The first commercial flight of a Colombian airline in years landed in Venezuela on Wednesday, two days after the route between Bogotá and Caracas was reactivated as part of the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two South American countries after their breakup in 2019.
The Satena airline aircraft, owned by the Colombian Air Force, left Bogotá for the Venezuelan capital with 45 passengers on board. The first flight from Caracas to the Colombian capital, on the reverse route, was made this Monday by the Venezuelan airline Turpial Airlines.
Satena “for the first time in its history makes an international flight and not just any flight,” Colombian Transportation Minister Guillermo Reyes González told the press, among the passengers on the inaugural flight. The official stressed that this trip will serve to “reestablish the brotherhood between Colombia and Venezuela”.
For now, only Satena, Turpial and the Venezuelan airline Laser have permission from the Venezuelan authorities to operate the route between Bogotá and Caracas.
Among the companies that have requested permission to operate between the two capitals are Latam, the largest airline in Latin America, and Wingo, a low-cost airline owned by Copa Holdings.
The connectivity of commercial aviation between both countries was pending for weeksparticularly after the initial plan that contemplated that the first flight would be made by the Venezuelan state airline Conviasa, was not authorized by the Colombian aeronautical authorities.
The Colombian ambassador to Venezuela, Armando Benedetti, then explained that his country, after a complaint from Washington, did not authorize the flight because Conviasa is sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC, for its acronym in English), of the US Department of the Treasury, which considered that the government of Nicolás Maduro used the airline to “transport corrupt officials of the regime around the world”, according to what the then Secretary of the Treasury said in 2020 , Steven T. Mnuchin.
In response, the Venezuelan government canceled the permission it had given Wingo to start its flights from October.
In this regard, Reyes González commented that Colombian President Gustavo Petro, two weeks ago in a meeting with the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, asked the authorities of that country to “review the issue of Conviasa”. He added that the Conviasa situation “is not a closed issue.”
Venezuela and Colombia resumed diplomatic relations in September after petro’s choice as Colombian president.
Petro, the first leftist president in the history of Colombia, recognized Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela. The now former Colombian president Iván Duque (2018-2022), along with dozens of other world leaders, ignored Maduro, arguing that he had been re-elected in 2018 in fraudulent elections.
Petro also promoted the reopening of the border on September 26marking the resumption of trade relations between the two countries.
Maduro, for his part, has repeatedly expressed that with Petro now the environment is conducive to building a new stage of cooperation and closer ties with Colombia.
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