Brazil’s Air Force announced on Wednesday evening that it shot down a plane allegedly transporting drugs that illegally entered Brazilian airspace from Venezuela, killing its two pilots.
The Brazilian Air Force explained to local outlets and on its official social media accounts that the plane was shot down on Tuesday, February 11, as part of “Operation Ostium,” a joint security operation in conjunction with Brazil’s Federal Police against criminal activities on the Brazilian border.
Officials said the plane, which bore no identification, illegally entered Brazilian airspace from Venezuela. Upon detection of the Venezuelan inbound plane by Brazil’s radar systems, the Air Force explained that pilots ordered the airplane’s pilot to change course and land at a designated airfield in the Amazon region. The airplane ignored the order and in response, Brazilian planes fired warning shots in accordance with the nation’s security protocols to prevent the flight from continuing.
The aircraft was classified as “hostile” after ignoring orders to land and was shot down near the city of Manaus as a “last resort” measure. The plane crashed into the Amazon rainforest and exploded, killing its two passengers.
A Brazilian Air Force helicopter went to the crash site on Wednesday. Military and police officers confirmed the death of the two pilots and confirmed the discovery and seizure of unspecified drugs inside the wreckage.
“After the failure of the investigation and intervention measures, it was necessary to carry out the Detention Shot (TDE), resulting in the downing of the aircraft and the discovery of two dead traffickers and drugs on board,” the Brazilian Air Force said in its statement.
“The [Brazilian Air Force] reinforces its commitment to maintaining the sovereignty of the airspace and the defense of the country,” the statement concluded.
The Brazilian Air Force reportedly invoked the nation’s 1998 Shootdown Law and a 2004 decree on airspace security to take down the alleged drug-trafficking plane. The invoked legislation states that Air Force fighters can intercept and shoot a hostile plane down to protect national security and sovereignty if the aircraft refuses to comply and disobeys all orders given.
Brazilian authorities have not publicly disclosed further information at press time on the Venezuelan-inbound alleged drug-trafficking plane, the two dead pilots, and the type and amount of drugs the plane transported.
For the greater part of the past two decades, neighbors Venezuela and Brazil maintained highly friendly ties fostered by Venezuela’s late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez and Brazil’s radical leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. According to Chávez, he and Lula became close friends during the 1990s, long before either of them had been elected president.
Following Chávez’s death from an undisclosed form of cancer in March 2013, his appointed successor, current socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, maintained the friendly ties between the leftist-led neighbors alongside Lula’s successor, leftist former President Dilma Rousseff.
Rousseff was impeached in 2016 over corruption allegations while Lula, who served for two consecutive presidential terms between 2003 and 2011, was sentenced in 2019 to over two decades in prison on multiple corruption charges that took place during his first two presidential terms.
Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) overturned Lula’s convictions in 2021, allowing him to run for president again in 2022, when he narrowly defeated then-incumbent conservative President Jair Bolsonaro.
Under Bolsonaro’s administration, Brazil cut all relations with Venezuela in 2019 in response to Maduro no longer being the legitimate president of the country after a sham election in 2018. Upon returning to power in January 2023, Lula restored Brazil’s diplomatic ties with the Maduro regime and reestablished the friendly ties and cooperation between the two leftist governments following Maduro’s official visit to the neighboring nation in May 2023.
The friendly relationship between Lula and Maduro soured, however, after Maduro held another fraudulent presidential election on July 28, 2024.
Maduro allegedly personally promised Lula’s top foreign policy adviser Celso Amorim that he would provide him with voter data and documentation to show his “victory” in the highly fraudulent event but never did so. At press time, neither Maduro nor any member of his socialist regime has published the purported documentation.
Maduro’s refusal to provide the promised voter documentation — which Amorim described as a “breach of trust” that had nothing to do with “democracy” — prompted Lula to snub Maduro, which cost the Venezuelan a highly-coveted membership seat at the BRICS anti-U.S. bloc during the group’s latest annual gathering, hosted by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in the city of Kazan in October 2024.
Lula, 79, was slated to attend the meeting, but cancelled his trip after suffering a head injury in a bathroom accident hours before he was scheduled to travel to Russia. Weeks later, in December, Lula underwent an emergency surgery to drain an intracranial hemorrhage resulting from the injury.
Maduro, who participated as a guest in the BRICS meeting, claimed upon returning to Caracas empty-handed that no one would veto or silence Venezuela and ominously predicted that whoever tries to do so will “wither.” Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab accused Lula of “faking” the head injury as part of a contrived anti-Venezuela plot to leave it out of the BRICS group. Saab never presented evidence that could substantiate his accusations.
In January, Amorim announced that Lula’s government does not recognize Maduro’s fraudulent electoral victory. Brazil nevertheless maintains diplomatic ties with Venezuela. Maduro reportedly did not extend a personal invitation to Lula to attend his inauguration on January 10, 2025. Brazil was instead represented by its ambassador to Caracas Glivânia Maria de Oliveira.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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