2023-08-07 03:50:00
The Uruguayan Justice ordered to carry out technical expertise in a plane found near Montevideo that would have been used to transfer detainees within the “Plan Cóndor” of coordination between the South American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.
Judge María Helena Mainard ruled “as a precautionary measure, the conservation (…) of the Hawker Siddeley HS-125 aircraft, with identification codes 5-T-30 and 25251, currently abandoned at the Melilla airport”according to a resolution dated July 6.
In addition, the judge ordered “the preparation of a technical expert report to accredit the original numbering of the aircraft and to specify the current state in which it is found, officiating for this purpose to the Uruguayan Air Force“.
Mainard thus gave rise to a request from the Argentine judge Sebastián Casanello, of the National Federal Criminal and Correctional Court No. 7 of Buenos Aires, which has under its aegis cases of Condor Planthe international coordination operation of repression carried out in the 1970s and 1980s by the dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia.
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The international warrant, signed on June 15 by federal judge Sebastián Casanello, requested “the competent Uruguayan jurisdictional authorities” to issue “a precautionary measure that arranges to preserve the current state of the plane.” It’s about a Hawker Siddeley HS-125 model 400B with identification code 5-T-30 and 25251, “which was registered with registration number 0653”.
According to a police report included in the Paraguayan Terror Archive, which gathers documentation referring to the Condor Plan discovered in 1992, an Argentine Navy plane with the same registration as the one found in Melilla in 1977 from Asunción to Buenos Aires to transfer five leftist militants detained in Paraguay by the security forces. Is about Argentines Jose Luis Nell, Alejandro Logoluso and Marta Landi, and Uruguayans Nelson Santana and Gustavo Inzaurraldeall of whom remain missing.
How the Plan Condor plane was found
The plane was located in September 2022 at the Ángel S. Adami International Airport, on the outskirts of Montevideo.by Sebastián Santana, who declared on June 15 before Judge Casanello that he found the aircraft while searching for data for a project at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, which documents human rights violations by dictatorships in the Southern Cone .
The plane, according to Santana, was identified in Melilla thanks to data from the Facebook page of the Argentine Navy and blogs of aviation enthusiasts, which indicated that the aircraft had been used for the personal use of former Admiral Emilio Massera, head of the Argentine dictatorship from 1976 to 1978.
Santana said that he located the plane in Melilla when looking for graphic material for an audiovisual about the aforementioned five leftist militants arrested in 1977. in Asunción by the Paraguayan security forces and who, according to documents from the so-called Paraguayan Terror Archive, known in 1992, were taken to Buenos Aires on May 16, 1977 in an Argentine Navy plane.
“Ten days later Ricardo Peidró, a survivor of the Buenos Aires clandestine detention and torture center ‘El Atlético’, shared a cell with Inzaurralde; it is the last information available on one of these hostages,” Santana said in his report “A Form of the Condor “, presented to the courts of our country.
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“The ship is in bad shape, albeit in one piece,” Santana said. “In 2013, part of the navigation panel was dismantled, but it is still a recognizable object,” he adds, and clarifies that “due to the security measures of the property” he could not get close to the device. According to Santana, the plane made its first flight on July 28, 1970 and in April 1971 it was incorporated into the Argentine Navy, where it came to serve for “The personal transport of former Argentine Admiral Emilio Massera”.
Santana dismissed that it has been used for “death flights”. “This plane could not have been used to drop people into the sea because it has the two jets attached to the tail and it flies very fast, so it would have been very risky.”said.
After a “serious accident in Ushuaia” in June 1977, and after being used in 1982 “for observation tasks in the Malvinas War”, its registration in the Argentine Navy was canceled in 1987. Since then it has been in the hands of civilians, first by Argentine companies “for anti-hail operations” and then by the Uruguayan company. AirWolf “for air taxi services”. On April 15, 2008, there is a record of the “abandonment state” of the aircraft at the Melilla airport, says the report.
The researcher at the University of Oxford Francesca Lessa, an expert in the Condor Plan, celebrated the finding. “The plane embodies the materiality of the crimes committed and its location in Uruguay may boost existing investigations in Argentina that are still trying to determine the final fate of the victims,” she said in a statement.
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