The military called them “transfers”, but in reality they were “flights of death.”
Argentine Armed Forces planes threw people, mostly alive, into the Rio de La Plata or the sea after having drugged them.
It was a systematic plan of extermination that was carried out during the last Argentine military regime, Come in 1976 Y 1983.
“The flights of death constituted the last part of a repressive cycle that had the characteristic of the disappearance of people. It is the last facet of the disappearance process “, synthesizes Valentina Salvi, sociologist and researcher of the recent history of Argentina of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (Conicet).
They had to pass more than four decades -this 24 March is fulfilled 45 years of the last military coup in Argentina- so that justice could reconstruct how those flights happened and condemn that practice.
AND the job is not finished yet.
After the historical failure of 2017 of the so-called “Megacausa ESMA” – the acronym of the National School of the Argentine Navy- in which 29 ex-military were sentenced to life imprisonment and there were other 19 sentences between 8 and 25 years for the crimes of kidnapping, torture and disappearance of people during the last military period, a new trial began last year.
On this occasion, the prosecution seeks to prove the existence of the “death flights” operated from Campo de Mayo , a military base in the northeast of the province of Buenos Aires where another clandestine detention center operated, to That those who commanded that operation be sentenced.
“We are going to repair, even if it is a minimal thing, all the damage that they have caused to the families of the victims,” Mercedes Soiza tells BBC Mundo Reilly, a member of Attorney General Marcelo García Berro’s team in the cases where “death flights” are being investigated in Campo de Mayo.
What were the “death flights” like?
In the ESMA building, in the north of the City of Buenos Aires, it worked since 1976 until 1983 one of the largest clandestine detention centers of the military regime that ruled Argentina in that same period.
Although the exact number of people who were housed there against their will is not known, human rights organizations maintain that there were up to 5. 000.
In the Megacause ESMA, in addition to the abuse, torture, theft of babies and murders, it was also possible to prove the existence of the organization of the “death flights.”
They happened between once and twice a week , mostly between the years 1976 Y 1977. A group of abductees from among 25 Y 30 people, each one of them meticulously selected, were taken to a secluded room in the ESMA.
There they were injected with a substance -pentotal or ketalar- that made them sleepy and then undressed them.
Later they were transferred piled up in a truck to the Jorge Newbery Metropolitan Airport , the airport of the City of Buenos Aires.
They were loaded onto an army plane and in mid-flight they were thrown , to the Río de la Plata in the first instance and in subsequent flights, presumably, to the sea.
Of those flights that departed with hostages from the ESMA -and also believe other clandestine detention centers- there are no survivors.
“We had an idea about this because a colleague was taken by mistake and then returned. And he told this, ”he said in 2001 Miriam Lewin, journalist and survivor of ESMA, in a testimony from the Oral Archive of Open Memory, part of an alliance of human rights organizations in Argentina .
Lewin refers to the sayings of Emilio Assales Bonazzola, alias “Tincho”, who had 34 years and had been kidnapped in January 1977. Then the testimony of Lidia Batista, from 36 years, kidnapped in December 1978.
Both were detained at the ESMA and were taken off the flights. When they were returned to the clandestine center, they told their colleagues what had happened to them. It is likely that later they were “transferred” again. The two are still missing today.
“In general we did not want to hear much of this (…) we thought that maybe it had happened only that time, that it was not the form of general elimination,” Lewin recalled.
More chilling details
Some bodies destroyed of those people thrown in “the flights of death” began to appear on the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay between the years 1976 Y 1977.
In Buenos Aires, the corpses were buried as NN, that is, without a name, although previously the police forensic doctors performed autopsies and concluded the Ones revealed that the cause of death had been a collision with hard objects from a great height.
Roberto León Dios, one of the forensics who performed several of the autopsies, mysteriously died a few months later.
Other people began to talk about the appearance of the bodies, such as the journalist Rodolfo Walsh, who the 24 March 1978, on the first year of the military government, wrote an “Open letter from a writer to the Military Junta ”in which he denounced these chos.
The following day Walsh was riddled with bullets in the heart of the city of Buenos Aires and, dying, was kidnapped and disappeared.
The first testimony on the part of the military that “the flights of death” existed was offered by the former lieutenant captain Adolfo Scilingo in a statement to the journalist Horacio Verbitsky published in the book “The flight” in 1995 .
There the former ESMA representative explained what the mechanics of “the flights of death” were like.
“It was an Armed Force that is organized to fulfill the last part of a systematic plan that is murder “, details Soiza Reilly, who served as attorney general in the ESMA Megacause.
