Word: scilingo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...They were unconscious. we stripped them, and when the flight commander gave the order, we opened the door and threw them out, naked, one by one. That is the story, and nobody can deny it." With these words, former Argentine navy Captain Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, 48, spilled one of the dirtiest secrets of the "dirty war" that raged in his country from the mid-1970s through the early '80s. Human-rights workers and relatives of at least 9,000 Argentines who "disappeared" under military rule have long contended that the missing were systematically murdered by troops acting on orders from...
Even Argentines inured to the perfidies of the dictatorial period were shocked by the confession that first appeared in O Vuelo (The Flight), a book based on a series of taped conversations with investigative reporter Horacio Verbitsky. Over the past two weeks, Scilingo has repeated his story in newspaper and television interviews. As a 28-year-old lieutenant, he was stationed in Buenos Aires at the Naval School of Mechanics in 1977; Scilingo says his post, already a notorious detention center for those rounded up on charges of disloyalty, soon became a way station to death...
...Scilingo estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 people "disappeared" in this manner from his base alone. He admits responsibility for 30 of them. He says he was ordered to participate in two of the death flights in 1977, adding that his fellow officers drew the same sort of assignment: "It was to give everyone a turn, a kind of Communion." On his first flight, Scilingo helped strip and then throw 13 victims out of a coast guard Sky Van; on his second, he did the same to 17 more out of a navy Elektra...
...Personally, I could never get over the shock," he says now, even though he still feels the fight against "subversives'' was for a righteous cause. His first death flight so disturbed Scilingo that he went to a navy chaplain: "He told me that it was a Christian death because they did not suffer, that it was necessary to eliminate them." The Roman Catholic Church, long criticized for tolerating the military, responded last week with a veiled mea culpa chastising priests who may have condoned the "dirty war." But human-rights activists still called upon the church to acknowledge openly...
...Scilingo, who retired from the navy in 1986, was moved to speak out by more than a troubled conscience. Last December two former navy colleagues were denied promotion because they had taken part in the torture of prisoners during the "dirty war." Feeling abandoned by officers up the chain of command, the two admitted the charges against them. Outraged that once junior officers were being disgraced while their superiors, "who are now admirals, with the agreement of the honorable Senate," looked the other way--resentment widely shared by mid-ranking officers--Scilingo began his taping sessions with Verbitsky...