Inside the fight to memorialize victims of the military junta that ruled over the South American nation in the 1970s and ‘80s

By Joshua Hammer

The former Navy School of Mechanics, in Buenos Aires, sits on a leafy campus of whitewashed buildings and grassy plazas running alongside the Avenida del Libertador, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. On a recent Tuesday morning, I passed through the front gate and walked up the steps of a neo-Classical structure adorned with four Doric columns. The elegant facade belied its notorious history: The building served as the primary secret detention center for the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s.

María Belén Ghiso, a young guide, greeted me at reception and led me down a narrow flight of stairs into a basement with scuffed yellow walls. “This is where they tortured people,” she told me. In the 1970s, the space was divided into cubicles in which leftist guerrillas and their sympathizers were shocked and waterboarded to force them to reveal the whereabouts of fugitive comrades. The members of the military “task force” who administered the torture lived right upstairs, on two floors of dormitory rooms. The detainees spent the rest of their time on the third floor of the building, chained and blindfolded in a kennel-like hold called the capucha, Spanish for “hood.” Here, Ghiso told me, they lay side by side in grave-like compartments for weeks, allowed to shift positions only to eat and use the toilet. A secondary holding area, known as the capuchita, or “little hood,” was on the attic floor above. “It was psychological torture,” she said, ducking her head beneath a truss supporting the roof. “Its main purpose was to dehumanize them.” 

But that was not the worst that the prisoners, mainly young men and women, were forced to undergo. Every Wednesday, naval officers would single out about a dozen detainees and announce that they would be transferred to a detention center on a ranch in Patagonia, in the country’s south. “They would call your case number, and some of the prisoners waved their hands, crying out, ‘I want to go! I want to go!’” Miriam Lewin, a former leftist activist who survived a year of imprisonment at the navy school, known by the Spanish acronym ESMA, told me later. “They wanted to escape to that idyllic, beautiful place in Patagonia.” 

The announcement was a ruse. After dark, guards led the selected inmates to the basement, where they injected them with a sedative. Then they loaded their semi-conscious prisoners into a truck, which took them to a regional airport five miles away. The prisoners were herded onto a propeller plane. Often the captives received a second shot that rendered them unconscious and were stripped naked to remove traces of their identity. Then the pilots flew over the Río de la Plata, the wide estuary separating Argentina and Uruguay. Several thousand feet above the water, the guards in back cranked a winch. The rear ramp lowered, and the prisoners were pushed to their deaths. 

The navy hoped the corpses would disappear without a trace, but in at least 65 cases bodies washed onto beaches in Argentina and Uruguay. As time went on, the executioners began “studying the tides, improving the techniques, so that the bodies could be taken to the bottom of the sea,” says Nicolás Gil Lavedra, an Argentine filmmaker whose 2024 documentary, Traslados (roughly, TheTransported), detailed the crimes. The captives left behind at ESMA suspected that some terrible fate had befallen their comrades. “We used to find their shoes, their clothing, and we asked, ‘How come they left these here?’” Lewin recalls. “They told us, ‘We provided them with suitable clothing because it’s cold down south.’”

In March 1977, the Argentine investigative reporter and leftist activist Rodolfo Walsh, who was wanted by the junta, wrote an open letter to the regime, which he sent to several media organizations. Walsh, whose own daughter had been executed by the armed forces, described “prisoners hurtling down to the sea from the doors of the First Air Brigade,” and he cited the discovery in Uruguay of some two dozen corpses that had washed onto the beach. Shortly after mailing the letter, he was shot dead on the street by Argentine security services. Two years after that, new details about the death flights emerged when three former ESMA detainees who had been released and sent into exile testified before France’s National Assembly, in Paris, about the crimes of the dictatorship, repeating a story told to them by a fellow prisoner while they were still captive. One night in 1977, he’d told them, he was drugged, loaded into a truck and pushed onto a plane with a dozen other detainees. But just before the plane took off, his captors realized they’d selected him in error, and they brought him back. “He got to see the whole scene,” Lewin told me. (The prisoner, Emilio Carlos Assales Bonazzola, later disappeared.)

After the Paris testimony, facing mounting rumors of torture and murder, the dictatorship was forced to allow the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to inspect the navy school. But before investigators arrived, the task force transferred all remaining detainees to an island north of Buenos Aires, destroyed the internal staircase and the elevator, and made other structural alterations. The aim, Ghiso told me, was “to prove that witnesses were not remembering the place correctly.” Of 5,000 people held at the school during the dictatorship, fewer than 250 survived.

