Death flights (Spanish: vuelos de la muerte) are a form of extrajudicial killing in which the victims are dropped to their death from airplanes or helicopters into oceans, large rivers or even mountains. Death flights have been carried out in a number of internal conflicts, including by France during the 1947 Malagasy Uprising in Madagascar and the 1957 Battle of Algiers, and by the junta dictatorship during the Argentine Dirty War between 1976 and 1983. During the Bougainville conflict, PNGDF helicopters were used to dispose of corpses of detainees that had died under torture, and in some cases, still-living victims. [1]
During the 1976–1983 Argentine Dirty War, many thousands of people disappeared, clandestinely kidnapped by groups acting for the dictatorship. According to the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons 8,961 persons disappeared between 1976 to 1983. Human rights groups in Argentina often cite a figure of 30,000 disappeared; Amnesty International estimates 20,000. [2] Many were killed in death flights, a practice initiated by Admiral Luis María Mendía, usually after detention and torture. Typically they were drugged into a stupor, loaded into aircraft, stripped, and dropped into the Río de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean. [3] [4]
According to the testimony of Adolfo Scilingo, a former Argentine naval officer convicted in Spain in 2005 for crimes against humanity under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, there were 180–200 death flights during 1977 and 1978. Scilingo confessed to participating in two such flights, during which 13 and 17 people were killed, respectively. [5] Scilingo estimated that the Argentine Navy conducted the flights every Wednesday for two years, 1977 and 1978, killing 1,500 to 2,000 people. [6]
Victims were sometimes made to dance for joy in celebration of the freedom they were told awaited them. In an earlier 1996 interview, Scilingo said, "They were played lively music and made to dance for joy, because they were going to be transferred to the south. ... After that, they were told they had to be vaccinated due to the transfer, and they were injected with Pentothal. And shortly after, they became really drowsy, and from there we loaded them onto trucks and headed off for the airfield." [7] At the time, Scilingo said that the Argentine Navy was "still hiding what happened during the Dirty War". [8]
In May 2010, Spain extradited pilot Julio Alberto Poch to Argentina. Born in 1952, Poch had been arrested in Valencia, Spain, on September 23, 2009, and was wanted in Argentina for his alleged participation as a pilot on the death flights. [9] At his trial in February 2013, Poch denied that he had participated in the death flights, claiming everything he knew about them came from what he had read. [10] After spending eight years in an Argentine jail, Poch was found not guilty by a court in Buenos Aires. [11]
In April 2015, further arrests were made. It was reported that the death flights had started before 1976, and continued until 1983. To carry out the flights, a military unit, Batallón de Aviación del Ejército 601 (Army Air Battalion 601), was set up, with a commander, sub-commander, chief of staff, and officers from five companies. Soldiers who refused to take part, as well as others who acted as airfield guards and runway cleaners, testified they had seen live people and corpses loaded onto aircraft; after taking off, the planes returned empty. [12]
On 12 March 2016, Interpol, through the National Police of Colombia, arrested Juan Carlos Francisco Bossi in the city of Medellín. [13] Also known as El doctor, Bossi was accused of activating the death flights during the Dirty War and was wanted by Argentine authorities for taking part in death flights and forced disappearances of over 30,000 people. [14] After his arrest, Bossi confessed to the Colombian authorities to being responsible for the deaths of 6,000 individuals. [15]
Meanwhile, in 2003, Italian photographer Giancarlo Ceraudo had become intrigued by the death flights and, with the assistance of the investigative journalist Miriam Lewin, began looking for the aircraft that had been used. [16] Lewin was a survivor of the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), which was one of the dictatorship’s most notorious detention, torture and extermination centres. They believed that PNA - Argentina Naval Prefecture Short SC.7 Skyvans were among the aircraft that had participated in the death flights. By this time, the PNA had lost two Skyvans in the Falklands War, and had sold the remaining three. In 2010 Ceraudo and Lewin eventually tracked down one of these remaining Skyvan aircraft (serial number 'PA-51') to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where it was owned by GB Airlink, whose then owner allowed a Miami based Argentinian sports journalist acting on their behalf to visit the aircraft and also provided all its flight logs, among which was one covering the period of the death flights. [16] A three-hour flight entry on 14 December 1977 led to the identification and 2017 conviction of pilots, Mario Daniel Arrú and Alejando Domingo D’Agostino for the murder of eight women and four men. [16] A third crew member Enrique José de Saint Georges, was charged but died of natural causes while awaiting trial. [16] The victims had been tortured, sedated prior to being loaded on the aircraft and their clothing was removed by members of the crew. In the air the Skyvan’s ramp door was opened and the captives were pushed out to fall thousands of feet to their death in the South Atlantic. [16] [17] [18] [19]
