Posted by Bill Conroy - January 11, 2009 at 8:05 pm
A twin-propeller Cessna 402C aircraft was seized near Carepa, Colombia, just across the border from Panama in mid-December of last year while it was in the process of attempting to transport about 850 kilos of cocaine to a suspected destination in Central America — and an ultimate arrival point in the United States.
The story was not reported in the United States, but rather appeared as a short item in news publications in Panama and the Dominican Republic. The Cessna, according to those news reports, had flown out of an airport in Panama to pick up the payload of white powder in Colombia.
This incident would likely have gone down as simply one more aborted drug run in the trail of thousands that bring the lucrative product to the U.S. each year if it were not for one small fact: the Cessna sported a U.S. tail number and FAA registration history that connect it to a number of other “cocaine planes” that have apparent links to covert U.S. intelligence operations focused, at least in part, on Venezuela and the government of Hugo Chávez ...
... in a stroke of good fortune for Gomez, on Dec. 12, the day before the Cessna was seized on its cocaine-running mission, the FAA confirmed its deregistration due to the fact that it had been sold to buyers in Venezuelan. That curious coincidence is compounded by the fact that the same pattern of a U.S. registered aircraft being sold just prior to it getting busted in a drug run plays out in a number of other cases that Narco News has investigated over the past year ...
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2009/01/cocaine-plane-trail-open-challenge-obama-administration