STORY: For relatives of victims of Argentina’s dictatorship… this plane is a shocking sight.
It’s where their loved ones took their last breaths… before being thrown to their deaths.
The so-called “death flights” were used as a tool by Argentina’s bloody dictatorship to get rid of critics.
Cecilia de Vicenti’s mother was one of them.
She had been seeking justice for her missing son – before she herself was detained and killed.
“It was shocking to see the plane. On the one hand, the achievement of having brought it back after four years of trying to get them [the government] to buy it, and on the other hand, to think that it was the last place my mother was alive. It is terrible to think that a mother who was only looking for her son was thrown alive from this plane.”
The plane was brought to Argentina from the U.S. at the request of families of victims.
It will be housed in a museum on the site of a former clandestine detention and torture center.
Human rights organizations say some 30,000 people disappeared during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
Mabel Careaga also lost a loved one to the flight.
“We are building memory, truth, and justice,” she says. “As long as there is justice for these crimes, there will be a guarantee that it will not happen again.”
The plane was identified in 2010 by an Argentine journalist and an Italian photographer using flight logs.
The discovery provided evidence used to convict dozens of people of dictatorship-era crimes.
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