Argentine dictatorship’s 'death flight' plane returned to country for a historical reckoning

[PHXPhlyer]

Argentine dictatorship’s 'death flight' plane returned to country for a historical reckoning
The plane, which was discovered in the U.S., is the first ever proven in a court to have been used by Argentina’s junta to hurl political detainees to their deaths from the sky.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/arge ... -rcna90991

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Flying from Florida to Buenos Aires usually takes about 10 hours, but the turboprop landing in Argentina on Saturday was no normal plane. It had been en route for 20 days, and many Argentines eagerly refreshed flight tracking software to keep tabs on its progress.

The Short SC.7 Skyvan carried no crucial cargo nor VIP passengers. Rather, the plane will be another means for Argentines to reckon with the brutal history of their country’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

The plane, which was discovered in the U.S., is the first ever proven in a court to have been used by Argentina’s junta to hurl political detainees to their deaths from the sky, one of the bloody period’s most cold-blooded atrocities.

Relatives and victims of the dictatorship, and others, are given access to the Short SC-7 Skyvan aircraft used in the last Argentine military dictatorship as it sits on the tarmac at Jorge Newbery International Airport in Buenos Aires, on June 24, 2023.

Argentina’s government will add the plane to the Museum of Memory, which is in what was the junta’s most infamous secret detention center. Known as the ESMA, it housed many of the detainees who were later tossed alive from the “death flights” into the ocean or river

One of the victims linked to the returned plane was Azucena Villaflor, whose son Néstor disappeared and presumably was murdered early in the dictatorship. After he went missing, she founded the group Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to demand information about disappeared children, and then was herself detained and killed.

“For us, as family members, it’s very important that the plane be part of history, because the bodies as well as the plane tell exactly what happened,” Cecilia De Vincenti, Villaflor’s daughter, told The Associated Press.

Cecilia De Vincenti, daughter of the late Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo's founder Azucena Villaflor, in Buenos Aires, Thursday, June 15, 2023.

The plane’s return was enabled by Italian photographer Giancarlo Ceraudo, who spent years seeking out “death flight” planes. This one had later delivered mail in Florida and more recently carried skydivers in Arizona.

Throughout his quest, Ceraudo said, countless people failed to understand why he remained steadfastly focused on finding the junta’s aircraft, especially since the bodies of many of the dictatorship’s victims are still undiscovered.

“The planes had to be recovered because they were an important piece, like the (Nazi) gas chambers, a terrible tool,” Ceraudo said in an interview.

Argentina’s junta is widely considered the most deadly of the military dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. It detained, tortured and killed people suspected of opposing the regime. Human rights groups estimate 30,000 were slain, many of whom disappeared without a trace.

Some of them vanished aboard the “death flights.”

During an extensive 2012-17 trial, survivors testified that the flights took place at least weekly. According to witnesses, prisoners often were told that they were being released and sometimes were forced to dance to loud music in celebration. Then they received a supposed vaccination that was in fact a strong sedative. As the drug took effect, they were hooded, bound and loaded aboard a plane.

The trial, at which 29 former officials were sentenced to life in prison, proved that the dictatorship used death flights as a systematic mode of extermination. It specified that the Skyvan just returned to Buenos Aires was used to kill Villaflor and 11 other detainees.

Prosecutors say it is impossible to know how many detainees in all were thrown from the planes. But at least 71 bodies of suspected death flight victims washed up along the coast — 44 in Argentina and 27 in neighboring Uruguay, according to the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a non-governmental group.

Between December 1977 and February 1978, the bodies of five women, including Villaflor, two other members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and two French nuns who were helping mothers search for their loved ones washed up. They were buried without identification, and their bodies were not identified until 2005.

Ceraudo teamed up with Miriam Lewin, a journalist and ESMA survivor, in the search for the planes.

The pilots of the flight that carried Villaflor to her death were convicted in part due to flight logs that 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 from those names, we were able to locate them within the repressive structures that operated in the service of the systematic extermination plan,” said Mercedes Soiza Reilly, who was prosecutor in the 2012-2017 trial.

Through a painstaking search that included deep dives into websites in which plane spotter hobbyists kept track of aircraft, Ceraudo and Lewin were able to locate the planes.

Of the five Skyvan planes known to have been used in death flights, two had been destroyed in the 1982 war with Britain over the Falkland Islands. The three others were sold in 1994 to CAE Aviation, a Luxembourg-based firm. One of those planes was sold to GB Airlink, which used it to provide private mail services to the Bahamas from Florida.

This year, after Argentina’s government decided to buy the plane after a campaign by De Vincenti and other human rights activists, it was located in a skydiving outfit in Phoenix.

“What an incredible story, right?” said De Vincenti. “Because they were thrown out without a parachute, and now they’re using it for that, for parachuting.”

Getting such an old plane back was not easy. It was stuck in Jamaica for two weeks after its engine broke shortly after takeoff from the island. It was also stuck for a few days in Bolivia due to inclement weather.

