Responsibility for removal
Apologies if I'm being pedantic. It took 46 hours to haul the Centurion MD-11 off the runway; in that time it now appears that over 500 other Viracopos flights - pax and cargo - were directly affected; Azul (a passenger operation run by David Neely of JetBlue fame and based at Viracopos) had 15 aircraft trapped and that impacted their operations all down the line.
Viracopos is in transition, being jointly run by Infraero and the new concessionaires who take on full responsibility in January 2013. Infraero at the time were reported to have said responsibility for removal laid with the operators, Centurion. The A/C removal kit had to be hired from TAM, not sure whether brought from Sao Carlos or Sao Jose dos Campos. I don't know who paid for the TAM kit - Infraero, Centurion or their insurers - but the bottom line is it took nearly two days to get the aircraft off the runway.
My question is for the airport and cargo operators: whose responsibility is it to remove a damaged aircraft from a runway?