Villaflor was a founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an organisation dedicated to recovering people who disappeared under the dictatorship. “I have mixed emotions,” said Cecilia De Vincenti, 60, whose mother Azucena Villaflor was among the group whose remains were swept to shore. For survivors of the dictatorship, its return acts as a rebuke to those who deny or minimise the atrocities of that period. It is the first death flight plane to be repatriated as part of an ongoing government effort to recognise that dark chapter in Argentina’s history. In March, on the anniversary of Argentina’s military coup, demonstrators in Buenos Aires pass a message that reads, ‘30,000 reasons not to forget’, a reference to the dead Now, the evidence of that practice is returning to Argentina, as the plane used to kill those seven victims is transported from the United States back to South America.

How they came to perish in those frigid waters is a testament to the horrors of a period of state violence in Argentina, when as many as 30,000 people were killed in a government campaign to stamp out left-wing activism and political dissent.īut the seven bodies that washed ashore in the late 1970s were victims of a particularly gruesome form of execution: They were among those who had been hurled, oftentimes alive, from planes into the river below, in what became known as “death flights”.

They had all been prisoners of a clandestine detention centre run by the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The wind - called a sudestada - pushed seven bodies ashore about 300 kilometres (186 miles) south of Buenos Aires between December 1977 and January 1978.Īmong the bodies were mothers who had been looking for their disappeared children and a nun who had helped in their search. Buenos Aires, Argentina – The haunting discovery might never have happened were it not for the sudden rotation of a cold southern wind, howling across the Rio de la Plata estuary between Argentina and Uruguay.

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