The dictatorship collapsed in 1983, after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, the British colony in the South Atlantic, and proceeded to lose a bloody and humiliating war. Mass protests at home and increasing opposition abroad led the military leadership to announce a transition to democratic elections. Many were elated when a human rights lawyer, Raúl Alfonsín, was sworn in as president and initiated trials of the junta’s top leadership. In a watershed event in 1985, a panel of civilian judges sentenced the former junta president, General Jorge Rafael Videla, and Admiral Emilio Massera, the architect of ESMA’s torture-and-murder program, to life in prison, and delivered lesser sentences to three others. 

But the armed forces remained a powerful institution, and in 1990 Alfonsín’s successor as president, Carlos Menem, gave indultos, or pardons, to all military personnel, springing Videla and Massera from jail. In the 2000s, successive leftist presidents Néstor Kirchner and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, both lawyers, threw out the indultos and put Videla back in prison. (Massera was incapacitated after an aneurysm.) They also set in motion a series of trials that, in various shapes and forms, continue to the present. As of mid-2024, 17 trials were ongoing, involving more than 100 defendants. 

According to current estimates by human rights groups, during its seven years in power the junta killed as many as 30,000 people, though the bodies of most of los desaparecidos—the disappeared—have never been found.

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Today, more than four decades after the fall of the dictatorship, the pervasive and unresolved trauma inflicted by that period is evident in many forms across Argentina. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a nonviolent protest group formed in the early days of the dictatorship by mothers of desaparecidos, still demonstrate once a week in front of the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. When I visited Buenos Aires this past September, hundreds of young people gathered in a plaza outside the National Congress for the annual commemoration of the “Night of the Pencils,” when on September 16, 1976, masked military gunmen kidnapped ten high school students who had led protests for cheaper bus fares, then tortured the students and later killed six of them. For the anniversary, protesters blocked traffic, held up photographs of the dead and chanted “Nunca Más,” or “Never Again,” the mantra that became a rallying cry across Argentina after the dictatorship. 

But the junta’s crimes can hardly be relegated to the past. One of the regime’s most insidious programs involved detained women who were pregnant at the time of their abduction or became pregnant in captivity after being raped by their captors; the military authorities waited until the women gave birth, then killed the women, forged birth certificates for the newborns and turned the babies over to military couples or, in some cases, to childless Christian families, often with the complicity of the Catholic Church. As many as 500 such children, now in their 40s, grew up in Argentina without knowledge of their real parentage. Some 350 have yet to be identified, and the ongoing process of identification—led by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, an offshoot of the Mothers—remains an open wound. 

As the country has carved a circuitous path toward justice and commemoration, ESMA has emerged as a central symbol of that historical reckoning. In 2015, the former torture center was established as the ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, which in 2023 UNESCO classified as a World Heritage Site. About three miles away is Memory Park, an expanse of manicured lawns along the Río de la Plata, landscaped with art installations and gray walls inscribed with the names of thousands of the dictatorship’s victims. Offshore, supported by buoys, stands a steel statue of 14-year-old Pablo Míguez, who was placed on a death flight in 1977. The likeness of the junta’s youngest murder victim seems to walk on the water as he gazes toward the horizon.

Even as the country seeks to emerge from the legacy of those seven horrible years, however, a new government elected in 2023 has become the first since the fall of the dictatorship to justify the regime’s extrajudicial killings and violent repression. The new president, Javier Milei, a libertarian economist and TV personality, and the vice president, Victoria Villarruel, have both disputed estimates of the number of the disappeared. Villarruel, the daughter, granddaughter and niece of former officers of the dictatorship, has also threatened to close memorial sites, audit the records of human rights organizations and reopen criminal cases against former leftist guerrillas. Never before has a democratic Argentine government of any political persuasion “decided to break its links with human rights groups,” Marcela Perelman, the head of research for the Center for Legal and Social Studies, a Buenos Aires-based international rights group, told me. The resultant social fracturing is pitting the vast majority against a newly vocal minority of junta sympathizers. “After 40 years of … demonization, we’re not afraid anymore,” Villarruel said during a 2023 campaign rally.