” The death flights were not the only way that the military used in Argentina to assassinate, but it was a very used one in most of the extermination centers ”, he assures.
-
The moving reunion in Argentina between a “stolen child” during the military government and the family that had been looking for him almost 40 years
“Fish food”
The Argentine justice took decades to take that information that was repeated in the account of the survivors, ex-military personnel and witnesses.
In those testimonies they spoke of syringes, drug bottles, vomiting, marks on the ground after having dragged bodies and the euphemisms used by the captors to refer to “the flights of death.”
“The transfers”; “They will be food of pe c is”; “They went up”; “Flying nuns” (referring to two French nuns, Alice Domond and Leonie Duquet, who were kidnapped, tortured and thrown alive into the Río de la Plata in one of those flights, in 1977).
“These euphemisms meant that something was happening with people in the air,” reflects the prosecutor.
“The planes of death”
There are still many unanswered questions.
It is still unknown how many flights there were, if they extended beyond 1977 and how many people were thrown from the planes into the river and into the sea.
“In court, only cases in which the bodies were found. And this data is not so real. In the clandestine center of Campo de Mayo, between 3 passed. 000 and 4. 000 victims, they say, and there are very few survivors, most of them are missing and there are very few finds of bodies ”, explains Soiza Reilly.
In the new trial of the Federal Oral Court 2 of San Martín, which began in October 2020, the accused are Santiago Omar Riveros, former head of the Military Field Institutes of Mayo, and four of his subordinates: Luis del Valle Arce, former commander of the Aviation Battalion 601; his second, Delsis Ángel Malacalza; former operations officer Eduardo María Lance; and the then personnel officer Horacio Alberto Conditi.
They are accused of kidnapping and torturing four people at the Campo de Mayo military base, who were later disappeared in the framework of “flights of the death. ”
The victims are Rosa Eugenia Novillo Corvalán kidnapped between October and November of 1976 and whose body was found on the shores of the province of Buenos Aires in December of that year; and Roberto Ramón Arancibia who was kidnapped in May of 1977 and his body appeared in February 1978, also on the Buenos Aires coast .
Adrián Enrique Accrescimbeni and Juan Carlos Rosace were deprived of their liberty in November of 1976 and their bodies were found on the banks of the River of Plata, on the coast of Buenos Aires, in December of that year.
“In this case we are going to test the operation of the flights (of death) in Campo de Mayo, the mechanics and operations and how this operations battalion provided airplanes to the task force that worked there to carry out the practice of death “, says the prosecutor.
Unlike the army flights that left at the end of the decade of 1976 from the Aeroparque or the airport or Ezeiza International, the Aviation Battalion 675 Campo de Mayo had its own landing strip which made it easier to make trips at any time without drawing attention.
Prosecutors and members of the investigation knew that in Campo de Mayo there were planes in disuse and that some they could have starred in “the flights of death.” But when they did an inspection last December they were still surprised.
Two of the planes that were used to throw people into the river and into the sea more than 40 years were still there , abandoned, but full of history.
These are Twin Otter ships registration AE – 106 and Fiat G – 222 License plates AE – 260, AE 260 and AE – 262.
“In 1976, the army brings Fiat aircraft from Italy G 222 and are today abandoned in Campo de Mayo and are the planes of death . We did an inspection and got on the planes of death ”, Soiza Reilly details.
This model of plane has the particularity of having sliding doors on both sides of the fuselage, which can be used to deploy paratroopers.
But in the “death flights” they used it to throw people alive and drugged to kill them.
Will there be justice?
“I think so” , says convinced Soiza Reilly, who anticipates that the sentence will be known at the end of 2021.
“Argentina is very proactive on human rights and never lowered its arms. From the Public Ministry we have enough evidence so that those responsible have their penalty for what they did “, he assures.
The prosecutor says that all those military structures functioned as a great gear, like an oiled device where each one fulfilled their role. The aviation fulfilled its role of collaborating with the final elimination of the victims through the use of airplanes.
“If we understand this sequence, this is the systematic plan of repression “, he describes.
Conicet researcher Valentina Salvi agrees that the path of the trials is the clearest and most forceful in terms of reparation for the victims and for the construction of a truth in the country.
“The flights of death were the most hidden (of the regime military) ”, he opines.
“In Argentina there were years of impunity . This was a great political and ethical debt ”, Salvi concludes.
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo. Download the new version of our app and activate them so as not to miss our best content.