Meanwhile GB Airlink had sold PA-51 to Win Aviation, headquartered in DeKalb, Illinois. In early 2023 it was announced that the company’s owner, Andri Wiese, had agreed to allow it to be purchased by the Argentinean Economy Ministry. The plane was flown back to Argentina [16] and is now on display at the Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos in Buenos Aires. [17] [20]
A five-year trial (nicknamed the "ESMA mega-trial" or "Death Flights trial") of 54 former Argentine officials accused of running death flights and other crimes against humanity (lesa humanidad) heard 830 witnesses and investigated the death of 789 victims. A verdict was reached on 29 November 2017: 29 defendants were sentenced to life in prison, six were acquitted, and the nineteen remaining defendants were sentenced to prison terms ranging from eight to 25 years. [21] [22]
Oregier Benavente, Augusto Pinochet's former personal helicopter pilot, has admitted that on numerous occasions he threw prisoners into the ocean or into the high peaks of the Andes. [23]
Flights were also used to make bodies of already murdered dissidents disappear. One person's testimony described the procedure: corpses were put in gunny sacks; each sack was attached to a piece of rail using wire, and a second gunny sack put around both. The sacks were carried by pickup truck to helicopters that flew them to the coast of the Valparaíso region, [24] where the bodies were thrown into the ocean. Secret police agent Osvaldo Romo confessed in a 1995 interview to having participated in death flights. Showing no remorse, he added, "Now, would it not be better throwing bodies into a volcano?" [25]
In 2001, Chilean President Ricardo Lagos told the nation that during Pinochet's rule, 120 civilians had been tossed from helicopters into "the ocean, the lakes and the rivers of Chile". [26]
During the Violencia (1948–1958), the Colombian military had dissenters thrown from airplanes above areas under the control of guerillas. [27]
The method was allegedly used during the Guatemalan genocide. [ citation needed ] In one instance on 7 July 1975 – one month to the date after the assassination of José Luis Arenas – a contingent of uniformed army paratroopers arrived in Ixcán Grande and abducted 30 men. [28]
Death flights were used during the Algerian War by French paratroopers of the 10th Parachute Division under Jacques Massu during the Battle of Algiers (1957). After it was discovered that corpses sometimes resurfaced after being disposed in this manner, the executioners began attaching concrete blocks to their victims' feet. These victims came to be known as "Bigeard's shrimp" (crevettes Bigeard), after one of the paratrooper commanders, Marcel Bigeard. [29] [30] [31]
During the Malagasy Uprising of 1947, hundreds of Malagasy in Mananjary were killed, including 18 women and a group of prisoners thrown from aircraft. [32]
During its occupation of East Timor, Indonesian forces are alleged to have thrown suspected guerrillas and independence supporters from helicopters, many into lake Tasitolu, just west of the capital Dili. [33] Other locations where detainees were thrown from aircraft include the rocky mountains between Dili and Aileu, in Dili Bay, and in the sea around Jaco Island near the eastern tip of the island. Security forces developed various euphemisms to refer to these flights including mandi laut ("taking a bath in the sea") referring to the practice of weighting the bodies of suspects with rocks and dumping them from a helicopter into the sea, piknik ke Builico ("going for a picnic to Builico") a.k.a. being dumped in the Sarei River ravine near Builico, and dipanggil ke Quelicai ("called to Quelicai"). [34] One of the most prominent victims was Venâncio Gomes da Silva, a former FRETILIN central committee member. According to Amnesty International, on July 14, 1980, he was put on a helicopter and flown south-east in the direction of Remexio; the helicopter returned without him 15 minutes later. [35]
During the Bougainville conflict which was fought in 1988–1998, the Papua New Guinea Defence Force used the death flight method to dispose of the bodies of tortured rebels who died in Bougainville region. Some among the disposed victims were found out to be still alive when their bodies were disposed. [1]
