Skyvan PA-51, the plane from which the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the French nuns were thrown into the sea

Vice President Cristina Kirchner and the Economy Minister and brand new presidential candidate, Sergio Massa, appeared for the first time in a joint act after the Unión por la Patria lists became official. The photo will take place during the act by the recovery of the Skyvan PA-51 aircraft, used for the “flights of death”at the Jorge Newbery Aeroparque Military Air Station.

This plane was used to throw a group of 12 people alive into the Argentine Sea on December 14, 1977., including the three Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Azucena Villaflor, María Ponce de Bianco and Esther Ballestrino de Careaga and the French nuns Leonie Duquet and Alice Domon. The plane was bought by an American businessman who kept the original parts and kept until a few weeks ago in a hangar in Dekalb, near Chicago.

Cristina Kirchner presents a plane from the “flights of death” in the first act of campaigning with Sergio Massa

The original flight documentation was kept by the owner since the aircraft was in Argentina in the 1970s. SC7 Skyvan series 3 registration PA-51 It is a utility aircraft with STOL characteristics (for short takeoffs and landings), of British manufacture. Two other Skyvan aircraft used for death flights are preserved in the UK and Luxembourg.

nicknamed”flying shoe box“, is an all-metal twin-engined monoplane with a mid-mounted tailplane and twin rudders. The first flight of the aircraft built by short brothers It was January 17, 1963. It has a capacity for 19 passengers and two crew members and in 2007 it was used by a postal company between the Bahamas and Fort Lauderdale.. She later moved to Phoenix for the skydiving flights.

He commercial pilot and filmmaker Enrique Piñeyro reviewed the available documentation and discovered between 10 and 15 suspicious flights made by this plane and took the complaint to court. “The plane is a cabin without a door. It will have six, seven meters. There they piled up all the bodies semi-anesthetized with pentothal, with a cynicism they called it ‘Pento-naval’. It is a horrible thing. When you look at that box, that plane, You say: My God, what this must have been!” Piñeyro described.

“The plane is a scary thing for us, but having found and identified it we cannot allow it to continue flying”said Mabel Caraga, daughter of Esther Ballestrino and one of the promoters of the repatriation of the device that belonged to the Naval Prefectureto be exhibited as testimony of the dictatorship of 1976-1983.

“It’s too scary to imagine my mom there,” reflected the woman, who together with Cecilia de Vicenti, daughter of Azucena Villaflor, asked that the device be exposed on the grounds of the Navy Mechanics School, a clandestine detention center where some 5,000 prisoners spent and which today is the Museum of ExESMA Memory, in Buenos Aires. “The plane is part of the story that is painful but it must be told as it was,” De Vicenti replies.

Deceived by Astiz and thrown into the sea: this is how the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and two French nuns appeared in 1977

On December 10, 1977, Azucena Villaflor, María Ponce de Bianco and Esther Ballestrino de Careaga were wildly thrown into the void from an airplane Skyvan PA-51when the aircraft was flying over the Argentine sea.

It was one more of the terrible “death flights” launched by the Military Junta to destroy illegally detainees. All three had been injected with pentothal sedative, with their hands and feet tied.

The victims were thrown from a plane still alive. Skyvanwhich have large tailgates, which will soon be returned to Argentina to be exhibited at the former ESMA.

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Villaflor, Ponce de Bianco and Ballestrino have been part of the Mothers since April 1977, and They were part of a group that usually met in the church of Santa Curuz, located in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of San Cristóbal, with the purpose of establishing ties of solidarity in the context of fierce illegal repression..

One of the objectives of the group was to raise funds to finance the publication of a request in which they demanded answers from the authorities for the fate of those who disappeared from the dictatorship.

The group was also made up of other militants and religious members such as Angela Aguad, Remo Berardo, Julio Fondevila and Patricia Oviedo, relatives of the disappeared; the militants of the Communist Vanguard Horacio Elbert, Raquel Bulit and Daniel Horane and French nuns Leonie Duquet and Alice Domon, who had long been linked to human rights groups and social organizations.

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Azucena Villaflor, who was looking for her son Néstor, was one of the most active Mothers and was part of a family with a strong political tradition in Avellaneda’s Peronism, while María Ponce de Bianco and Esther Ballestrino had political training.

The first had suffered the kidnapping of her daughter Alicia, had been a member of the Communist Party, while Esther, a teacher and doctor in biochemistry born in Paraguay, had been a member of the left in that country. She had joined Madres after the kidnapping of her daughter, Ana María Careaga, released in the winter of 1977.

On December 8, the group was kidnapped as part of a Navy operation that included the participation of the genocidal Alfredo Astiz, who was a member of ESMA Task Group 3.3.2 and infiltrated this group by pretending to be the brother of a victim.

The Mother of Plaza de Mayo who never kept quiet, neither in a dictatorship nor in a democracy

For this purpose, Astiz changed the identity of “Gustavo Niño” to infiltrate the organization and with that nickname he signed a request from the group claiming for the disappeared. His strategy consisted of posing as a relative and marking them with a hug or kiss so that the paramilitary groups could kidnap their victims.

“Some of us were killed in the shootings, but I don’t know what was happening to others, I handed them over alive (…) They told me: go look for such a person, I would go and bring him back. Dead or alive, I would I left at ESMA and went to the next one”, said the operative, but denied the most accepted version: “I did my job. Besides, that whole story about the kiss on delivery day is a verse. I wasn’t there that day.”

On December 10 of that year, at the door of the church, Astiz kissed those who hours later would be kidnapped by Task Group 3.3.2: Villaflor, Ballestrino and Ponce. Locked up and tortured in the ESMA, they were eventually thrown into the ocean alive.

It is not known how many of the disappeared of the military dictatorship were thrown into the sea. From the plane’s high flight height, the bodies fell into the sea with the same violence as if they had been thrown on a concrete floor, and some corpses disintegrated in the sea in a few days. Others were returned by the waters.

In a television interview in 1998, the former repressor Adolfo Scilingo recorded that “Every Wednesday there is a flight and different officers were designated on a rotating basis to take charge of those flights, in such a way that the greatest number of members of the Navy would go through those flights.”

“To those who were chosen the day before to die, they were taken to the airport asleep or semi-asleep by a slight dose of a sleeping pill and deceivedmaking them believe that they were going to be taken to a prison in the south,” he recounted. “They were given a second very powerful dose, they would remain totally asleep, they were undressed and, when the commandant gave the order, they were thrown into the sea one by one “.

On December 20, the corpses of the three Mothers, Ángela Aguad and the nun Leonie, coming from the sea, reached the coast at the height of Santa Teresita and were deposited in a common grave in the General Lavalle cemetery, until, in 2005, a work by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team allowed them to be identified.

“I did not betray them, because I was not one of them and I converted. What I did was infiltrate, and that is what they do not forgive me. Because I infiltrated twice. When they accuse me of other things I get angry, but that’s what I laugh,” Astiz said. “They were montoneros. They received orders from the Montoneros. I respect those who ask for their disappeared children, but the Mothers use it to trade, for money or for politics.”