Dirty War and Condor: Concentration camps, death flights and torture
- John Zek
- Apr 23
- 7 min read
***The following post contains graphic depictions of torture, sexual abuse and murder.***
The scale and scope of the Dirty Wars is still debated due to the destruction of evidence and the time that has passed. Human rights groups estimate across South America as many as 50,000 were killed and as many as 400,000 were tortured and imprisoned.[i] Around 30,000 of those killed were ‘disappeared’ (victims are known as ‘the disappeared’ Spanish: Los Desaparecidos) who were abducted then executed, their bodies destroyed or disposed of in inaccessible areas and which allowed officials plausible deniability but also worked as a psychological weapon against the families of the victims.
There are hundreds of stories of the torture and murder of dissidents across Latin America. In 1978 the U.S top aide of Latin America Robert Pastor wrote a memorandum to the President Carter’s national security advisor detailing the abduction and torture of Alfredo Bravo, president of Argentina's Permanent Assembly for Human Rights in September 1977. The memo states
“Bravo’s account is that of a classic ‘disappearance’“ after the report to Pastor, Bravo added that he had heard tales which made his treatment look moderate." [ii]
The memorandum reads:
“plain clothesman entered the classroom where he was teaching, took him for “questioning” blindfolded and in an unmarked car. Then begins the horror.
Bravo was held for ten days in various detention centres. During that time, he was hooded constantly, naked and denied food and water. The list of tortures he experienced and witnessed reads like a primer of cruel and unusual punishment. He himself was:
Beaten, both by hand and rubber clubs;
Subjected to electrical shocks via a four-pronged electric picana [cattle prod] until his mouth and jaws were paralyzed;
Subjected to a bucket treatment where his feet were held in a bucket of ice water until thoroughly chilled then shoved into a bucket of boiling water;
Subjected to ‘the submarine’- repeatedly being held under water until almost drowned.
Beyond the physical torture were a variety of psychological horror that Bravo was forced to watch or listen to:
As he moved from detention centre to detention center, Bravo was thrown in vans with dead bodies and other naked prisoners showing physical evidence of violent torture.
Group tortures occurred in which Bravo was placed in a circle of prisoners holding hands and electricity was applied; a woman prisoner was raped with the group standing by and her boyfriend shot when he objected; the group was beaten.
Throughout the ten days of torture, the interrogation was a litany of questions about the activities and political affiliations of people known and unknown to Bravo. In the last session Bravo and a number of other prisoners were taken to a field which appeared to be a garbage dump. Bravo, still hooded, heard the sounds of beatings and many shots being fired….
Bravo was made a “regular prisoner” and warned not to talk of what had happened to him or he would be found to have committed suicide. [iii]
The memorandum of conversation, done with the Buenos Aires embassy staff notes that Bravo was released because his abduction had brought great domestic and international pressure on the government. Other testimonies tell of the police using waterboarding and psychological torture in Chile[iv]. Some detention centres had even more brutal acts: uncompliant prisoners’ legs were run over by trucks, prisoners submerged in vats of excrement and solitary confinement in freezing conditions. Sexual violence against women was used in a systemic manner. A report commissioned by the Chilean government in 2005 on political imprisonment and torture by the Pinochet regime between 1973 and 1990 noted that of the 3,399 women they had interviewed almost all had been subjected to sexual violence. [v] This violence was brutal, with the use of foreign objects, animals such as rats and dogs, rape in front of family members, electric torture and forced abortions.[vi] The report noted men did experience sexual violence but not in the systematic way that women were. Pregnant women or those that became pregnant had their children taken away from them, often these women were kept alive until they gave birth then they were later executed.[vii]
A common fate of The Disappeared: Death Flights
Psychological terror against their opponents was a common tactic by the police and army in both Chile and Argentina. One method was ‘death flights’, these used either helicopter or plane in which sedated prisoners were thrown out alive over remote areas such as the high peaks of the Andes mountains or the vast Pacific Ocean. Some perpetrators attest to using these flights as a method of disposing bodies of those who died from torture or execution in concentration camps.
In the 1990s retired Argentine naval officer Francisco Scilingo ‘confessed’ to journalist Horacio Verbitsky his involvement in death flights and his account remains a rare account of what occurred. On his first flight Scilingo says that prisoners were told they were to receive a vaccination from a Naval doctor but instead were given sedative that rendered them ‘like zombies’, from there the prisoners in a drowsy state were helped onto transport planes. Once on the planes they received a larger dose of sedative designed to render them unconscious then:
“In their unconscious state, the prisoners were stripped, and when the commander of the airplane gave the order… according to where the plane was, the hatch was opened and they were thrown out, naked, one by one… I was pretty nervous about the situation I was experiencing and almost fell out… I slipped and they caught me.”[viii]
During their interview Verbitsky continually questions Scilingo that no victim ever woke up to which Scilingo vehemently denies, although the question seemed to have struck a chord within him.
