Survivor of Argentina’s dictatorship finds justice tracking down “death flight” plane

Today, the British-made Skyvan airplane, now 50 years old, is grounded for good at the former Navy School of Mechanics, or ESMA, in Buenos Aires. The facility, once a death camp, is now a museum and a memorial to the 30,000 citizens tortured and murdered during Argentina’s dictatorship. 

The Skyvan, and other planes like it, was where many of the “disappeared” spent their last moments before being thrown to their deaths. The Skyvan might have been lost in the contrails of history if not for the curiosity of Italian documentary photographer, Giancarlo Ceraudo.

“It’s very important for the memory for the next generation, you know? This is real. This is evidence,” Ceraudo said. “This was an instrument of death, but now [it] is a witness.”

Searching for an instrument of death

Ceraudo, on assignment in Buenos Aires in 2003, heard about the death flights of the 1970s. The flights were a key part of the Argentine military junta’s campaign against dissidents and perceived opponents, including activists, union members and college students.

If there were flights, Ceraudo reasoned, then there were planes, and surely there were pilots. But where were they? In his search for the planes and the pilots, he turned to one of Argentina’s most well-known and intrepid journalists, Miriam Lewin. 

As a young student activist in 1977, Lewin was kidnapped, tortured and sexually abused. She was then taken to ESMA. Lewin had seen other prisoners taken to the basement there and given what they were told was a vaccine. Only years later did she learn that it was a sedative, and that those drugged prisoners were put on planes, flown over the ocean and stripped of their clothes before being flung to their deaths.

“Death flights allowed them to disappear the bodies of the disappeared,” Lewin said in an interview. “No trail, no clues whatsoever that could incriminate them.”

Lewin was among the few who survived Argentina’s notorious death camps, though she never knew why. She later became a leading investigative journalist in Argentina, known for unearthing the crimes of the dictatorship. 

When Ceraudo first contacted her about finding the death flight planes, she was skeptical.

Lewin was focused on finding the people who went missing, not the tools used to make them vanish. 

“And he said, ‘I come from a different culture. In Rome, when they are digging a tunnel to extend the subway lines, they find a plate or a sculpture and they stop everything for, like, three years,'” Lewin said.

By finding the plane, they could unearth an irrefutable piece of evidence from the horrors of Argentina’s dictatorship. 

How the infamous plane was found

Lewin and Ceraudo began their search by poring over military records, hunting down sources and combing the internet for clues. They discovered that in the 1970s, the Argentine military purchased five Skyvans—workhorse planes used for transporting cargo and troops, and used for parachuting.

Two of the planes were shot down by the British during the Falklands war. Argentina’s surrender in that conflict ended the dictatorship in 1983. 

The rest of the planes were sold off. One went to the United States, where it was used for skydiving excursions and for delivering mail. 

Lewin and Ceraudo discovered the plane in Fort Lauderdale. The owner provided them with all of the plane’s technical logs, which detailed every journey the plane had ever flown. 

They brought the logs back to Argentina to decipher them. They asked experts for help, but even decades after the dictatorship ended, people were afraid.

Lewin and Ceraudo eventually tracked down a source who explained the highly suspicious journeys in the logs, tracing a route over the middle of the ocean. The departure and arrival points were the same.

“He looks at them and goes, ‘Oh gosh. This is gold,'” Lewin said.

It was the first time the death flights could be documented and proven.

Finding bodies of the victims

Finding the logs was one thing, but Lewin and Ceraudo were determined to solve one of the most notorious and heinous abductions of Argentina’s dictatorship.

The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo are a group of mothers who marched and protested outside the Presidential Palace demanding to know the fates of their missing sons and daughters. They became the most potent symbol of resistance against the dictatorship, and soon they became targets themselves.

In December 1977, a group of 12 mothers and their supporters, including two French nuns, were meeting at the Holy Cross Church in Buenos Aires when they were hauled away and taken to ESMA. They were seen by fellow prisoners being tortured, then never seen again. 

One of the mothers, Azucena Villaflor, had been searching in vain for her son. Villaflor’s daughter, Cecilia de Vincenti, always hoped her mother would return.

“In reality, we didn’t know what happened. Every single day we thought she was coming back,” de Vincenti said. “Every day we lived like this.”

Her mother was among those taken on a death flight. 

Days after the Holy Cross kidnapping victims were last seen, a storm washed up six bodies some 250 miles from Buenos Aires. Authorities in the nearby town secretly buried the remains in a common grave, but a local doctor issued death certificates, noting the victims had suffered multiple blunt force traumas. 

“This means that they were compatible with those bodies having fallen from height,” Lewin said.

In the years after democracy was restored in Argentina, forensic anthropologists began unearthing evidence of the dictatorship’s crimes. In 2005, bodies in that common grave were exhumed and identified. Five were identified as victims of the Holy Cross kidnapping. Azucena Villafor was one of them. 

“The mothers and the nuns fought death just as they fought when they were looking for their children,” de Vincenti said. “The ocean brought them back as proof that the military was trying to disappear them.”

Uncovering damning evidence 

Lewin and Ceraudo began building a timeline for the days after the 12 were kidnapped from the Holy Cross church. They looked at the plane logs and found a four-hour flight over the Atlantic the night of Dec. 14, 1977. What’s more, the log contained the names of the pilots.

For Lewin, this was the jackpot. 

“I thought that no one would deny what happened back then,” she said. “Seeing that proof, seeing that horrible proof of a group of women being thrown alive into the ocean, being mothers and nuns, right? Innocent people, completely innocent people.”

The pilots of those deadly flights were hiding in plain sight. Two of them were flying international commercial routes for Argentina’s state airline. 

Lewin and Ceraudo’s investigation became critical evidence used by prosecutors in the arrest of the two pilots. In 2017, an Argentine court convicted 48 people linked to ESMA for crimes against humanity. The pilots who flew the Skyvan PA-51 death flights were sentenced to life in prison.

Bringing the plane back to ESMA

Forty years after the end of the dictatorship, many of the disappeared remain unaccounted for and many crimes remain unresolved. The Argentine government and human rights organizations estimate that between 15,000 to 30,000 people were killed or “disappeared” during the dictatorship

After finding the plane and the pilots, Miriam and Giancarlo still had one final goal: to bring the plane home to Argentina so it could serve as irrefutable evidence of the horrors of Argentina’s dictatorship.

“Questioning, denying, or even vindicating what happened in those years will lead us into darkness again,” Lewin said. “We always said, ‘never again.'”

The plane used to make some of them disappear was brought back to Argentina in June of 2023. 

Lewin, who knows she could have easily been a victim of the death flights, has always asked herself why she survived. Her investigation provided an answer.

“There was a purpose to my survival,” she said, “to get justice.”

Jon Wertheim

L. Jon Wertheim is an accomplished journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent.