Airplane Hijacker
By: Roberto Morejón
In the presence of the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the seizure by the United States of a Venezuelan airplane passing through the Dominican Republic was announced, in an act considered a violation of international norms.
The head of U.S. diplomacy was present at the seizure, with which act he coined it, despite its dirty nature.
As in the days of the Old West, the United States carried out the seizure after the Dominican authorities, on its instructions, had kept the plane last October.
As expected, the Bolivarian government reacted to what it described as a blatant theft by Donald Trump's administration of an aircraft belonging to the Venezuelan nation.
Caracas held Marco Rubio, who was visiting the Dominican Republic, directly responsible for giving the orders for an episode that it considered hostile and an open crime.
The information on the matter in the Western press is full of anecdotes about the seizure, without any critical signals of piracy.
All the more so since this is not the first action of this kind against Venezuela, since on September 2 last year another of its official planes was seized in the Dominican Republic while undergoing maintenance and transferred to Florida on orders from Washington.
In early 2024, the United States seized another Venezuelan airplane, this time in Argentina.
In complicity with its friend, the ultra-right-wing President Javier Milei, the government of Joseph Biden seized an airplane, brought it to its territory and dismantled it.
The plane originally belonged to the Iranian company Mahan Air, which the United States, like the Persian country, sanctions as part of its international coercion based on unilateral arguments.
Venezuela then denounced that the hijacking of the Boeing 747-300 in Argentina was for humanitarian purposes.
With these detentions, the United States is violating the rules of civil aviation and commercial, civil and political rights.
It is no coincidence that it is seizing goods belonging to Venezuela, since it has imposed more than 900 sanctions against the country in order to interfere with its political course and sovereign decisions.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration recently sent a special envoy to Caracas, which analysts interpreted as a crack of reason in the interest of dialogue between sovereign nations.
But the seizure of another Venezuelan aircraft calls into question the scope of that trip.
