The aircraft, a Cessna 210, was found on a rural road in southern Santa Fe province with a package of cocaine inside. There were no occupants on board, and the discovery came just hours after the arrest of alleged drug kingpin Brian Bilbao in Buenos Aires.
he Mysterious Arequito Plane Crash: No Crew, Cocaine on Board, and Ties to a Major Drug Network
What began as an ordinary morning for a rural farmer quickly escalated into a sweeping federal investigation. Daniel, a longtime resident of Arequito, was making his usual rounds when something in a nearby field caught his eye — a small aircraft lying wrecked in the middle of a neighboring property. The sight was so shocking that he froze for a moment before rushing to alert the Volunteer Fire Department and the Santa Fe Police. Soon after, the National Gendarmerie and the Federal Court took control of the scene.
“I went to the field and saw a plane down. I told a firefighter, and he called the police. The site is about six kilometers from my property,” Daniel told local reporters, still visibly shaken.
The circumstances surrounding the crash were as eerie as they were puzzling. According to Daniel, the plane was completely abandoned — no pilot, no passengers, no signs of injury, and no footprints or tracks nearby. The aircraft appeared to have clipped a perimeter fence before coming down. “It took some wire with it. We found it at 8:30 a.m. The engine was cold, the cabin was intact, and there were no traces of blood or violence. The door was open,” he recounted.
Forensic teams quickly uncovered the truth behind the plane’s silent crash: a package of pure cocaine hidden inside. And with that discovery, investigators immediately connected the dots to a massive drug-trafficking network dismantled just hours earlier in Buenos Aires.
At the center of that operation was Brian Walter Bilbao (47), one of Argentina’s most elusive narcotraffickers. Bilbao had been arrested the previous day in Exaltación de la Cruz while awaiting a 400-kilogram shipment of cocaine from the country’s northern border. Authorities now believe the abandoned Arequito aircraft was part of the same smuggling network — a clandestine air corridor that used rural airstrips and hidden routes across Santa Fe to ferry drugs from Bolivia and Paraguay.
The Federal Court of Rosario is investigating the theory that the plane belonged to the fleet operated by Bilbao’s organization, which allegedly ran its operations out of the upscale Campo Timbó gated community in Timbúes. There, the criminal group reportedly maintained a private hangar and airstrip to manage incoming and outgoing shipments with minimal detection.
As forensic teams continue analyzing the aircraft and the seized narcotics, investigators are piecing together the plane’s final journey: who was flying it, where the cargo was headed, and how the crew managed to vanish without leaving a single trace. The case sheds new light on the increasingly sophisticated use of lightweight aircraft for drug trafficking in central Argentina — a shadowy, fast-evolving tactic that federal forces are now racing to dismantle.
