Global Courant
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Flying from Florida to Buenos Aires usually takes about 10 hours, but Saturday’s turboprop landing in Argentina was no ordinary plane. It had been 20 days on the road and many Argentines were eagerly revamping flight tracking software to keep track of progress.
The Short SC.7 Skyvan was not carrying critical cargo or VIP passengers. Rather, the plane will be another means for Argentines to reckon with the brutal history of their country’s military dictatorship from 1976-1983.
The plane, discovered in the US, is the first ever proven in court that it was used by the Argentine junta to sling political prisoners to death from the air, one of the period’s most bloody atrocities.
The Argentine government will add the plane to the Museum of Memory, located in what was once the junta’s most notorious secret detention center. Known as the ESMA, it housed many of the prisoners who were later thrown alive from the “death flights” into the ocean or river
One of dozens of victims linked to the returned plane was Azucena Villaflor, whose son Néstor disappeared and was presumed killed early in the dictatorship. After he went missing, she founded the group Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to demand information about missing children, after which she herself was detained and disappeared.
“For us, as family members, it is very important that the plane is part of history, because both the bodies and the plane tell exactly what happened,” Cecilia De Vincenti, Villaflor’s daughter, told The Associated Press.
The plane’s return was made possible by Italian photographer Giancarlo Ceraudo, who spent years searching for “death flight” planes. It had later delivered mail in Florida and more recently transported skydivers in Arizona.
During his search, Ceraudo said, countless people failed to understand why he remained steadfastly focused on finding the junta’s plane, especially since the bodies of many of the dictatorship’s victims remain undiscovered.
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“The planes had to be salvaged because they were an important piece, like the (Nazi) gas chambers, a terrible tool,” Ceraudo said in an interview.
The Argentine junta is widely regarded as the most deadly of the military dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. It arrested, tortured and killed people suspected of resisting the regime. Human rights organizations estimate that 30,000 were killed, many of whom disappeared without a trace.
Some of them disappeared aboard the ‘death flights’.
During an extensive trial from 2012-2017, survivors stated that the flights occurred at least weekly. According to witnesses, prisoners were often told they were being released and were sometimes forced to dance to loud music in celebration. Then they were given a supposed vaccination that was in fact a strong sedative. When the drug took effect, they were hooded, tied up and loaded aboard a plane.
The trial, which sentenced 29 former officials to life in prison, proved that the dictatorship used death flights as a systematic means of extermination. It specified that the Skyvan that had just returned to Buenos Aires had been used to kill Villaflor and 11 other prisoners.
Prosecutors say it is impossible to know how many prisoners have been thrown from planes. But according to the Argentine forensic anthropology team, a non-governmental group, at least 71 bodies of suspected flight victims washed up along the coast — 44 in Argentina and 27 in neighboring Uruguay.
Between December 1977 and February 1978, the bodies of five women washed ashore, including Villaflor, two other members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, and two French nuns who helped mothers search for their loved ones. They were buried without identification and their bodies were not identified until 2005.
Ceraudo worked with Miriam Lewin, a journalist and ESMA survivor, in the search for the planes.
The pilots of the flight that took Villaflor to her death were convicted in part because of flight logs that Ceraudo and Lewin were able to find after tracking down the PA-51 Skyvan in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2010.
“The data led us to the pilots, and those names allowed us to locate them within the repressive structures that operated in the service of the systematic extermination plan,” said Mercedes Soiza Reilly, who was prosecutor in the trial from 2012-2017. .
Through a painstaking search, which included diving deep into websites where plane spotter hobbyists tracked planes, Ceraudo and Lewin were able to locate the planes.
Of the five Skyvan aircraft known to have been used in death flights, two had been destroyed in the 1982 war with Britain over the Falkland Islands. The three others were sold in 1994 to CAE Aviation, a Luxembourg company. One of those aircraft was sold to GB Airlink, who used it to provide private mail service to the Bahamas from Florida.
This year, after the Argentine government decided to buy the plane after a campaign by De Vincenti and other human rights activists, it was in a skydiving outfit in Phoenix.
“What an incredible story, right?” said De Vincenti. “Because they were thrown out without a parachute, and now they use it for that, for skydiving.”
Getting such an old plane back wasn’t easy. It was stuck in Jamaica for two weeks after its engine failed shortly after takeoff from the island. In Bolivia, too, it was stuck for a few days due to inclement weather.
In pursuit of justice for victims of the junta, Argentina has conducted 296 trials involving crimes against humanity from the dictatorship since 2006, after amnesty laws were scrapped. According to the Public Prosecution Service, 1,115 people have been convicted of this.
By displaying the plane, Argentines will better understand the reality of the dictatorship, activists say.
“It’s very important, because generations after generations have been born and lived in democracy and not suffered the terror of those years,” Lewin said.