According to Scilongo these flights happened every Wednesday between 1977 and 1978 with around 15 to 20 prisoners and personnel were rotated around this job as some sort of method of collective accountability and more senior officers occasionally joined the flights to watch. [ix]
Above: An aeroplane used in death flights in Argentina. Behind is the notorious Navy Academy (known by the acronym ESMA) where many of the disappeared were held prisoner and tortured.
This particular Skyvan was tracked down by ESMA survivor Miriam Lewin and an Italian photographer, Giancarlo Ceraudo. Surprisingly the flight logs dated back to the 1970s, they were used as evidence to convict two of the pilots involved (a third died in custody) in an infamous death flight in late December 1977 when 12 activists (including founding members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) were abducted by the Navy with the help of Naval officer Alfredo Astiz who infiltrated the group.[x] Bizarrely a Chilean helicopter used for executions was tracked down to a game park in Sussex, UK. In a sad irony the chassis was being used as a prop in simulated warfare games, survivors are calling for it to be returned to Chile.[xi]
The perverted Paraguayan dictatorship of Stroessner.
Julia Ozorio Gamecho was 13 years old when she was kidnapped by Colonel Pedro Julián Miers, taken while playing out the front of her house in the Paraguayan countryside. For two years she was sexually abused by guards and starved in a cell.
Her story is one of thousands. Young girls who stolen off the street by red Chevrolets nicknamed caperucita roja ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ by roving bands of soldiers. These ‘girl hunters’ searched the countryside for virgin girls to be given to dictator Alfredo Stroessner and his relatives. Journalists claim twelve detention centres across the country held these children who were used as sex slaves. Those who reported the crimes were met with extreme brutality. In 1975 when Malena Ashwell discovered three unconscious young girls who appeared to have been raped in her neighbour’s house she reported what she saw to the local news and was arrested and tortured by secret police. Her wounds were dipped in excrement to cause infection, she survived only as she was from an influential family.
Others were not as fortunate, Miguel Ángel Soler, secretary of the Communist party, was reportedly abducted and dismembered with a chainsaw while Stroessner listened on a telephone.[xii] Soler was trying to publish Ashwell’s story. Julia Ozorio never returned to Paraguay after leaving at 15. She described the abuse she suffered in her 2008 book, A Rose and a Thousand Soldiers and is the only person to publicly come out as a victim. Since publication of her book she has faced threats, Stroessner’s party has held power for most of the three decades since democracy. In 2016 the government has finally opened an investigation into the crimes though many of those who committed the crimes are deceased as Rogelio Goiburú. As director of reparations and historical memory at Paraguay’s Ministry of Justice put it:
“To talk about these crimes remains a taboo. The legacy of state terrorism is a continued fear of speaking out. We need to break this cycle and bring the dictatorship’s crimes against humanity to light.”[xiv]
Sources
[i] These figures have come from various sources such as: Amnesty International. June 30, 1995
[ii] National Security Council. Memorandum: Human Rights in Argentina. National Security Archive August 28, 1978. P.14 Accessed 21: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/22393-4-national-security-council-memorandum-human
[iii] ibid
[iv] Maria Pilar, “Chilean Survivor Breaks the Silence,” in Refugee Transitions, STARTTS Issue 3 (August 1999): https://www.startts.org.au/media/Refugee-Transitions/Refugee-Transitions-Issue-3.pdf
[v] Caroline Davidson. NUNCA MÁS MEETS #NIUNAMENOS— ACCOUNTABILITY FOR PINOCHET-ERA SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN CHILE. Columbia Human Rights Law Review, no. 51.1 (2019). https://hrlr.law.columbia.edu/hrlr/nunca-mas-meets-niunamenos-accountability-for-pinochet-era-sexual-violence-in-chile/ P. 109
[vi] Ibid. P. 110
[vii] This stemmed from the Catholic belief of the innocence of children compared to their ‘sinner’ parents.
[viii] Horacio Verbitsky. The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior. New York: The New Press, 1996. P. 48
[ix] Uki Goñi. No One Can Deny It Now’: Death Flight Plane to Be Returned to Argentina. The Guardian, March 24, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/24/argentina-dictatorship-death-flight-plane-return-from-us
[x] Uki Goñi Argentina ‘death Flight’ Pilots Sentenced for Deaths Including Pope’s Friend. The Guardian, November 30, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/29/argentina-death-flight-pilots-sentenced-for-deaths-including-popes-friend.
[xi] Charis McGowan. How a Pinochet ‘Death Flight’ Helicopter Became UK Gamepark Prop. The Guardian, August 4, 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/04/chile-pinochet-death-flights-helicopter-uk-park.
[xii] Anne Whitehead . Paradise Mislaid: In Search of the Australian Tribe of Paraguay. University of Queensland Press 1998. p. 554.
[xiv] Mat Youkee "How Paraguay Is Finally Reckoning with Its Dark Past." America's Quarterly. August 1, 2024. https://www.americasquarterly.org/fulltextarticle/how-paraguay-is-finally-reckoning-with-its-dark-past/.
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