Escape from a dictatorship death camp: the story of Jaime Dri |
When Jaime Dri realized he was being held at the ESMA death camp, one thing became very clear to him: he would never make it out alive.
It was late December, 1977, and the military junta that ruled the country was at its peak. Dri, a former provincial congressman in Chaco and a political official within the Montoneros guerrilla organization, had been kidnapped on December 15 in Montevideo, Uruguay, by local armed forces.
His capture had been yet another operation within the framework of Operation Condor, a covert campaign by South American military dictatorships to coordinate kidnappings and assassinations of political opponents across borders.Dri was waterboarded and shocked with electric prods for days at a black site in Carrasco. In very poor shape, he was flown to Buenos Aires’ Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), Argentina’s largest clandestine center of detention, torture and extermination.
While on the plane, he begged for water, but his captors told him he was still under the effects of electricity. A drink of water could kill him.
“It’s OK,” he answered, “I’ll be drinking plenty of water when I’m down in the River Plate.”He wasn’t just making a dark joke. Earlier that year, journalist and writer Rodolfo Walsh had published his Open Letter to the Military Dictatorship, revealing, among other things, that the dictatorship’s extermination plan included throwing kidnapped dissidents alive from airplanes into the ocean.
The day before Dri was captured, Mothers of Plaza de Mayo founder Azucena Villaflor and French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet — who had been abducted by Navy forces several days before — had been boarded into one of these “death flights” together with a dozen desaparecidos.
Days later, the remains of Villaflor, Duquet and three others washed up on the shores of Buenos Aires’ province. Their identification in 2005 by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team helped prove the actual existence of the death flights in court.
Dri was taken to the ESMA death camp, where he discovered several of his fellow militants whom he believed killed had been kept alive. Junta leader and Admiral Emilio Massera had decided to spare some of the desaparecidos and turn them into a political “staff” for his own presidential........