Washington: Venezuelan authorities say a US-owned air freight company delivered a crate of assault weapons earlier this week to the international airport in Valencia to be used in "terrorist actions" against the embattled government of Nicolas Maduro.
An air freight company, 21 Air, based in Greensboro, North Carolina, operates the Boeing 767 aircraft that the Venezuelans allege was used in the arms transfer. The flight originated in Miami on Sunday.
The discovery of the weapons occurred on Tuesday - two days after the flight landed briefly in Valencia, Venezuela's third-largest city - as tax authorities and other inspectors conducted a routine inspection of cargo that came off the flight, according to a statement by the Carabobo state governor's office.
A senior Venezuelan security official, Bolivarian National Guard General Endes Palencia Ortiz, who is the nation's vice minister of citizen security, said authorities found 19 assault weapons, 118 ammunition cartridges, and 90 military-grade radio antennas, among other items.
An Ottawa, Canada-based analyst of unusual ship and plane movements, Steffan Watkins, drew attention to the frequent flights of the 21 Air cargo plane in a series of tweets on Thursday, US time.
"All year, they were flying between Philadelphia and Miami and all over the place, but all continental US," Watkins said in a telephone interview. "Then all of a sudden in January, things changed."
That's when the cargo plane began flying to destinations in Colombia and Venezuela on a daily basis, and sometimes multiple times a day, Watkins said. The plane has made close to 40 round-trip flights from Miami International Airport to Caracas and Valencia in Venezuela, and Bogota and Medellin in Colombia since January 11.
The most recent tracking of the aircraft showed it arrived from Medellin into Miami airport after midnight on Thursday.
The air cargo company's website says that the Boeing 767 has a payload capacity of 42 tonnes.
The provenance of the alleged weaponry was not apparent. And questions about who the arms shipment was destined for, if the Venezuelan version of events is true, only mounted. Delivery at a commercial airport would indicate that somebody with authority there would have had a hand.
Venezuelan authorities displayed the weaponry that they said was delivered by the 21 Air cargo plane on open-air tables draped in red cloth. Some of the rifles included stands for long-range targeting. The shipment included 15 AR-15 assault weapons, a Micro Draco semiautomatic pistol with a jumbo magazine, a Colt 7.62 rifle and two telescopic sights, the governor's statement said.
Valencia was a former manufacturing and economic hub before the collapse of the nation's economy.
Flight records from the tracking site flightradar24.com, monitored by Watkins, indicate that the 21 Air cargo plane flew at least four times to Valencia from Miami and another four times to Caracas from Miami since January 11. In many cases, the flights would head on to Bogota or Medellin before returning to Miami.
If some US entity were attempting to provide arms to a Venezuelan resistance movement, it would be taking a familiar page from the history books.
The CIA operated a dummy airline, known as Air America, from the early 1950s until the mid 1970s for air operations in Southeast Asia, including air-dropping weapons to friendly forces.
More than a decade later, Sandinista soldiers shot down a cargo plane taking weapons to the US-backed Contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government. A US. Marine veteran, Eugene Hasenfus, survived the 1986 crash, and later told reporters that he was working for the CIA, paving the way for his release and return to the United States.
Curiously, one of the figures in the Reagan administration instrumental in delivering support to the contras, former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams, was named by US President Donald Trump late last month as his special envoy overseeing policy toward Venezuela.