In seeking justice for the junta’s victims, Argentina has held 296 trials relating to dictatorship-era crimes against humanity since 2006, after amnesty laws were struck down. In those, 1,115 people have been convicted, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Putting the plane on display will help Argentines understand the reality of the dictatorship, activists say.

“It is very important, because there are generations upon generations who were born and lived in democracy and did not suffer the terror of those years,” Lewin said.

PP

[tango15]

It is perhaps unfortunate that Argentina for the most part a relatively low and flat country. Had this been in Bolivia or Ecuador, where airports tend to be much higher, then this form of execution could not have taken place. Back in the 80s, both countries were treated to a demo tour by the Skyvan, but the operating conditions at such altitudes were not conducive to a Skyvan operation, and in fact, after a number of failed attempts to take off from La Paz's El Alto airport, the aircraft had to be dismantled and flown out in a CL-44. Bolivia was gifted an F-27 by the Dutch government (much to my chagrin), and Ecuador was gifted some IAI Aravas, which proved to be almost as useless, in that they could carry loads from the lower-lowing airports to Quito, but not the other way round. Incidentally, if you've ever wondered where Israel gets its oil from, given that it is surrounded by oil-rich but unfriendly neighbours, it's Ecuador. This explains why the Ecuadorian Air Force has so much Israeli kit.

[OneHungLow]

PARKED at an East Rand airport you may find a Piper Seneca II, registered ZS-KFG. This is the aircraft used in the 1980s to drop the bodies of anti-apartheid insurgents into the Atlantic. The advantages of such disposal were deniability and destruction of any future forensic evidence; in short total erasure of human lives – immunity added to impunity. As Nkosinathi Biko points out in his foreword to Michael Schmidt’s book, this was the policy of people acting in the name of civilisation. Most of the victims, probably hundreds of SWAPO guerrillas, remain unidentified. Mozambican RENAMO dissidents were also eliminated with at least one body dropped into the Indian Ocean off St Lucia.

The French were the first to throw bodies out of aircraft – in Madagascar in 1947 and in Algeria in the 1950s, with the Argentinian junta following suit in the 1970s. The first South African operation was ordered by Fritz Loots on 12 July 1979 from Meob Bay in South West Africa with the despatch of two dead SWAPO guerrillas. The Atlantic was deliberately chosen because of the behaviour of ocean currents that would prevent bodies washing up ashore as inconveniently happened in Argentina. Deserted beaches were used for departure and great care was taken to avoid fishing vessels. The door of the aircraft was left on the beach before a perilous round trip of 120 nautical miles that could have seen the plane disintegrate if flown too fast. The clothes of the murdered insurgents were burned.

Schmidt goes into considerable detail to show the origins of these South African flights by Delta 40 (D40, which became Operation Barnacle and eventually the Civil Co-operation Bureau or CCB) that continued until December 1987. Magnus Malan was a keen student of André Beaufre’s total strategy, which as Schmidt notes might be better named totalitarian. But the tactics lie in Rhodesia’s civil war and the pseudo operations and bio-chemical warfare it spawned. Many operators from the Rhodesian SAS, recce groups and Selous Scouts and the police special branch as well as academia moved south after 1980 and continued the fight to maintain white supremacy. Rhodesia’s poison expert, Robert Symington, ended up on the staff of University of Cape Town.

Most Rhodesian recruits quickly left the South African forces over cultural differences, but a number of individuals continued to play significant roles. Some stayed behind in Zimbabwe as a fifth column (for example the Bawdens) and were responsible for the murder of Joe Gqabi (31 July 1981), the bombing of Jeremy Brickhill (13 October 1988), sabotage of the Bulawayo armoury (16 August 1981) and the Thornhill base raid at Gweru (25 July 1982). Others simply drove tons of materiel subsequently used in South African pseudo operations over the border at Beit Bridge.

It was Neil Kriel, a former Selous Scout, who piloted the first South African death flight. His name and that of Johan Theron are a constant thread in this tale, which has been put together over many years from interviews and published sources. But the breakthrough evidence of the death flights came during the trial of Wouter Basson in 1999. South Africa’s Doctor Death was, unbelievably, acquitted, but Judge Hartzenberg accepted crucial evidence that confirmed the existence of the flights and other dirty operations.

Basson denies that he was involved in the Rhodesian war, in particular the Buffalo Range incident in which doctored bodies were dropped by parachute over Mozambique’s Gaza province. But one of the earlier South African operations misfired when a prisoner woke up in the plane and had to be killed. There were other, similar occasions. Use of a triple cocktail of drugs (Ketalar, Scoline and Tubarine) overcame the problem as the lungs and heart collapsed during a state of unconsciousness. The solution has the imprint of Basson and this led to charge 31, conspiracy to murder.