Lewin, the former ESMA prisoner, is one of many seasoned human rights activists seeking to challenge the administration’s efforts. She first came to national prominence in 1985, when she testified in the first criminal trial of the junta’s leaders. Later, she became an investigative television journalist. She produced a documentary, La Escuela (The School), about the experiences of ESMA survivors, and co-wrote a book, Putas y Guerrilleras (Whores and Guerrillas), about sexual violence in the detention camps. She was at the forefront of the campaign to convert ESMA into a memorial center, and she regularly protests and works in other ways to ensure the lessons of Argentina’s darkest chapter are not forgotten. Now Lewin is gaining international attention for a project she believes will make those horrors tangible for a new generation: a mission to locate and bring home a long-lost “death plane” used by the regime in the 1970s. “Villarruel is trying to rewrite history, paving the way for a return of the military, accusing politicians and members of the opposition of having a guerrilla criminal past,” she says. “It worries me.” 

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Lewin grew up in Buenos Aires in the 1960s, a period of steady decline from the glory days of the early 20th century. After gaining independence from Spain in 1816, Argentina, the fourth-largest country in the Americas, produced a bounty of wheat, corn, beef and wine, attracting massive investment and six million immigrants from across Europe. By the 1920s, the country was richer than France or Germany. Buenos Aires became known as “Paris on the Pampas,” its avenues lined with elegant buildings such as the Casa Rosada, the pink presidential palace, and the Teatro Colón, a grand 1908 opera house. 

But the worldwide depression of the 1930s and a succession of incompetent civilian and military regimes plunged the country into poverty. Juan Perón, a charismatic populist elected president in 1946, empowered labor unions and redistributed wealth. His wife, Eva Perón, who died from cancer at age 33, became an idol for the country’s poor. But Perón’s efforts to curb the political influence of the Catholic Church antagonized the military, and in September 1955 Perón was deposed in a coup and forced into exile. After struggling to run the country, the military allowed him to return 18 years later, and he was re-elected president in 1973. Perón died a year later and was succeeded by his third wife, the ineffectual Isabel Perón.

By now the country was ripping apart. A government austerity program led to sharp wage losses, currency devaluation and an increasingly unstable economy. Popular unrest grew, and underground political movements organized. Some, including extremist factions of the Montoneros—made up of thousands of mostly middle-class youths who believed the government’s economic programs were perpetuating widespread inequality—carried out political assassinations and kidnapped wealthy Argentines for ransom. As the political situation deteriorated, the CIA predicted in 1975 that “Argentina is probably destined for an army coup sooner rather than later.”

The tanks rolled through the streets on March 24, 1976. The “National Reorganization Process,” as the regime called itself, responded to widespread unrest with kidnappings, torture, executions and disappearances. The military targeted not only guerrillas, but also “students, educators, trade unionists, writers, journalists, artists, left-wing activists, members of the clergy and alleged sympathizers,” according to a declassified CIA report from the time. “They killed people who had no links to the guerrillas,” Lewin told me. By the end of 1977, the ranks of the guerrilla groups had been largely wiped out, but the dictatorship’s terror continued. 

Lewin was an 18-year-old student activist with the Montoneros’ political wing in Buenos Aires, known by the code name Gringa, when the military seized power. “I never had a gun and never committed any blood crimes,” she told me recently as we drank café cortados in the Parque Centenario neighborhood of Buenos Aires. “We handed out leaflets, we painted walls. We were thousands, and I felt I was fighting for justice.” Lewin is an animated, red-haired woman who speaks fluent English and relates her story with a matter-of-factness that belies its horror. Comrades began disappearing days after the coup, dragged off by plainclothes men in Ford Falcons, soon known as the telltale car of military abductors. Lewin dropped out of university, took a job in a furniture factory and kept a low profile. Determined not to betray her fellow activists under torture, she carried a cyanide capsule to swallow in the event that she was captured. “I thought it would be nice to save their lives even if I died,” she told me. “Every comrade I lost made my commitment stronger.” 

In May 1977, half a dozen men surrounded her as she walked home from work. Lewin slipped the poison pill into her mouth, but the assailants choked her and removed the capsule. For months she was moved among clandestine torture centers. Her interrogators demanded that she give up the whereabouts of Patricia Palazuelos, a friend since high school, suspected of planting a bomb in air force headquarters. (Palazuelos’ father was a top air force officer.) “They kept me blindfolded,” she recalled. “They used electric shock, they put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. They played Russian roulette.” Lewin continued to insist she had lost track of Palazuelos when she joined the Montoneros’ armed wing. Eventually, she says, her captors believed her, but they kept her imprisoned. Security forces reportedly found Palazuelos by accident and killed her in September 1977, while they were searching a group house for a burglar.