By the late 1970s, the South African apartheid government started implementing death flight executions of rebel group fighters. To do this, the government created a special branch of the South African Defence Force called the Delta 40. Hundreds of ANC-, PAC-, and SWAPO-affiliated activists and guerrilla fighters were thrown into the Atlantic Ocean off the Namibian coast during the height of the South African Border War. [36]
Aircraft were also used to dispose of the bodies of prisoners killed by other means beforehand; in one example, five members of a RENAMO rebel faction who assassinated Orlando Christina, the group's secretary general in April 1983. The suspects were first flown to the Caprivi strip where they were tried by the RENAMO war council, and shot. Their bodies were then wrapped in tarps, weighted, and dropped over the Atlantic, with a false flight plan drawn up. [37]
During the Mobutu era, an unknown number of people were extrajudicially executed by being dropped from helicopters into the Zaire River, the Kinsuka Rapids or Lake Kapolowe in the Shaba region. [38]
Scholars have compared the practicalities of the Argentine death flights to the US-led procedure of extraordinary rendition during the War on Terror, noting in particular how the two practices converge in many of their material and technological resources. [3]
This section needs additional citations for verification .(April 2023) |
Operation Condor was a campaign of political repression involving intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations of left-wing sympathizers, in South America which formally existed from 1975 to 1983. Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Augusto Pinochet's spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers to the Army War Academy on La Alameda, Santiago's central avenue. Officers came from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, which comprised the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The United States and, allegedly, Colombia, Venezuela, and France were also collaborators and financiers of the covert operations.
Jorge Rafael Videla was an Argentine military officer and dictator who was the 47th President of Argentina and as well as the 1st President of the National Reorganisation Process from 1976 to 1981. His rule, which was during the time of Operation Condor, was among the most infamous in Latin America during the Cold War due to its high level of human rights abuses and severe economic mismanagement.
The Dirty War is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina for its period of state terrorism in Argentina from 1974 to 1983 as a part of Operation Condor. During this campaign, military and security forces and death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance hunted down any political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with socialism, left-wing Peronism, or the Montoneros movement.
Cement shoes, concrete shoes, or Chicago overcoat is a method of murder or body disposal, usually associated with criminals such as the Mafia or gangs. It involves weighing down the victim, who may be dead or alive, with concrete and throwing them into water in the hope the body will never be found. In the US, the term has become a tongue-in-cheek euphemism for a threat of death by criminals. While a common trope in fiction, only one real-life case has ever been authenticated.
Alfredo Ignacio Astiz is a convicted war criminal and former Argentine military commander, intelligence officer, and naval commando who served in the Argentine Navy during the military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla during the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (1976–1983). He was known as El Ángel Rubio de la Muerte, and had a reputation as a torturer. He was discharged from the military in 1998 after defending his actions in a press interview.
The Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy has gone through three major transformations throughout its history. Originally ESMA served as an educational facility of the Argentine Navy. The original ESMA was a complex located at 8151 Libertador Avenue, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, in the barrio of Núñez. Additionally, It was the seat of U.T.3.3.2—Unidad de Tareas 2 of G.T.3.3 [es].
Adolfo Scilingo is a former Argentine Navy officer who is serving 30 years in a Spanish prison after being convicted on 19 April 2005 for crimes against humanity, including extra-judicial execution.
The National Reorganization Process was the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, which received support from the United States until 1982. In Argentina it is often known simply as the última junta militar, última dictadura militar or última dictadura cívico-militar, because there have been several in the country's history and no others since it ended.
