Sebastián Santana Camargo knew that the five activists forced to board the plane in Paraguay were never seen again.

The Uruguayan artist had been commissioned to illustrate a video of an Argentine navy airplane that the country’s dictatorship used to traffick political detainees across borders during the worst repression of Operation Condor.

Archives from the time included details like its model and number. Its last recorded location was in Argentina in 1984. But its whereabouts were unknown. So, Santana did what any artist would. He Googled it — and got several pages of results.

At first, he was skeptical, but as he scrolled through Google Images, his suspicions grew. The aircraft that kept cropping up on planespotter blogs and aviation websites wasn’t just the same model. It was the same plane.

“I looked at the screen and I couldn’t believe it,” he told the Herald. “It blew my mind.”

Once Santana realized what he was looking at, it took just a couple of hours to confirm. He compared pictures posted on the websites with the information he had on the plane. “It was relatively easy,” he said. “I had plenty of information that told me that it was the same plane from the documents.”

The official Argentine Navy Facebook page even had pictures of it with its registration number written in the captions. The images showed that the aircraft had been painted over and its code had changed after being sold a couple of times.

On one of the pages was a Google Maps image with a pin on its current location: Montevideo’s Melilla airport. It was even visible on Google Street View. It had been sitting there, abandoned, at least since 2008. But no-one had connected it with the sinister information in archives and trial testimonies.

The airplane’s story is an example of the horrors that happened while South American........

© Buenos Aires Herald