Soon afterward, Lewin’s captors blindfolded and handcuffed her, threw her into a car trunk, and drove her to ESMA, where, she said, “awful things were said to happen.” She thought they were taking her to be killed, but the military had decided to spare her life. Lewin spoke English and French, and she was put to work in the center’s “press department,” which meant translating articles about the dictatorship from the Washington Post and other American newspapers. At night, she slept in the capucha, beside chained prisoners. “I was free to walk around and talk to them,” she said. “They were sitting there blindfolded, with rats crawling around them.” Lewin was fed the line about the transfers to Patagonia, but she suspected something more sinister was happening. “You left in the morning to go to work, and you saw a lot of people, and you came back at night and the capucha was empty.”

Lewin was released in 1979, just months before the Inter-American Commission visited ESMA. Afterward, she was monitored closely by the military, she says, but she made a new life. She married another former prisoner, gave birth to a son, and left the country with her husband and child in 1981. She had another son soon afterward. For three years, she worked as a paralegal and translator in New York while raising her young children, then returned to Argentina at the dawn of the Alfonsín era. After testifying against the junta, she got a job writing for a magazine, and she was eventually hired by the TV news program “Telenoche Investiga,” akin to “60 Minutes.” As a victim of torture, she was hesitant to produce stories about the dictatorship’s crimes, believing that she could not report about them impartially. But while she was attending a journalism workshop at the Poynter Institute, the global pro-democracy nonprofit based in Florida, her professor told her, “On the contrary, you should do it, because your sensibility will make all the difference when you’re interviewing victims or survivors.” There were certain issues, he said, “where there are not two sides.”

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For years, the known history of the death flights was limited. That finally changed in the 1990s, when a guilt-racked former navy lieutenant, Adolfo Scilingo, broke a pact of silence and confessed his role in the murders to the Argentine journalist Horacio Verbitsky, who told the story in his book El Vuelo(The Flight), published in 1995. 

In 2003, Giancarlo Ceraudo, an Italian photojournalist working in Argentina, became caught up in the story of the desaparecidos. He had come to Buenos Aires to cover an economic crisis, but the brutality of the former dictatorship “was in your face,” he recalled recently. “The Mothers were marching, victims were talking, the story was alive.” An aviation enthusiast since childhood, when a pilot friend of his father’s would fly him over Rome in a single-engine Cessna, Ceraudo believed that tracking down the death planes might provide the key to finding those involved in the murders. “Argentina’s armed forces only had about 15 planes, and not so many pilots,” he told me. Ceraudo credits his Roman upbringing with teaching him to value the history embedded in inanimate objects. “When I saw stones as a child, I thought, ‘This stone reveals things about the Roman Empire.’ The object for me has a soul.” 

A colleague gave Ceraudo a copy of a little-noticed follow-up memoir written by Scilingo that contained a vital clue: The former navy lieutenant identified the principal model of plane used in the death flights, a clunky but durable British-made aircraft known as a Short SC7 Skyvan, nicknamed “the flying shoebox.” Ceraudo spent the next few years shuttling between his home in Italy and assignments across South America, returning frequently to Argentina to shoot portraits of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and victims of the junta. “Every year I got more deeply inside the story,” he said. 

In 2007, a colleague introduced him to Lewin, and the two picked up the quest for the planes in earnest. An extensive online search turned up the serial numbers of several Short SC7 Skyvans used by the Argentine Navy and Coast Guard in the 1970s. Other sites compiled by aviation aficionados tracked the planes’ ownership history. Two Short Skyvans had been lost, probably shot down and destroyed, during the Falklands War. The Argentine military had sold another Skyvan to a skydiving company in Luxembourg. But the company’s owner refused to provide any more information about his plane, so Lewin and Ceraudo kept searching. Soon they traced another Skyvan to a private American mail carrier: GB Airlink in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 2009, the owner of GB Airlink shared with Lewin and Ceraudo a critical document: the plane’s flight logs. Dating to 1971, when the plane, then registered as PA-51, was originally purchased by the Argentine Coast Guard, the logs contained records of every flight the plane had made in four decades. “Every maintenance operation, every problem, every flight had to be recorded,” Lewin says. “You cannot sell a plane without that.” 

