2023-06-25 04:00:00
The Skyvan PA-51 plane, used in 1977 to throw three Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and two French nuns alive into the sea in one of the “death flights” was received on Saturday in Buenos Aires by an emotional group of relatives of victims of the dictatorship.
In the last decade the plane was in the United States in a company that used it for skydiving flights.
Mabel Careaga is the daughter of Esther Ballestrino, who was thrown into the sea from that military plane, together with the also founders of the organization Madres de Plaza de Mayo Azucena Villaflor and María Ponce, the French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet and seven other activists in a flight made on the night of December 14, 1977, according to the judicial reconstruction.
“It’s too horrifying to imagine my mother there,” says Careaga, who along with Cecilia de Vicenti, 62, Azucena’s daughter, wants the device to be exposed on the grounds of the Navy School of Mechanics, a clandestine center detention center where some 5,000 prisoners spent and which today is the ExESMA Museum of Memory, in Buenos Aires.
The initiative has the backing of the government but generated rejection in some human rights organizations that prefer “not to make a show of death.”
“The plane is part of the story that is painful but it must be told as it was,” De Vicenti replies.
The group of 12 kidnapped had been pointed out by ex-marine Alfredo Astiz, infiltrated in the organization Madres de Mayo and who today is serving life in prison.
The plane’s course
It was possible to locate six planes mentioned by ex-marine 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 left in Argentina, but unrecoverable. “Of the other three, the most accessible was in Miami, another was paradoxically in the hands of the British armed forces and the other in Luxembourg,” recalls Lewin.
The one in Miami turned out to be the Skyvan PA-51, the one from the flight on December 14, 1977. In 2007 it was used by a postal company between the Bahamas and Fort Lauderdale. Later he moved to Phoenix for the skydiving flights.
The aircraft kept the history of flights and pilots, but interpreting the sheets was not easy. “There was still a pact of silence,” explains Lewin.
The commercial pilot and filmmaker Enrique Piñeyro analyzed the documentation, discovered between 10 and 15 suspicious flights and took the complaint to justice.
justice and memory
The investigation into the plane was evidence in the trial that in 2017 sentenced two of the three pilots who carried out the flight of ‘Los 12 de la Santa Cruz’ to life imprisonment. The third died shortly before the verdict.
Some 30,000 people disappeared under the Argentine dictatorship, according to human rights groups. The Skyvans made more than 200 suspicious night flights between 1976 and 1978, according to Prefecture records. There were also flights from 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 that night, a Sudestada (strong wind from the south) threw the remains of five people onto the coast. A forensic police doctor indicated that the bodies had fractures compatible with falls from a height. They were then buried in a common grave in the nearby General Lavalle cemetery, 300 km south of Buenos Aires, and only in 2005 might they be identified.
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