On Monday (4) the Argentine court sentenced four ex-military members of the country to life imprisonment due to the so-called “death flights”, a criminal practice that consisted of throwing political prisoners, alive or killed during the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 in the country.
Luis Del Valle Arce, Eduardo Lance, Ángel Delcis Malacalza and Santiago Omar Riveros were convicted of, according to the indictment, breaking and entering, illegal deprivation of liberty, torture and aggravated murder of four people who were held in a clandestine detention center. , torture and extermination known as Campo de Mayo. An estimated 5,000 people passed through the site.
The victims are Adrián Enrique Accrescimbeni, Juan Carlos Rosace, Rosa Eugenia Novillo Corvalán and Roberto Ramón Arancibia, whose bodies were found off the coast of the country between 1976 and 1978.
The judges ordered doctors to examine the health of three of the convicts to see if they are fit to go to prison. In the meantime, they will be under house arrest using electronic monitoring devices. According to the Argentine press, they are between 79 and 98 years old.
The convicts, the government says, were part of the 601st battalion of the Army’s aviation unit. Del Valle Arce was the group’s commander; Malacalza, second in command; Lance, chief of operations; and Riveros, head of the Military Institutes Command.
According to the indictment, the convicts organized and facilitated the resources to carry out the murder of the tortured people in Campo de Mayo — they used military airport, pilots, planes and army helicopters in a systematic way to eliminate political opponents. Trucks were also used to transport prisoners, guards and even drugs to dope the kidnapped before flights.
The court also ordered the Clarín group, which publishes the largest newspaper in Argentina, to correct a report published in 1977 entitled “Family members of 2 abandoned children sought”, about the children of Arancibia – one of the victims of the group condemned in second, according to the indictment.
According to the Argentine government, this is the first trial involving “death flights”. The process lasted almost two years, and the sentence was given virtually due to the pandemic. “The wrongful acts discussed in this case constitute crimes against humanity,” said Judge Walter Benditti.
The evidence was gathered, among other sources, by the Truth and Justice program, which investigated state crimes in the period. According to the Spanish newspaper El País, the crimes were reconstructed from the testimonies of recruits who were doing military service in Campo de Mayo at the time, who reported to the court, among other things, that they had found belongings of the disappeared near the airstrip.