Kriel was the founder of D40, which had a number of roles, most notably long-range reconnaissance and deep penetration elimination and sabotage. For instance, it played a key role in the raids on Maseru (9 December 1982) and Gaborone (14 June 1985) and caused havoc along the Namibe-Lubango railway line in Angola. Its operators were off the army’s books, its operations fronted by civilian companies (the unconvincing cover of an estate agency was succeeded by a more plausible security company). D40 sometimes used stolen vehicles. Orders were delivered verbally and weapons were untraceable. The operational base was Renosterspruit, another example of the use of farms in South Africa’s dirty war. The most notorious was the police’s Vlakplaas.

The potential for denial, and the consequences for the operators, were well understood by Kriel and he hoarded rare documentary evidence such as organograms as future insurance. Special forces became the fifth operational arm of the South African Defence Force in 1981 and spawned a number of undercover units that treated southern Africa as a playground for clandestine operations. Reporting lines were labyrinthine and involved considerable overlap between special forces, military intelligence, police security branch and the intelligence services.

One influence hinted at by Schmidt is Argentinian, but this possibility is left unresolved. Rubén Chamorro from the notorious torture and detention centre at ESMA (Naval School of Mechanics) in Buenos Aires and architect of industrial-scale disappearances was naval attaché at the Argentinian embassy in Pretoria from June 1979. A month later South Africa started its death flights; coincidental perhaps. It is instructive that this was at the height of Operation Condor in South America, an agreement that allowed death squads to operate freely in eight military dictatorships covering 80 per cent of the continent. State terror was used to kidnap, torture, murder and disappear opponents in a fashion echoed in southern Africa in the 1980s.

[OneHungLow]

The apparent reason for death flights was disposal of captured insurgents who could either not be turned, or askaris who had outlived their usefulness or proved a liability. There was also concern about overcrowding and security consequences in detention camps. But the cold-blooded nature and complexity of the solution suggest something more, and very unsavoury, about the perpetrators. One commented that certain prisoners were ‘empty of intelligence … just eating food now … useless to the organisation’.

The title of Schmidt’s book and its cover design are somewhat misleading. He has done a sterling job in piecing together the death flight operations, but his book is in fact a general survey of southern Africa’s dirty war of the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the photographs show the predictable burly, often moustachioed, figures of hard-faced military men. Every one of them has blood on his hands, directly or indirectly. They caused chaos in the region, acting criminally in the name of apartheid and anti-communism, and almost all of them evaded justice. It would be pointless to prosecute those still alive, a parade of grey old men. But this book leaves the reader questioning why international law, which has developed in leaps and bounds since World War II, was not effectively brought to bear with salutary effect.

Clandestine operations violated South African army regulations and criminal law; and international law, especially the Geneva Convention protocols I and II of 1977 that were introduced to cover civil wars. Pseudo-ops were an early example of the willingness of the security state to act criminally. The army tried to distance itself from pseudo-ops and other war crimes, but this was always unconvincing especially when murder was committed, or planned, on South African soil. It is possible that compartmentalisation was as effective as desired, although this required a particularly myopic mindset. What is clear is that verbal directives originated from the very highest levels of the state.

Yet there was to be no reckoning. Eugene de Kock (Prime Evil of the CCB), a police colonel, was the highest-ranking officer successfully prosecuted and it is not hard to appreciate his bitterness, especially since he was forthcoming with information. The apartheid state employed a deliberate policy of mass murder and politicians and officials could (and should) have been tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, notwithstanding the blanket amnesty granted by the last administrator-general of South West Africa, Louis Pienaar. His ruling did not apply to crimes initiated on South African soil.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission dealt with the military in superficial fashion (it named just two SWAPO victims), then a group of generals requested legal absolution similar to the Spanish pact of forgetting after the fascist era. This was not granted, but effectively they were indemnified, possibly because the ANC was worried about reparation claims and repercussions for some of its own members. Amnesia suited both sides of the conflict at the expense of victims and, as Schmidt notes, the work of the Priority Crimes Litigation Unit was stalled in various ways.

Kriel resigned from D40 in 1982, although he did not resurface as a genuine civilian until 1987. He was unhappy about the appointment of Kat Liebenberg as head of special forces and opposed domestic operations that confused the roles of military and police. If this was genuine, it showed considerable prescience: the notorious and labyrinthine CCB was established in March 1986 and it discounted any vestige of military ethics, recruiting among criminals and employing policemen of dubious provenance such as Staal Burger and Ferdi Barnard. Its work carried on illegally after official disbandment in 1989 for a further four years as the Badger Unit. Unsurprisingly, the CCB’s records vanished.

Theron continued with a war that became dirtier by the year. He eventually found salvation in evangelical religion and became a pastor. Kriel, after an up and down career as businessman, committed suicide in his car in July 2018. Schmidt speculates that he may have been conscience stricken. If so, he had a great deal to repent and perhaps he may be considered the dirty war’s last victim, although this judgement requires a high dose of charity.

Source: From The Thornveld

https://www.anfasa.org.za/death-flight/

Edited to say I knew Kit Bawden and his wife.