Aguacate Airport is the Tegucigalpa base named for SETCO, an airfreight company whose corporate trail connects aircraft operations in Honduras to the wider cocaine-and-arms network. The airport’s importance is logistical rather than scenic: it gives the investigation a specific location for tracing aircraft and refueling within a transnational system built around moving contraband across borders.

Setting and Identification

Art Keller’s investigation follows the serial number N-3423VX through a maze of holding corporations, shell companies, and business names. The trail ends at Servicios Turísticos, known as SETCO, an airfreight company operating out of Aguacate Airport in Tegucigalpa. The identification makes the airport a concrete point of contact between an aircraft and the company behind its operations. The Honduran setting carries a longer history of commerce entangled with smuggling. Art recalls how banana companies based in New Orleans depended on docks controlled by the New Orleans Mafia, and how contraband could travel beneath legitimate cargo. That history does not establish that the airport itself participated in those earlier schemes; it frames Honduras as a place where lawful transport infrastructure and illicit trade have long intersected.

Role in the Air Network

The Honduran registry answers a practical question in the investigation: where the DC-4s refuel. Aguacate Airport is thus tied to an operational requirement of long-distance air transport, not merely to a name on a corporate record. The route sits within a broader system in which Colombian cocaine was moved through Central America and Mexico toward the United States, while weapons moved through connected channels in the opposite direction. SETCO’s corporate identity also gives the airport a human and organizational link. Its partners are David Núñez and Ramón Mette Ballasteros; Núñez is later identified as a Cuban expatriate and Operation 40 veteran. The evidence places Núñez within the arms-and-drugs network, but does not establish that the later hangar activity involving him takes place at Aguacate Airport.

Investigative and Narrative Significance

The airport functions as a hinge in Art’s paper investigation: a chain of obscured ownership resolves into a named airfreight company at a named Honduran location. Its narrative force comes from that conversion of abstraction into geography. The aircraft’s refueling point helps make visible how the Federación could profit from transport and access across the border, even as individual cargoes and corporate identities were concealed behind layers of intermediaries.