Two former Argentinian military pilots have been given life sentences for their part in the death of a close friend of Pope Francis, who was hurled to her death from an aircraft during the country’s 1976-83 dictatorship.
The ruling on Wednesday marked the first Argentinian judgment against participants in the so-called “death flights”, in which opponents of Argentina’s military regime were thrown into the freezing waters of the South Atlantic in an attempt to hide the murders.
The court heard that former coastguard pilots Mario Daniel Arrú and Alejandro Domingo D’Agostino were in the crew of the Skyvan PA-51 plane from which Esther Careaga and 11 other people were thrown to their death on the night of 14 December 1977. Careaga was a close friend of Jorge Bergoglio, who decades later became Pope Francis.
The pilots were among the 54 defendants in the huge trial, which also involved the cases of 789 victims of the Navy Mechanics Higher School, ESMA, in Buenos Aires, where up to 5,000 people are estimated to have been killed.
The victims included leftwing opponents of the regime and members of Argentina’s tiny urban guerrilla groups, but also human rights activists and relatives of people who had already been “disappeared” by the military.
Naval intelligence operatives infiltrated activists groups – such as the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo human rights group, made up of mothers of missing persons such as Careaga, who were drawing the attention of international media to the human rights abuses in Argentina.
Careaga was seized by the military after denouncing the disappearance of her pregnant 16-year-old daughter Ana María. Along with two French nuns and nine others, she was thrown from a plane that left the city’s airport on the night of 14 December 1977. The court found that Arrú and D’Agostino had piloted the three-hour flight.
Careaga’s body, along with those of one of the nuns, Léonie Duquet, and two other mothers, Azucena Villaflor and María Bianco, washed ashore six days later and were buried in a common grave. Their remains were only identified via DNA testing in 2003.
Jorge Bergoglio met Careaga when he worked as an apprentice at a pharmaceutical laboratory in Buenos Aires in the early 1950s. Careaga was a feminist far ahead of her time, a biochemist and Bergoglio’s boss.
Bergoglio and Careaga developed a close friendship that they maintained up to the moment of her kidnapping by an ESMA death squad on the evening of 8 December 1977.
“Careaga was a good friend and a great woman,” said Beroglio, then archbishop of Buenos Aires, when the bodies of the three mothers were identified in 2003.
The scope of the crimes under investigation in the five-year trial was mind-boggling. A total of 484 cases corresponded to persons who were either murdered or made to “disappear” at the ESMA.
The remaining 305 cases involved survivors of kidnapping and torture as well as children born in captivity at the camp.
In most cases, the babies were handed over to military couples who raised them as their own while their real parents were murdered. It was only decades later through patient detective work by another human rights group, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, that many of these victims were reunited with their biological families.
A total of 830 witnesses gave evidence, including Pope Francis, who testified in 2010 over the disappearance of two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics.
“At that time any priest who worked among the poor was the target of suspicion from some sectors,” said Bergoglio when he testified in 2010. “It was very common, if someone went to work with the poor they were considered a lefty.”
Arrú and D’Agostino’s participation in the death flights was discovered by Argentinian journalist and ESMA survivor Miriam Lewin, who in 2011 managed to track down the Skyvan PA-51 aeroplane to its new owner in Miami.
Incredibly, the original 1977 flight logs of the plane were intact and named the crew on the night of Careaga’s death. A third crew-member, Enrique José de Saint George, died during the trial.
“The human rights community has worked tirelessly and creatively for decades to make this verdict possible,” says Ram Natarajan, an anthropologist and professor at the Univeristy of Arkansas who is writing a book on the ESMA trial.
Former navy lieutenant Alfredo Astiz, a naval commando who specialised in infiltrating activist groups was also sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday for kidnapping, torture, murder and child-stealing. Astiz – who became known as the “Angel of Death” in the ESMA jail – was already serving a life sentence on other charges.
The monumental trial started with a single case almost 40 years ago. In 1978, Arturo Lorusso went to court to report the disappearance of his younger sister María Esther.
Esther Lorusso was targeted because she belonged to a group of youths and priests who worked with the poor in the Bajo Flores slum of the Buenos Aires. She was taken to the ESMA navy base that night and was never heard from again.
Presenting charges against a death squad kidnapping was not something tolerated by the dictatorship. “My brother, my mother and another sister all had to go into exile in Belgium because of the threats they received,” said younger brother Luis Lorusso, now 63.
Speaking before the sentencing, Lorusso told the Guardian he was no longer seeking punishment for the officers responsible. “I want to know the truth more than seeing them in jail. I would prefer to know what actually happened. I don’t have my sister’s bones. It’s something awful,” he said.
- This article was amended on 29 November 2017 to correct María Bianco’s first name.