Varför finns det så mycket affärsjet i Venezuela?
Historien fram till 2018 berättas i detta citatet:
The smuggling of cocaine, a niche pursuit before the '70s, was streamlined in the early '80s by the Medellín Cartel, specifically by a John Lennon-obsessed neo-Nazi named Carlos Lehder. Working with the most famous Colombian trafficker, Pablo Escobar, Lehder opened air routes to the Bahamas. He even bought an island, where he held orgies while one plane after another stopped for refueling before unloading cocaine at airports in Florida and Georgia.
By the '90s, Mexican cartels had grown in power and seized control of the trade from the increasingly fragmented Colombians. Around that time, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, a Mexican kingpin nicknamed the "Lord of the Skies," used former passenger jets such as Boeing 727s, capable of outrunning air force patrols, to transport up to ten metric tons of cocaine at a time. He is estimated to have earned $25 billion in his career.
Though the Lord of the Skies died in 1997 from botched plastic surgery, there's been no letup in air traffic. Sinaloa Cartel chief Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán — whom Forbes has repeatedly named one of the world's most powerful people and who is awaiting trial in New York — allegedly had a fleet of planes outstripping the largest Mexican airline, Aeromexico, according to the Mexican newspaper El Universal. More than 500 Sinaloa aircraft have been identified, the paper reported, and those are just the ones that have been caught.
Drug planes today can be nimble single-engine Pipers or giant turbojets. Last year, a cocaine-smuggling Boeing 737, painted all white, was seized in the Dominican Republic along with 800 kilos of cocaine.
Air corridors have shifted dramatically since the '80s. In the never-ending game of whack-a-mole that is the drug war, a lockdown of Colombian airspace beginning in the early '00s led air pirates to decamp to neighboring Venezuela, where they've thrived.
Det här ett ämne som man kan återkomma till hur många gånger som helst. Till exempel Lehders ö i Bahmamas, som var mellanlandningsplats för smuggeltraden för 40 år sedan - om den har jag länge funderat att skriva något om. Var det kanske där man hittade en Cessna 402 som tidigare var känd som SE-GMO?
De gamla propliners som man förrut förknippat med rosthörnan i Miami - ja, de har gått åt vid det här laget. Skulle säga att tyngdpunkten i drogbaronernas "flygplansinnehav" numera ligger på äldre äffärsjet. Om inte förr så märker man det när man läser artikeln. Narcojets är termen.
Mer än en gång har Gulfstream G.II:or och gamla Hawker 125:or landat på raka vägsträckor i Belize, Guatemala eller Mexico. Ofta övergivna, ofta utbrända...
