MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Former death flights aircraft back in Argentine territory

The former Argentine Coast Guard aircraft is already in Argentine territory. Her last flight will be to Buenos Aires on Monday

The British-built Shorts Skyvan PA-51 used by Argentina's military dictatorship to throw three Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and two French nuns alive into the sea in one of the so-called “death flights” in 1977 landed Friday at Tucumán and is expected in Buenos Aires by Monday to be added to a museum.

“The plane is something tenebrous for us, but having found and identified it, we cannot allow it to continue flying,” Mabel Careaga, one of the promoters of the repatriation of the aircraft that used to belong to the Coast Guard and ended up with a private US company performing parachuting flights, told AFP.

Mabel Careaga is the daughter of Esther Ballestrino, who was thrown into the sea from that military plane, along with the other founders of the organization Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Azucena Villaflor and María Ponce, the French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet and seven other activists on Dec. 14, 1977.

“It is too horrifying to imagine my mother there,” says Careaga, who together with Cecilia de Vicenti, 62, Azucena's daughter, hopes that the device will be exhibited on the grounds of the Navy Mechanics School, a clandestine detention center where some 5,000 prisoners were held and which today is the ExESMA Museum of Memory, in Buenos Aires.

The initiative has the support of the government but generates rejection in some human rights organizations that prefer “not to make a show of death”.

“The plane is part of the story, which is painful, but it has to be told as it was,” De Vicenti responded.

The group of abductees had been identified by the former sailor Alfredo Astiz, who infiltrated the organization Madres de Mayo and who today is serving life imprisonment.

“If there were death flights, there must have been planes,” was the argument that led to a search in military aviation records and other documents, one of its promoters, journalist Miriam Lewin, an ESMA survivor, told AFP.

It was possible to locate six planes mentioned by former Navy officer Adolfo Scilingo, the first to admit his participation in the death flights, sentenced in 2005 to 640 years in prison by the Spanish justice system.

Three of those planes were in Argentina, but unrecoverable. “Of the other three, the most accessible was in Miami, one was in the hands of the British armed forces and the other in Luxembourg,” Lewin recalls.

The one in Miami turned out to be the Skyvan PA-51, the one from the December 14, 1977 flight. In 2007 it was used by a courier company between the Bahamas and Fort Lauderdale.

The aircraft retained the flight and pilot history, but interpreting the logs was not easy, “There was still a pact of silence,” Lewin explains.

Professional pilot and filmmaker Enrique Piñeyro analyzed the documentation, discovered between 10 and 15 suspicious flights, and took the complaint to court.

“The plane is a cabin without a door. It will be six, seven meters high. There they piled up all the bodies half anesthetized with pentothal, with cynicism they called it 'Pento-naval'. It is an appalling thing. When you look at that box, that plane, you say: My God, what this must have been like,” Piñeyro told AFP.

The investigation into the plane was evidence in the trial that in 2017 sentenced two of the three pilots who flew the flight of 'The 12 of the Holy Cross' to life imprisonment. The third one died shortly before the verdict.

Skyvans made over 200 nighttime flights between 1976 and 1978, according to Coast Guard records. There were also flights by the other armed forces. “This is the most perverse thing. In the 'flights,' the disappeared disappeared completely. The genocidal military wanted to destroy all evidence,” says Lewin.

But a strong wind from the south threw the remains of five people to the shore. A police forensic doctor indicated that the bodies showed fractures compatible with falls from a high altitude. They were then buried in a mass grave at General Lavalle cemetery, some 300 km south of Buenos Aires. Only in 2005 were the bodies identified.

It took 15 years for Mabel Careaga and Cecilia De Vicenti to decide to push for the plane's repatriation, with the support of Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora Mother Taty Almeida. Economy Minister Sergio Massa gave the go-ahead. But the aircraft had moved from Miami to Phoenix.

After several months of formalities, the plane left Chicago on June 3.

(Source: AFP)