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Death flights
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The so-called death flights (Spanish: vuelos de la muerte) were a form of forced disappearance routinely practiced during the Argentine "Dirty War," theorized by Admiral Luis Maria Mendia. Victims of death flights were first drugged into a stupor, hustled aboard planes or helicopters, stripped naked and pushed into the Río de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean to drown. Extrajudicial killings have been conducted in manners substantively similar to those of the Argentine death flights, during the 1957 Battle of Algiers by General Marcel Bigeard, during the Vietnam War and in other conflicts.
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According to the testimony of Adolfo Scilingo, convicted by a Spanish court of crimes against humanity under the doctrine of universal jurisdiction in 2005, there were 180-200 death flights in the years 1977 and 1978; Scilingo confessed to participating in two such flights, with 13 and 17 people respectively.[1]
As an added twist, victims were sometimes made to dance for joy in celebration of the freedom that awaited them. In an earlier interview, in 1996, Scilingo said, "They were played lively music and made to dance for joy, because they were going to be transferred to the south. [...] After that, they were told they had to be vaccinated due to the transfer, and they were injected with pentonadal. And shortly after, they became really drowsy, and from there we loaded them onto trucks and headed off for the airfield."[2]
Scilingo says that the Argentine Navy is "still hiding what happened during the dirty war".[3]
Paul Teitgen, former General Secretary of the Algiers Police, who had been himself tortured by the Gestapo, resigned on September 12, 1957, in protest against the widespread use of torture and extra-judiciary killings ordered by Generals Marcel Bigeard and Jacques Massu, who had received full powers during the 1957 Battle of Algiers to crush the insurgency by whatever means necessary. They threw out hundreds of prisoners into the sea, from the port of Algiers or by helicopter death flights. As the corpses sometimes came back to the surface, they began to attach concrete blocks to their feet. These victims were known as "Bigeard's shrimps" ("crevettes Bigeard")[4][5][6][7]
Expulsions of live prisoners from helicopters also occurred during the Vietnam War, but the scope and extent of these actions – and the degree to which they were sanctioned and advised by senior military leadership – are underdocumented, due in part to a reluctance (at the time) on the part of mainstream media sources to follow up on the vivid recountings of returning servicemembers, as recorded in the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation. For example, Marine Corps Captain Ernest ("Rusty") Sachs, himself a helicopter pilot, told of "throwing Viet Cong suspects from the aircraft after binding and gagging them with copper wire",[8] and Seargant Scott Camil spoke of "bodies shoved out of helicopters"[9] as well.
- ^ Spain tries Argentine ex-officer.
- ^ Macabre new details emerge about Argentina's 'dirty war'.
- ^ 'Death flight' captain says Argentine navy is hiding horrors.
- ^ Film testimony by Paul Teitgen, Jacques Duquesne and Hélie Denoix de Saint Marc on the INA archive website
- ^ Henri Pouillot, mon combat contre la torture, El Watan, November 1, 2004
- ^ Des guerres d’Indochine et d’Algérie aux dictatures d’Amérique latine, interview with Marie-Monique Robin by the Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH, Human Rights League), January 10, 2007
- ^ Prise de tête Marcel Bigeard, un soldat propre ?, L'Humanité, June 24, 2000 (French)
- ^ Testimony of Rusty Sachs, Winter Soldier Investigation
- ^ Testimony of Scott Camil, ibid