Few souls walk around the bonded warehouses at the imports section of the Ezeiza International Airport. The scarce people that walk the streets are mainly Edcadassa employees, the firm that administrates those warehouses.

Customs brokers and brokers in general, who used to swarm the place with briefcases and cell-phones in hand, are now extinguishing species.

Cargo vanished. The weight figures managed last December came to be 48% less than the same month of the previous year. “It is an alarming situation”, Francisco Comparato, Edcadassa commercial manager, said.

Anyway Aerolineas Argentinas seems to insist on the idea of building their own bonded warehouse, out of the Ezeiza airport compound, and without interfering exclusivity Edcadassa holds there.

The idea Aerolineas has been dealing with for some time, is now subject to the company’s doubling its bet and not only build a warehouse but a building to hold all its staff, that these days uses five storeys of a building on Bouchard street, in downtown Buenos Aires.

“We want to move to a place where we will be nearer the operations area”, Julio Scaramella, speaker for the airline, commented.  Provisionally there would already be a chosen place to house the new offices, though the company preferred not to offer great detail. “What is defined already is that the location will be near the Ezeiza airport”, Scaramella confided.

Aerolineas’ plan, which resumed its cargo operation on the first day of February, includes reconciliation with Edcadassa, with whom it had broken commercial ties at the beginning of last November, what caused the interruption of goods transport in the holds of their planes that landed and took off from Ezeiza .

Although any approximation to the flag line was denied by the bonded warehouse operator, the truth is there was a beginning of agreement between both companies to allow the airline to restart its cargo deliveries from the international airport.

Anyway, the idea of Aerolineas building its own bonded warehouse at some area near the terminal continues generating uneasiness at Edcadassa, that some time back, when the management was the Exxel Group responsibility, had succeeded in stopping some constructions Aeropuertos Argentina 2000 (AA2000) was executing to build a cargo transfer centre within Ezeiza a few metres away from Edcadassa.

In this case, the situation is different. Not only because the function carried out by Exxel in that time is now exercised by its previous competitor,AA200, but because the Aerolíneas plan does not contemplate the possibility of trying to build the warehouse within Ezeiza, something they know will be impossible to achieve.