To make sense of the logs, Ceraudo and Lewin enlisted the help of a commercial pilot in Argentina who, cooperating in secret for fear of repercussions, singled out a number of suspicious flights from the mid- and late 1970s. In each case, the Short Skyvan had taken off from a regional airport five miles from the ESMA detention center on a Wednesday evening. It had flown for nearly four hours and returned to the same airport without making any other stops. The long journey, close to the plane’s maximum range, raised the pilot’s eyebrows. According to standard aviation practice, planes should never use more than 75 percent of their fuel on any flight, and military pilots were known for their strict adherence to the rules. But this plane, the airman told Ceraudo and Lewin, was basically running on fumes. He theorized that the military pilots had pushed the plane to reach the Atlantic Ocean—a 300-mile round trip—where bodies could be disposed of without a trace. But he refused to put this theory on tape or sign an affidavit. Most of his fellow commercial pilots were ex-military men, he explained to them. “They would kill me if I did,” he said, according to Lewin.

Finally, in 2010, Lewin and Ceraudo turned to Enrique Piñeyro, a prominent Italian Argentine ex-airline pilot turned actor, film director and political activist, who felt he had little to fear from a discredited military. One date in the flight logs leapt out at Piñeyro: December 14, 1977. Six nights earlier, the leaders of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and other relatives of desaparecidos had gathered to plan strategy at a church in Buenos Aires. One group member, who had introduced himself as the brother of a missing leftist and was known affectionately as “the little blonde,” was in fact an undercover naval officer named Alfredo Astiz. (He later became known as the “angel of death.”) As the meeting broke up, Astiz singled out 12 activists with a telltale kiss on the cheek, including three Mothers and two French activist nuns. Over the next two days, plainclothes officers arrested each of them and transported them to ESMA.  

Task-force torturers beat and administered electric shocks to the women for nearly a week. Then they made the nuns pose before a Montoneros banner and released it as “evidence” that the guerrillas had kidnapped them. ESMA survivors would recall seeing the women at the center on December 14. A few days later, after a night of storms and heavy waves, five corpses washed up on the coast. Workers hastily buried them in a local cemetery. It wasn’t until July 2005 that forensics researchers exhumed the remains. DNA analysis identified one French nun and the three Mothers. (The fifth body was not identified, and the remains of the second nun were never found.) 

Piñeyro, poring over the logs, saw that on December 14 the Skyvan flew for three hours and ten minutes, making no stops before returning to base. And the log contained other information: the names of the flight’s three coast guard pilots. They were Mario Daniel Arrú, Alejandro Domingo D’Agostino and Enrique de Saint Georges. Lewin, investigating further, found that the pilots were “still working in commercial routes—Madrid, Miami and Rome,” she told me. Realizing this, she was overcome by “surprise and horror.” Within a year, thanks to their investigation, the pilots were arrested and charged with crimes against humanity. 

Around the same time, Argentine prosecutors were building a larger case that would, unfolding over the next five years, expose the inner workings of the entire torture-and-murder apparatus at ESMA. (A first ESMA trial had taken place in 2007, after years of delays, with a single defendant who died before a verdict could be handed down. A second trial, in 2009, had ended with 16 convictions and two acquittals.) The so-called ESMA “Mega-Case,” the largest trial in Argentina’s history, opened in Buenos Aires in 2012. The trial of 54 defendants took testimony about 789 individual crimes from around 900 witnesses and presented new details about the death flights, including the complicity of church officials, who sometimes blessed the pilots before their flights. It also revealed how ESMA was used, at times, as a clandestine maternity ward for pregnant detainees, who were then killed, and whose newborns were illegally adopted. 

In the course of the trial, prosecutors presented powerful evidence against the three pilots identified by Ceraudo and Lewin as responsible for the murders of the French nuns and the members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo on December 14, 1977. The defense didn’t dispute that the three men had flown the plane, but it argued that the pilots, isolated in their cockpit, were unaware of the horror unfolding in the rear. Prosecutors countered that it would have been impossible for them not to be in on the executions. Before lowering the ramp midflight, the operator in back had to signal the pilots so they could decelerate to about 140 miles per hour or risk structural damage, even the plane’s destruction. Moreover, as the ramp winched open, the pilots would have experienced a sudden drop in temperature and heard a deafening roar above the whine of the Skyvan’s engines. In 2017, judges found two of the pilots guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced them to life in prison. (The third had died in prison while awaiting trial.)

