A PLANE OF DEATH KEEPS FLYING IN CANADA

                                  Death flights: Systematic extermination carried out during the last Argentine military regime, between 1976 - 1986

The future of an aircraft used by the dictatorship for repression

 A plane of death is still flying in Canada 

The AE 258 used to throw detainees into the Río de la Plata or the Argentine Sea was housed in Campo de Mayo and was nicknamed the "executioner." It is now in the hands of the aviation company Rise Air.

By Luciana Bertoia: A Twin Otter taxied on the Campo de Mayo track at night. Vans carrying dying people pulled up to the tarmac. Later, silence for hours and, when the Twin Otter returned, a fire engine approached to maguerearlo, thus erasing the traces of blood from a "ghost flight". Some ex-conscripts remember that the Twin Otter was called the "executioner", probably because of his role in the execution of the thousands of people who were kidnapped under the IV Corps orbit. Although it ceased to belong to the Argentine Army in 1983, that plane – in which most of the death flights that departed from Campo de Mayo during 1976 were carried out – is still active and in the possession of a Canadian aviation company, according to was able to reconstruct Page/12.

 A plane of death is still flying in Canada

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Twin Otters are short takeoff and landing airliners. They do not have a large size or a lot of capacity: they can carry between fifteen and 20 people if the seats are removed. They are used, in general, to practice skydiving or to carry out medical evacuations. They have a particularity: they can be deployed without doors and drop "load" in mid-flight. For the genocidal dictatorship, these characteristics were essential for the final phase of the extermination plan: to make the bodies disappear by throwing them into the waters of the Río de la Plata or the Argentine Sea. 

 As of September 1968, the Army Aviation Battalion 601 –based in Campo de Mayo– incorporated three Twin Otter: the AE 258, the AE 259 and the AE 100. The latter had that number because it was the aircraft that, at that time, he transferred the commander in chief of the Army. Over the years, the AE 100 became the AE 106 and ended up assigned to the area of ​​the IV Army Corps –which includes, among other places, Bahía Blanca and Neuquén–. The AE 259 was destined for Córdoba, where the III Army Corps had its headquarters. That plane crashed in January 1975 when it was moving the III Corps headquarters to Tucumán. That air tragedy postponed for a few weeks the launch of Operative Independence, the first stage of the genocide in Argentina. 

 The third Twin Otter, AE 258, was in Campo de Mayo, one of the main centers of repression during the years of state terrorism. It was confirmed, among others, by retired pilot Carlos Martínez Junor when he testified as a witness in a trial in Neuquén. "I flew as pilot in command of the 258. I didn't fly it much, but I did a few flights," he recounted before the Neuquén courts.

 “It was proven that the AE 258 is the one that was effectively used, especially in 1976 in Campo de Mayo,” prosecutor Marcelo García Berro, who – along with his colleague Mercedes Soiza Reilly – is in charge of of the accusation in the trial for the so-called death flights before the Federal Oral Court (TOF) 2 of San Martín.

 A plane of death is still flying in Canada

 
Images that prove the flights of death

The AE 258 has been in Canada for almost 16 years. According to an Army report accessed by this newspaper, it is in the hands of the Transwest Air company, which in recent months was renamed Rise Air. Locating the ship could be essential to find the documentation with the flights it made during the years of State terrorism. Página/12 contacted the company to inquire about the use that was being given to the former AE 258 and about the existence of those papers, but received no response.

 The executioner 

Pedro made the conscription in Campo de Mayo. He was assigned to the Services company. His main task was to drive a tanker truck and refuel the planes of the Aviation Battalion.

 "Did you fill the executioner with fuel?" asked a non-commissioned officer, referring to the Twin Otter. 

 When prosecutor García Berro asked him why they called him the “executioner”, Pedro said he did not remember. From the court, they asked him for a memory exercise. When he testified in investigation in 2012, Pedro said that they called him the executioner because he transferred prisoners to be thrown into the sea and that, to make the task easier. he carried a canvas door.

