LatinNews Daily Report - 23 September 2013

POLITICS | US responds to Maduro’s latest complaint. On 19 September Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro flew to China after a tiff with the US over his flight path. On 20 September Roberta S. Jacobson, the US assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs, rejected that the US had ever denied Maduro’s plane permission to use US airspace over Puerto Rico and stressed that in fact Venezuela had not followed normal procedures in submitting its request but that the US had worked to expedite it anyway. A US State Department note said that Venezuela had made its request on Wednesday 18 September, just a day before Maduro’s scheduled departure, when such requests are supposed to be made three days in advance. It added that Maduro was flying in a Cubana Airlines jet and that diplomatic flight requests were supposed to involve official State aircraft.  The statement said that, despite all of that, the US had worked with Venezuelan officials to get the approval done quickly. “This whole thing is absurd”, Jacobson said.  “This was a request that came in very late for an aircraft that is not a Venezuelan State aircraft and therefore would not normally get diplomatic clearance, and we got it done as quickly as we could so we don’t understand this reaction”. An airline industry analyst consulted by The New York Times, Robert W. Mann Jr., said that the most direct route from Caracas to Paris was over the Lesser Antilles and that flying over Puerto Rico, farther north, adds about 100 miles to the flight path. He admitted that there could be valid reasons to travel the extra distance, including wind forecasts or technical issues associated with the type of aircraft being used.