Florida has it all: sprawling retirement communities, womanizing police impersonators and planes used to commit acts of unspeakable horror. A Skyvan PA-51 used by Argentina’s military dictatorship to throw alleged dissidents to their deaths in the South Atlantic Ocean was found in Florida in 2008. The discovery shed light on how the regime terrorized its own population in the 1970s and eventually led to the aircraft’s return to Buenos Aires in 2023.
The Skyan’s location was uncovered by Argentine journalist Miriam Lewin and Italian photographer Giancarlo Ceraudo. The duo recently shared their story with CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Lewin was a student activist during the 1970s. The military kidnapped, tortured and sexually abused her during the Dirty War, the term used by the regime. Lewin was lucky to survive her imprisonment in the basement of the Navy School of Mechanics (or ESMA), as it’s estimated that the government killed up to 30,000 people.
A military school turned into a death camp
During the Dirty War, ESMA was a secret death camp in the middle of Buenos Aires. The school’s sadistic officers explored various cruel methods of executing its captives before settling on its death flights. Prisoners were told that they were being vaccinated but were actually sedated. The military then loaded the still-conscious captives onto a Skyvan plane for a one-way trip. They were tossed out of the back at 10,000 feet over the ocean to their certain death. For comparison, the Golden Gate Bridge’s road deck is 220 feet over the water. Lewin said:
“Death flights allowed them to disappeared the bodies of the disappeared. No trail, no clues whatsoever that could incriminate them.”
The Argentine military bought five British-built Skyvan PA-51s in the 1970s. The twin-turboprop plane was commonly used for transporting troops and cargo because its large rear door. Coincidentally, two of the planes were shot down by the British military during the Falklands War, the 1982 conflict that helped precipitate the regime’s collapse the following year.
Found plane helped lead to life sentences
The three surviving Skyvans were sold off. In 2008, Lewin and Ceraudo discovered that a skydiving company in Fort Lauderdale, Florida had one of the planes. The new owners were completely unaware of the aircraft’s dark past but happily handed over the Skyvan’s logs. With that information, the duo found the first concrete evidence that the death flights took place. The plane was connected to a death flight where the bodies were actually recovered. A storm washed six bodies ashore over 200 miles away from the Argentine capital and buried in unmarked graves just days after the flight.
The bodies were finally exhumed and identified in 2005. Five of the victims were from a group of mothers and nuns kidnapped from Holy Cross Church in Buenos Aires. The regime condemned these innocent people for protesting to learn the whereabouts of their own disappeared children. This movement ultimately led to the dictatorship’s demise.
The plane is returned to ESMA
The recovered logs also revealed the identity of the death flight’s pilots. They were still living average lives in Argentina. Two of them were commercial pilots for flag carrier AerolÃneas Argentinas. However, the country took action to confront its past and punish those who tormented the populace. In 2017, all the pilots of all death flights were sentenced to life in prison after 48 people tied to ESMA were tried for crimes against humanity. The reporting of Lewin and Ceraudo played a crucial role during the trial.
The Fort Lauderdale Skyvan PA-51 was returned to Argentina in June 2023. It is now on display at ESMA, now a museum dedicated to the disappeared during the Dirty War. The vehicles often preserved for their historical significance are successful racing machines or were previously owned by famous people.
Cars tied to tragic events are often left to rot or destroyed. For example, the 1966 Lincoln Continental used by Martin Luther King Jr. during his final trip to Memphis, where he was assassinated, ended up in a vacant lot behind an auto shop until 2001. History should be remembered not only to celebrate the successes but also to learn from the horrors.
