At 1:17 AM on Tuesday, June 4, a Ghadames Airline plane with a capacity of 400 passengers landed at Augusto C. Sandino International Airport in Managua. This marks the third flight arriving in Managua from the same origin in less than a month.
The flight tracking platform Flightaware indicated that the flight duration was 13 hours and 35 minutes. Departing from Mitiga International Airport in Tripoli, Libya, at 7:42 PM local time on Monday, the aircraft landed in Managua at 1:17 AM on Tuesday, local time.
The Boeing 777-200 is the largest aircraft in Ghadames Airline’s fleet. According to its website, Ghadames Air is a private airline based in Tripoli, Libya. It was founded in 2021 and is named after the ancient city of Ghadames.
Third Flight in Less Than a Month
This is the third flight to arrive in Nicaragua in less than a month. The first flight was on May 23, when an aircraft from the same airline landed after a 14-hour and 40-minute journey. On that occasion, the aircraft departed from Benghazi Airport, Libya, at 2:22 AM.
On May 18, according to a report by this media outlet, which tracked the flight using Flightaware, another charter flight from Benghazi, Libya, operated by the same airline, also landed in Managua.
Ghadames Airline does not operate direct flights to Nicaragua, so these recorded flights have been charter flights.
Manuel Orozco, an analyst and director of the Migration, Remittances, and Development Program at the Inter-American Dialogue, told LA PRENSA that the objective of the Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo dictatorship, in executing these operations, is “to seize the political opportunity to further exacerbate issues at the U.S.-Mexico border by using Nicaragua as an immediate bridge and, in the process, gain profits.”
Provocation to the U.S.
Regarding the flights from Libya, he mentioned, “Libya was the point of departure this time, as Morocco was before, etc. It is a way to provoke the United States and see how much they can tolerate Nicaragua.”
He also pointed out that “a third charter flight from Libya indicates that the regime continues to bet on promoting irregular migration to increase the burden on the United States while making money from these flights.”
“They use Ghadames Airlines, owned by Libyan companies, consisting of two Boeing aircraft that operate very infrequently. The way the flights arrive, their trajectory, indicates that there is a transportation arrangement according to the demand from passengers willing to pay for these flights,” the expert mentioned.
The arrival of such flights comes amid warnings issued by the U.S. government. On May 15, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an alert to airlines, charter flight operators, travel agents, and air service providers about how migrant trafficking networks are exploiting transportation services to facilitate irregular migration to the United States through Managua.
The alert indicates that the United States has confirmed that “increasingly, migrants are crossing the region using Managua as a landing point to continue their journey north by land.” Despite this alert, transcontinental flights carrying migrants seeking to reach the United States via Managua continue to arrive in Nicaragua.
No Record of Their Arrival in Nicaragua
As with previous occasions, the flight that arrived early Tuesday morning was not recorded by the Empresa Administradora de Aeropuertos Nacionales e Internacionales (EAAI).
In recent years, Cubans, Haitians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Africans, and citizens of Central Asian countries have joined the wave of migrants using Nicaragua as a transit route to reach the United States. They take advantage of Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship policy of not requiring visas for citizens from countries seeking to enter the United States illegally through its southern border.
The issue of irregular migration through its southern border has become one of the most heated political topics in the current electoral campaign in the United States, due to the high concern in that country over the uncontrolled influx of tens of thousands of migrants every month. Ortega’s dictatorship, which considers the United States its enemy, is actively promoting the exacerbation of this crisis.