Argentine officials seized and impounded cargo from a USAF C-17 at Argentina’s Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires, provoking a diplomatic fight with the United States. “It’s absolutely necessary that they immediately return that material. It makes no sense for it to have been confiscated this way,” said US assistant secretary of state for Latin America, Arturo Valenzuela, reports the Wall Street Journal. The Argentines took equipment including firearms, medical-morphine, and surveillance gear from Army Special Forces advisors who arrived on the C-17 for a US-sponsored counterterrorism training program for Argentine police. Argentina’s foreign minister Hector Timmerman accused US officials of smuggling arms and narcotics into the country, asserting that they had not declared the training items on the flight manifest. (See also Voice of America report)
The $4.26 billion Small Business Innovation Research contracting program widely used by the Air Force went into hibernation as the government shut down Oct. 1, but unless lawmakers strike a deal on reforms, the program could reach an abrupt end.