When it was over, the ESMA Mega-Case resulted in 48 guilty verdicts. Twenty-nine people received life sentences, and 19 others were sentenced to between 8 and 25 years in prison. In the trial’s closing remarks, the prosecutors called Vera Jarach, a founding member of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who spoke of the importance not only of seeking justice for the victims but also of documenting and remembering the atrocities for posterity. Jarach was an Italian-born Jew who fled to Argentina with most of her family in 1939; her grandfather, who stayed behind, was murdered at Auschwitz. In 1976, Jarach’s 18-year-old daughter, Franca, was abducted by the dictatorship and was never seen again. “We know that truth, justice and memory are the best guarantees for Nunca Más,” Jarach said. “With our efforts to promote memory, we try to ensure that these tragedies don’t fall into oblivion and, on the contrary, that they allow us to recognize symptoms of repetition—since history teaches us that what happened once, unfortunately, can happen again.”

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It was in that spirit that immediately after the trial, Lewin, Ceraudo, victims’ families and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo began pressuring the government to acquire the Skyvan and bring it home for display at the ESMA memorial center. “We always thought the plane had to be in Argentina,” Lewin told me. “It’s iconic. It’s important to the new generation.” But the president at the time, Mauricio Macri, had other priorities and dragged his feet on trying to arrange a handover. In 2019, the plane was sold to Win Aviation, a commercial air contractor based in DeKalb, Illinois. (The company was not aware of the aircraft’s history.) Not long afterward, following a personal appeal from the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the government of Macri’s successor, Alberto Fernández, struck a deal to purchase the plane. Then the Covid-19 pandemic put everything on hold. It would be three years before there was any new movement.

At last, on the morning of June 3, 2023, Ivan Bluske, an Argentine pilot with Win Aviation, climbed into the cockpit of the former death plane. Two newly installed “ferry tanks” nearly doubled the plane’s fuel capacity, but the journey from Illinois to Buenos Aires would require at least ten stops. Bluske and his co-pilot landed first in Arkansas, where they picked up nonworking replicas of the Short Skyvan’s original propellers and engine, to be retrofitted in Buenos Aires for display. Over Jamaica, an oil leak caused a turbine to overheat, nearly resulting in a catastrophic engine failure. The pilots had to ground the plane near Kingston for 13 days as they waited for a new engine to arrive from the United States and performed tests to make sure the plane was fit to fly. Next they crossed the Caribbean to Barranquilla, Colombia, then soared over the Andes, huddling in their frigid, unpressurized cabin at 16,000 feet while keeping a close watch for ice accumulating on the wings. They stopped on a jungle strip in Leticia, in the Colombian Amazon; touched down in Santa Cruz, Bolivia; then landed in Tucumán, in northwest Argentina.

On June 24, three weeks after the Skyvan set out on its 6,000-mile odyssey, Bluske guided the plane through thick winter fog as it approached Jorge Newbery Regional Airport in Buenos Aires. Ceraudo stood on a runway, alongside Lewin, leaders of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and dozens of family members of death-flight victims whose final journeys had started at this spot. As the ghostly outline of the Skyvan emerged through the mist, Ceraudo recalled, he drew a breath. “I had come up with this idea nearly 20 years before, and now I saw this aircraft landing in Buenos Aires,” he told me. “I moved away to stand alone, and for the first time I cried.” 

The Milei government swept into office that December. Villarruel, the vice president, has continued to argue that leftist guerrillas bore primary responsibility for the violence that convulsed Argentina. And she routinely disputes that 30,000 people were killed by the regime. While human rights groups say guerrilla violence likely killed hundreds or possibly more than a thousand people, they argue these figures include soldiers killed during armed confrontations and can’t be equated with the many thousands of non-combatants known to have been killed by the junta. In a sign of how fractious this debate has become, last March, on the 48th anniversary of the coup, tens of thousands of protesters in Buenos Aires carried signs reading not only “Nunca Más” but also “They are 30,000,” an apparent challenge to the new government line. (Villarruel declined my requests for an interview, and a spokesperson wrote in an email that “for the moment she is not interested in speaking about this subject.” Milei’s office did not respond to my request for a comment.) 

