The 'death flight' plane of the Argentine dictatorship has returned to the country for a historical reckoning
A U.S. court has proven for the first time that Argentina's junta used the plane to hurl political detainees to their deaths.
On Saturday, a turboprop plane landed in Argentina after spending about 10 hours flying from Florida to Buenos Aires, but it was not a regular plane. For 20 days, it had been on its way, and many Argentines eagerly checked flight tracking software.
Instead, the Short SC.7 Skyvan will serve as a means for Argentines to confront the brutality of their country's 1976-1983 military dictatorship.
Argentine's junta used the plane, which was discovered in the U.S., to hurl political detainees to their deaths from the sky, one of the bloodiest atrocities of the bloody period.
This plane will be housed in what was the junta's most infamous secret detention center, the ESMA, which housed many of those thrown alive from "death flights" into the ocean or rivers.
One of the victims linked to the returned plane was Azucena Villaflor, whose son Néstor disappeared and presumably was murdered early in the dictatorship. In response to his disappearance, she founded the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo group to request information about lost children, and was then arrested and killed herself.
As family members, it is very important that the plane be part of history, since both bodies and the plane show exactly what happened," Villaflor's daughter Cecilia De Vincenti said.
During his search for "death flight" planes, Italian photographer Giancarlo Ceraudo discovered this one, which later delivered mail in Florida and carried skydivers in Arizona.
Many people failed to comprehend why Ceraudo remained steadfastly focused on finding the junta's aircraft, especially since many of the dictatorship's victims are still unidentified.
Ceraudo said in an interview that it was essential to recover the planes because they were a terrible tool, similar to the Nazi gas chambers. In the 1970s and 1980s, Argentina's military dictatorship ruled much of Latin America. People suspected of opposing the regime were detained, tortured, and killed. The number of people murdered is estimated at 30,000, many of whom have disappeared.
In an extensive trial from 2012 to 2017, survivors testified that they were taken on the “death flights” at least once a week. It has been reported that prisoners were often informed they were being released and sometimes forced to dance to loud music. Following a false vaccination that was in fact a strong sedative, they were hooded, bound, and loaded onto a plane as the drug took effect.
According to the trial, in which 29 former officials were sentenced to life in prison, death flights were used as a systematic method of extermination.
According to prosecutors, it is impossible to determine how many detainees were thrown off the planes in total. A non-governmental organization, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, says 71 bodies of suspected death flight victims have been found along the coast — 44 in Argentina and 27 in neighboring Uruguay.
Five women's bodies were washed up between December 1977 and February 1978, including Villaflor, two other Mothers of Plaza de Mayo members and two French nuns helping mothers search for their loved ones. It took until 2005 to identify their bodies because they were buried without identification.