 A plane of death is still flying in Canada

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Former conscript Eduardo Bustos still remembers when he was given the order to let pass a cell phone that had people on board. No one searched it and the truck – which could be from the Federal Police or the Buenos Aires Police – headed towards the hangars. Bustos also said that at that time there was only one operational Twin Otter and he recalled that the firefighters had to hose him down when he returned from flights because of blood trails. “Some of the guys commented that they made them wash the planes that were the Twin Otters,” he stated. A similar account had been made in 1995 by Sergeant Víctor Ibáñez.

 Juan Carlos Herrera also made the conscription in Campo de Mayo. He related that the Twin Otter took off from the emergency runway and that there were trucks that arrived at that runway. Like Bustos, Herrera one day had to let pass a van driven by a man who identified himself as "Federal Coordination", the clandestine center located in the heart of the City of Buenos Aires. “I went back to the back of the van for security and there the door opened and a man got out with a gun in his hand, he put it on his waist. I managed to see people who were chained behind and there they yelled at me to let them pass, ”he described before TOF 2 of San Martín. 

 According to the stories of the conscripts, death flights could have departed from Campo de Mayo with people who were detained in other clandestine centers beyond those that operated in that garrison.

 AE 258 was converted in Canada and is operated by Transwest Air, now Rise Air.

IN CANADA

 In June 1971, the AE 258 suffered an accident: while it was going from Comodoro Rivadavia to Espora, its wings and propellers froze at the height of the Nuevo Gulf. For a time it was out of service. In the Army it is not known when they repaired it, but it is known that it was before the coup d'état, since a record was found that shows that on February 22, 1975 he went to Tucumán and returned on the same day. By then, Operative Independence was already underway.

 A plane of death is still flying in Canada

                                      Victims of the "death flights" of the Argentine military dictatorship, which remained in the Commission's archives since 1979.

 Martínez Junor – who retired in 1977 – said that the plane was in Campo de Mayo and the conscripts speak of a Twin Otter, which could not be other than the 258. In February 1977, the Aviation Battalion added the Fiat planes G-222, which the soldiers called "Herculitos" for being a smaller version of a Hercules. Martínez Junor, in fact, was part of the entourage that went to look for the Fiat planes in Italy together with the commander of the Oscar Luis Jofre and Delsis Malacalza – one of the five defendants in the trial of the flights.

 The AE 258 passed to YPF in January 1983. In May 1995, it began to be operated by Transportes Aéreos Petroleros SA (TAPSA) and, two years later, it was bought by Sky High SA, an Argentine skydiving educational center. In May 2006 it was sold to the Canadian company Maji Aviation Inc and it became registered C-FGLF. The following year, it was bought by Transwest Air Limited – now Rise Air – according to Canadian records. 

 "The trial was very important to clarify the truth of the facts and for data like this to appear," Soiza Reilly assessed. “The intertwining of information that led us to know that the AE 258 was the one used in the Campo de Mayo death flights was made thanks to the trial, which also allowed us to reach the Fiat planes – which were destroyed in a aviation battalion but they are still. That is the importance of trials,” added the member of the prosecution, who already in 2017 was sentenced for the flights that were made with detainees from the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA). 

“This is the first opportunity we have to judge the Army Aviation and this way of getting rid of the hostages. This will have to give rise to an investigation not only of the structures –as in this trial– but fundamentally of the pilots”, García Berro completed.

 Like the ESMA Skyvans 

The Twin Otter is not the first aircraft used to eliminate political prisoners not found in the country. The same thing happened with the Skyvans that the Argentine Navy used to throw their hostages into the waters. One of them was located in Florida by the journalist Miriam Lewin -also a survivor of that concentration camp- and was key to the conviction that the Federal Oral Court (TOF) 5 of the City of Buenos Aires issued in 2017.