One of Villarruel’s frequent targets of criticism is Miriam Lewin, whose journalistic exposés, public condemnation of the government and high-profile efforts to bring back the Skyvan have made her a symbol of the movement to honor Argentina’s historical memory. Villarruel has needled Lewin by referring to her as “Penny” and “Polaca,” misleadingly conflating Lewin, as her captors did, with the noms de guerre of guerrillas. “During my torture, the men of the air force kept asking me if I was Penny or La Polaca,” Lewin explained. In one of several posts on X, formerly Twitter, attacking Lewin, Villarruel cited Lewin’s incarceration at ESMA as apparent proof of her “terrorist” activities. 

In fact, Villarruel has called for dismantling the ESMA memorial center itself. She proposes turning it into a school so that, she has said, it “could be enjoyed by all the Argentine people.” She has shepherded funding cuts to other former torture centers that are now memorial sites, arguing that they present a biased perspective by ignoring the alleged crimes committed by those detained there. I visited one such site, known as El Vesubio, where I met Verónica Castelli, the caretaker. (During the dictatorship, Villarruel’s uncle, Ernesto Villarruel, was an intelligence officer supervising El Vesubio; he was later arrested and charged with crimes in connection with the role, but he was never tried, and he was released in 2016 because of poor health.) Castelli was 2 years old in 1977 when her parents were kidnapped and taken to El Vesubio; her mother was six months pregnant, and Castelli never saw either parent again. Castelli was raised by an uncle, and she only learned about a younger sibling—a sister born while her mother was in captivity and then “appropriated”—in 2008. That’s when a decades-long investigation turned up the name of a Buenos Aires woman, then 31 years old, in the files of the Christian Family Movement, a Catholic organization with ties to the junta that acted as an intermediary in illegal adoptions. DNA testing confirmed that she was Castelli’s younger sister. 

Castelli opened a padlocked gate and led me across a field past three stone pillars marked Memory, Truth and Justice. The grounds had once contained officers’ quarters, prison cells and a torture chamber known as Room Q, for quebrada (“broken,” in reference to prisoners’ spirits) but all that was left were their stone foundations. Since the government cut funding, Castelli told me, she has paid for the site’s upkeep herself. The government has sold off other public sites of memory, including part of La Perla, a former torture and execution center in the city of Córdoba, and an old army infantry headquarters in the province of Corrientes.

Other programs are also losing critical government support. For decades, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have been instrumental in the search for adopted children, amassing a vast database about suspected adoptees compiled from anonymous tips, suspicious neighbors, relatives of the disappeared and other sources. Since the late 1980s, the government has also overseen a genetic database containing DNA from family members of desaparecidos known to have been pregnant at the time of their abductions, and during the Kirchner years it established a special investigation unit as a part of the National Commission for the Right to Identity, which granted the Grandmothers access to old military files. Last July, the Milei government eliminated the special unit, arguing that it violated the country’s constitution by usurping prosecutorial powers and intruding on the right to privacy of security officers. Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit, an adoptee who learned his true identity in 2000 and now works to find other appropriated children, told me the unit was essential in helping the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo pursue its investigations. “This has made things more difficult,” he admitted. The administration has also shuttered a special Justice Department office that investigated dictatorship-era crimes. Lewin told me, “The government is ruling by decree, dismantling all public entities related to human rights.”

At ESMA, after touring the main building, I walked across the tranquil campus until I reached an asphalt plaza near the main gate. Directly in front of me, protected by a low metal barrier, was the boxy, gray, snub-nosed propeller plane with five passenger windows to a side and a rear ramp—the very aircraft from which government killers had thrown their perceived enemies thousands of feet to their deaths. The Skyvan was finally installed as a permanent exhibit at ESMA in late June 2023. Circling it, I found it hard to equate this clumsy-looking aircraft with a program of state-sponsored homicide, but the plane’s very modesty made it all the more indelible as a symbol of brutality. 

When I met with Mayki Gorosito, the ESMA memorial site’s director, she conceded that the past year had been difficult. “I cannot say that we don’t have problems,” she said. But she stressed that for many Argentines the battle for memory, truth and justice has never felt so urgent. “It’s a dangerous moment when the government of a country doesn’t condemn crimes against humanity.” 

Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/four-decades-after-fall-argentina-dictatorship-fight-over-country-darkest-chapter-reopening-grievous-wounds-180985587/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&spMailingID=50517474&spUserID=MTI1MzcyNjIxNjk1NAS2&spJobID=2824992237&spReportId=MjgyNDk5MjIzNwS2