Four repressors of the last military civic dictatorshipamong whom it is worth mentioning the ex-marines Jorge ‘Tigre’ Acosta and Alfredo Astizwhich meet different prison sentences for crimes once morest humanity committed at the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA)traveled in secret at the end of the 70’s to South Africa to collaborate with the authorities of the Navy of that country in the implementation of the so-called “flights of death“as a modality of extermination of opposition groups.

The journalistic investigation, titled “The Happiest Days of the Repressors”, was carried out for several years by Miriam Lewin (who has served as head of the Argentine Public Defender’s Office since 2020), and Facundo Fernández Barrio. This Wednesday it was published by the digital magazine Anfibia, from the National University of San Martín (Unsam).

The material prepared by Lewin and Fernández Barrio revealed that at the end of the 1970s “the Argentine Navy ordered the transfer of Acosta, Astiz and two other ESMA repressors to South Africa to hide them amid international denunciations of their crimes” during the last Argentine dictatorship.

“Supported by a military alliance between the two countries, the sailors were recycled on the other side of the ocean until the press discovered them,” the authors highlighted.

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The name of the investigation came from a phrase pronounced years later by Astiz. “In South Africa I spent the happiest days of my life”admitted the ex-marine, who in 2022 the Argentine Justice denied the benefit of accessing probation following alluding to the seriousness of the crimes and the sentences handed down to the repressor.

The note recalled that at that time South Africa was a country governed by a regime of racial segregation that maintained a strategic military relationship with the Argentine dictatorship.

Los crimes committed once morest the black population they isolated South Africa in international forums, so the regime approached the dictatorships of South America “in search of Western allies identified with the anti-communist cause and without pruritus regarding human rights.”

The Argentine Armed Forces also courted South Africa, especially through the Navy, which promoted a project to create the “South Atlantic Treaty Organization (OTAS)”a NATO-like hemispheric alliance of the United States and Europe.

“In Argentina, Admiral Massera is the great promoter of OTAS. Around 1979, the project promises cooperation, camaraderie and business for several years between the Argentine and South African Navy,” the cited investigation asserted.

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Confidential decrees of the dictatorship to protect the sailors who operated in the ESMA

According to the Anfibia publication, between May and June 1979 several confidential decrees of the dictatorship They appointed “most of the sailors who worked at ESMA” to different posts outside the country.

The decision “responds to a political decision by the Navy, which needs Lower the profile of its largest clandestine center. It is probable that (the then head of the Navy, Emilio Eduardo) Massera is a participant in the decision, and it is certain that the decision suits him: preserving his most committed men is preserving himself,” the text indicated.

In addition to Acosta and Astiz, former Rear Admiral Rubén Chamorro, director of the ESMA“an officer very close to Massera, above Acosta in the repressive structure”, and the former head of operations of the Mechanics School task group, Jorge Perren.

Some of the appointments of these repressors appeared as transfers to the United States, England and Spain, despite the fact that the final destination would be South Africa.

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According to the journalistic investigation, Chamorro and Astiz traveled to South Africa in the first days of June 1979 and they stayed in the offices that the Navy had in South Africa. In both cases they enjoyed “of diplomatic immunity, they earn a lot of money, they attend cocktail parties and events”.

Before arriving in South Africa, Acosta and Perren traveled to Madrid in October ’79 to participate in “a supposed training course at the Spanish Naval War College.” Both were discovered by the newspaper The countrywhich published that officers of the Argentine Navy, “responsible for hundreds of kidnappings and murders,” were complying “intelligence missions and using as cover supposed naval courses or positions in the military attaché office”.

Almost simultaneously, an inspection by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) had focused on the repressive actions at ESMA.

After passing through Madrid, Acosta and Perren arrived in South Africa to participate in a naval command course at the South African Army Staff College, known by its English name. South African Naval Staff Collegewhere South African sailors received training in strategy and leadership to access command positions.

Anfibia collected for the investigation, among others, the Testimony of retired South African Rear Admiral André Rudman, who had served as director of the SA Naval Staff College in 1980. There he supervised and qualified Acosta and Perren as students at the School, considering them “very good friends” and calling them “gentlemen”. Rudman also said that around those years he met Chamorro in South Africa.

Skyvan PA-51, the plane from which the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the French nuns were thrown into the sea

Death flights: a method to eliminate prisoners from dissident groups

The journalistic text highlighted that due to the call ‘Border War’in which South Africa sought “stop the pro-Soviet advance in southern Africawhere countries like Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have just gained independence from European powers” and were “ruled by black and socialist movements”, the South African armed forces implemented “a new method to eliminate prisoners from dissident groups: death flights”, the method of extermination used by the Argentine military dictatorship.

The atrocious mechanism was set in motion to eliminate members of revolutionary black organizations that they had fallen into the hands of the apartheid troops and that they were thrown into the waters of the South Atlantic from airplanes, in clandestine flights that South Africa operates from the coasts of Namibia.

Who was in charge of the first death flight, reported on July 12, 1979, was the coronel Johan Theronwho decades later would admit in a trial that “he repeated the operation hundreds of times and that the victims they were injected with an overdose of tranquilizer before being loaded onto planes: an identical kill mechanic to the one used at ESMA“.

Theron lived at that time in the city of Pretoria, the same one where Chamorro and Astiz lived.

“For now there is no known documentary or testimonial evidence that the ESMA officials have transmitted their expertise on flights of death to the South African military. It’s the kind of thing that no one records. In the most conservative scenario, it would be merely a coincidence of timing that, at the exact moment of the ESMA task force’s arrival in South Africa, the South African armed forces began dropping prisoners from aircraft,” the Anfibia investigation said.

Astiz, Acosta and Perren left South Africa at the beginning of 1982 following being discovered by the local press. Only Chamorro He continued to live in the African country until February 1984. Upon arriving in Argentina, he was arrested by order of the Supreme Council. From then on he became the first soldier arrested for ESMA crimesalthough he died two years later.

CA/ED