It happened on Wednesdays.
Every week, victims were selected and “transferred” away from the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), one of most active clandestine centers of detention, torture and extermination run by Argentina’s military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983.
“Transferred” was the dictatorship’s code word for “executed”, and one of the most common destinations for those transfers were the dark waters of the River Plate. After being kidnapped, tortured and imprisoned for days, weeks or months, desaparecidos held at ESMA and other clandestine centers were rounded up, given a sedative shot, and thrown alive into the river from Navy airplanes that took off from Buenos Aires airfields at night.
They are now known as the “death flights”, and one of those airplanes will be brought back to the country to stand as a reminder of horror.
The Argentine government is in the final stages of bringing back one of those airplanes — a Short Skyvan model that was discovered in the US back in 2010, thanks to an investigation by Argentine journalist and ESMA survivor Miriam Lewin and Italian photographer Giancarlo Ceraudo. They found several death-flight airplanes, including four other Skyvans –two of which were destroyed in the Malvinas war– and three Electra models.
Pilot and philanthropist Enrique Piñeyro, who also helped track them down and was a plaintiff in a case against death-flight pilots, made the final authentication of the plane at the Coolidge Municipal Airport on January 8.
The search for the airplanes was originally conceived by Lewin and Ceraudo as a way of tracking down their pilots. But the planes themselves can provide more than information.
“This airplane was also a place where relatives of the disappeared –who have been throwing their symbolic offerings into the river, can go and lay flowers into what is probably the last place where their loved ones were alive,” Lewin told the Buenos Aires Herald.
Lewin was kept alive to perform white-collar tasks at ESMA, together with other detained-disappeared who were used as slave labor. She was released in 1979 although she continued to be monitored by the military. Once democracy was restored, she testified for the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Conadep) created by President Raúl Alfonsin, which also received several anonymous testimonies from military officers describing the existence of death flights. Lewin was also a witness in many of the trials that focused on ESMA torturers and murderers after they reopened trials in 2003. She is now the country’s Press Ombudswoman.
When navy officers used to return to ESMA after transferring prisoners, the detained-disappeared there would see them carrying the clothes of the same people they had taken away hours before.
“They told us they had given them better ones, because they were sending them to Patagonia. And we chose to believe them. Some things are just too horrifying,” said Lewin in an interview with Página 12.
This particular Skyvan flew on the night of December 14, 1977, murdering Mothers of Plaza de Mayo founder Azucena Villaflor and several other desaparecidos —including French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, who had been kidnapped at the Church of the Holy Cross (‘Iglesia de la Santa Cruz’) in Buenos Aires and brought to the ESMA.
A few days later, five bodies washed up on the shore and were buried in anonymous graves. The remains of Villaflor, Duquet and three others were identified among them in 2005 by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.
“In the Argentine context, where denialist speeches are emerging, this plane –particularly this one that was used to throw off the founding group of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the French nuns– is an undeniable evidence of the extremes that state terrorism reached,” said Lewin.
“We now have new generations of young people who will vote, and they are being captivated by an allegedly libertarian discourse that is actually extremely authoritarian and vindicates the actions of the military back then.”
In 2017, two pilots of that particular flight, Mario Daniel Arrú and Alejandro Domingo D’Agostino, were sentenced to life in prison as part of the case known as “ESMA III”. The third pilot, Enrique José De Saint Georges, died while on trial months before the sentence.
The airplane has been bought by the Economy Ministry, led by Sergio Massa, and will be flown from the US with a yet-undisclosed flight plan. It will take around 5 days and several stopovers due to the airplane’s short flight range, according to ministry sources. It is expected to land in an Argentine airport in April, at which point the Argentine state will officially take possession of the aircraft.
Original parts will also be brought in on the flight as separate imports, including a sign that was then located next to the cargo door lever, indicating it should never be opened without authorization from the flight’s commander. The content of that sign, together with the airplanes manuals, were used at the trial against the pilots to refute the claim that they were not aware of what happened outside their cabin during the flights.
Sources in the Economy ministry told the Buenos Aires Herald that the process of acquiring the plane was not easy, since it was not originally on sale, and it took several rounds of negotiation until the owner agreed to the purchase on December 7th last year.
The Skyvan will fly to Argentina in its current state — it has been modified from its original version with updated avionics, new engines, a weather radar, and a new electronic system to open the formerly-manual cargo door. Once here, it will be stationed at a hangar provided by the Defense Ministry, where it will be arranged for transportation –including the temporary removal of its wings– to its final destination: the former ESMA property, which has been transformed into the Space for Memory and for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights.
The full ESMA complex was sprawled across 17 hectares in a residential neighborhood of Buenos Aires, but the horrors of state-sponsored torture took place in one building: the Casino de Oficiales, or Officers’ Quarters. The building was later turned into a Site for Memory and the Officers’ Quarters became the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory. Said museum is currently nominated for the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Sources at the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, specified that the airplane will be displayed in the Space for Memory but not in the museum itself.
Wherever it ends up being displayed, the airplane is set to be an emotional lightning rod.
“Personally, being close to the plane for the first time was a shock to me,” said Lewin, who flew to Fort Lauderdale in 2014 to see it in person for the first time. “I couldn’t stop thinking about the bodies of the people I cared about inside that thing. People I had known, people I had worked with as an activist and with whom I was a prisoner.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking I myself could have been a passenger in one of those flights.”
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