BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) – The flight from Florida to Buenos Aires normally takes about 10 hours, but Saturday’s turboprop landing in Argentina was no ordinary plane. It had been on the move for 20 days and many Argentines were eagerly updating the flight tracking software to keep track of the progress.
The Short SC.7 Skyvan was not carrying essential cargo or VIP passengers. Rather, the plane will be another means for the Argentines to come to terms with the brutal history of their country’s military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983.
The plane discovered in the US is the first ever proven in court to have been used by the Argentine junta to hurl political prisoners from the sky to their deaths, one of the most cold-blooded atrocities of that bloody era.
The Argentine government will add the plane to the Museum of Remembrance, housed in what was once the junta’s most notorious secret detention facility. Known as ESMA, the building housed many of the detainees who were later thrown alive into the sea or river on the “death flights”.
One of the victims linked to the returned plane was Azucena Villaflor, whose son Néstor disappeared and was believed to have been murdered at the beginning of the dictatorship. After he disappeared, she formed the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo group to demand information about missing children. She was then arrested and killed herself.
“For us as family members, it’s very important that the plane is part of the story 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. He later delivered mail in Florida and more recently transported skydivers in Arizona.
During his search, Ceraudo said, countless people failed to understand why he was relentlessly focused on finding the junta’s plane, especially since the bodies of many of the dictatorship’s victims were still undiscovered.
The story goes on
“The planes had to be recovered because they were an important part, like the (Nazi) gas chambers, a terrible tool,” Ceraudo said in an interview.
Argentina’s junta is widely regarded as the deadliest of the military dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. People suspected of opposing the regime were arrested, tortured and killed. Human rights groups estimate that 30,000 people were killed, many of whom disappeared without a trace.
Some of them disappeared on board the “death flights”.
During an extensive trial between 2012 and 2017, survivors testified that the flights took place at least weekly. According to witnesses, detainees were often told they would be released and sometimes forced to dance to loud music in celebration. Then they received what appeared to be a vaccination, which was actually a powerful tranquilizer. As the drug began to take effect, they were hooded, handcuffed, and loaded onto a plane.
The trial, which sentenced 29 former officials to life imprisonment, proved that the dictatorship used death flights as a systematic method of extermination. It stated that the Skyvan, which had just returned to Buenos Aires, was used to kill Villaflor and 11 other detainees.
Prosecutors say it’s impossible to know the total number of detainees thrown from the planes. However, according to the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a non-governmental organization, at least 71 bodies of suspected escape 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 up, including Villaflor, two other members of the Plaza de Mayo Mothers, and two French nuns who were helping mothers find their loved ones. They were buried without identification and their bodies were not identified until 2005.
Ceraudo teamed up with Miriam Lewin, a journalist and ESMA survivor, to find the planes.
The pilots of the flight that carried Villaflor to his death were convicted in part based on flight logs Ceraudo and Lewin were able to find after tracking down the PA-51 Skyvan in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 2010.
“The records led us to the pilots, and those names allowed us to locate them within the repressive structures operating in the service of the systematic extermination plan,” said Mercedes Soiza Reilly, who was a prosecutor in the 2012-2017 trial.
Through a careful search that included deep dives 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 on fatal flights, two had been destroyed in the 1982 war with Britain over the Falkland Islands. The other three were sold to CAE Aviation, a Luxembourg-based company, in 1994. One of these aircraft was sold to GB Airlink, which used it to deliver private mail services from Florida to the Bahamas.
This year, after the Argentine government decided to buy the plane after a campaign by De Vincenti and other human rights activists, it was found at a skydiving facility in Phoenix.
“What an incredible story, isn’t it?” said De Vincenti. “Because they were dropped without a parachute, and now they’re using it for that, for skydiving.”
It wasn’t easy getting such an old plane back. It was stuck in Jamaica for two weeks after its engine stalled shortly after taking off from the island. It also got stuck in Bolivia for a few days due to bad weather.
To seek justice for the victims of the junta, Argentina has held 296 trials related to dictatorship-era crimes against humanity since 2006, after the repeal of amnesty laws. According to the public prosecutor’s office, 1,115 people were convicted.
The plane’s display will help Argentines understand the reality of the dictatorship, activists say.
“This is very important because there are generations upon generations who were born and lived in democracy and did not have to endure the terror of those years,” said Lewin.