in Ciudad del Este, near from the border with Argentina and Brazil, where the 747 aircraft departed on May 16 for Aruba with a shipment of cigarettes.
According to Page 12, sources from the Casa Rosada (headquarters of the Argentine Government) revealed that the president of Paraguay, Mario Abdo Benítez, commented to his Argentine counterpart, Alberto Fernández, at the Summit of the Americas held in the United States, about the Venezuelan freighter and at no time did he talk about alleged links with terrorist groups of the crew made up of Venezuelans and Iranians, but rather that the case “was barbaric because -according to what he had read on a Paraguayan website- the Jumbo had been used by his rival politician, Horacio Cartes, to smuggle cigarettes.
Cartes was president of Paraguay between 2013 and 2018 and is the leader of the Colorado Party. He maintains great option to regain power next year.
It is not that the Paraguayan president had found out through a secret intelligence report from his country, which has no staff or budget, but because he read the news of what was happening in Ezeiza on a website.
While in Argentina, a sector of justice identified with former president Mauricio Macri continues to carry out judicial proceedings in the case that are considered by analysts to be outside the legal framework.
no hidden intentions
In a recent radio interview, Víctor Pérez Gómez, Emtrasur’s general manager of operations, stated that the presence of Iranians on the plane has no relation to terrorist groups, since their work was flight instructors.
“We didn’t come here with any hidden agenda or anything dark. We show (to the authorities) all the evidence of our work. The aircraft was checked and they did not find anything that caught their attention, ”he asserted.
