Ministro Pistarini International Airport, universally known as Ezeiza after the suburb it occupies, opened in 1949 as the flagship public-works project of Juan Peron's postwar government. At its inauguration it ranked among the largest airports in the world, laid out on a vast wooded reserve southwest of Buenos Aires and linked to the capital by one of Argentina's first motorways.
It is named for Juan Pistarini, the public works minister who personally laid its cornerstone in 1945. The airport entered political history in 1973, when crowds awaiting Juan Peron's return from exile clashed in the tragedy remembered as the Ezeiza massacre.
For decades Ezeiza has been Argentina's window on the world, handling nearly all of the country's long-haul traffic while domestic flights concentrated at the downtown Aeroparque Jorge Newbery.
The private operator Aeropuertos Argentina 2000 took over in the late 1990s and began a rolling modernization of the aging complex. The most dramatic change came in 2023, when a sweeping new departures terminal opened, unifying check-in and security in a bright hall that finally matched the airport's role as the primary gateway to Argentina and the home base of Aerolineas Argentinas.