The Caravan of Death was a Chilean Army death squad that, following the Chilean coup of 1973, flew by helicopters from south to north of Chile between September 30 and October 22, 1973. During this foray, members of the squad ordered or personally carried out the execution of at least 75 individuals held in Army custody in certain garrisons. According to the NGO Memoria y Justicia, the squad killed 97 people: 26 in the South and 71 in the North.
Léonie Duquet was one of two French nuns who was arrested in December 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and "disappeared". She was believed killed by the military regime of Argentine President Jorge Rafael Videla during the Dirty War. Alice Domon, the other French nun working with Duquet, disappeared a few days later. They had been working in poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires in the 1970s and supported the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, founded in 1977. Despite repeated efforts by France to trace the two nuns, the Argentine military dictatorship was unresponsive. In 1990 a French court in Paris tried Argentine Captain Alfredo Astiz, known to have arrested Duquet and believed implicated in the "disappearance" of Domon, for kidnapping the two sisters. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia. In Argentina at the time, he and other military and security officers were shielded from prosecution by Pardon Laws passed in 1986 and 1987. These were repealed in 2003 and ruled unconstitutional in 2005, and the government re-opened prosecution of war crimes.
Azucena Villaflor was an Argentine activist and one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organisation which looks for the victims of enforced disappearances during Argentina's Dirty War.
Marcel Bigeard, personal radio call-sign "Bruno", was a French military officer and politician who fought in World War II, the First Indochina War and the Algerian War. He was one of the commanders in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and is thought by many to have been a dominating influence on French "unconventional" warfare thinking from that time onwards. He was one of the most decorated officers in France, and is particularly noteworthy because of his rise from being a regular soldier in 1936 to ultimately concluding his career in 1976 as a Lieutenant General and serving in the government of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
General Augusto Pinochet was indicted for human rights violations committed in his native Chile by Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón in 1998. He was arrested in London six days later and held on house arrest for a year and a half before being released by the British government in 2000. Authorised to return to Chile, Pinochet was subsequently indicted by judge Juan Guzmán Tapia and charged with several crimes. He died in 2006 without having been convicted. His arrest in London made the front pages of newspapers worldwide; not only did it involve the head of the military dictatorship that ruled Chile between 1973 and 1990, it marked the first time judges had applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed in a country by former heads of state, despite the existence of local amnesty laws.
Luis María Mendía was the Argentine Chief of Naval Operations in 1976-77, with the rank of vice-admiral. According to confessions gathered by Horacio Verbitsky and made by Adolfo Scilingo, Luis María Mendía was the architect of the "death flight" assassination method whereby the Argentine state disappeared people by throwing them out of aircraft over the ocean, thus making the retrieval of their corpses nearly impossible. This method was set out in the Plancitara military plan of 1975, during Isabel Perón's government.
Elements from the French Armed Forces used deliberate torture during the Algerian War (1954–1962), creating an ongoing public controversy. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a renowned French historian, estimated that there were "hundreds of thousands of instances of torture" by the French military in Algeria.
The Cité Catholique is a Traditionalist Catholic organisation created in 1946 by Jean Ousset, originally a follower of Charles Maurras and Jean Masson (1910–1965), not to be confused with Jacques Desoubrie, who also used the pseudonym Jean Masson. Despite the presence of Roman Catholic clergy in some of its meetings, the Cité catholique is not officially recognised by the Roman Catholic Church.
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean military officer who was the dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990. From 1973 to 1981, he was the leader of the military junta, which in 1974 declared him President of the Republic and thus the dictator of Chile; in 1980, a referendum approved a new constitution confirming him in the office, after which he served as de jure president from 1981 to 1990. His time in office remains the longest of any Chilean ruler.
Falling is execution by throwing or dropping a person from a great height. It has been used since ancient times. People executed in this way die from injuries caused by hitting the ground at high speed.
The Argentine Army Aviation is the army aviation branch of the Argentine Army. Their members have the same rank insignia and titles as the rest of the Army. The Army Aviation Command is based at the Campo de Mayo Military Airfield.
On 9 March 2015, two Eurocopter AS350 Écureuil helicopters collided mid-air near Villa Castelli, Argentina, killing all ten people on board both aircraft.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)