The Argentine justice has asked Uruguay to keep in its current state a plane found on its territory, and having probably been used to convoy prisoners within the framework of Operation Condor of collaboration between South American dictatorships to liquidate their opponents.
This aircraft, a Hawker Siddeley HS-125 jet, is at Melilla International Airport, on the outskirts of Montevideo, according to a request for international legal assistance signed on June 15 by Argentine federal judge Sebastian Casanello.
This magistrate, who is investigating several crimes related to Operation Condor, asked the Uruguayan authorities to take “a precautionary measure to preserve the current state of the plane”.
The device was discovered in September by a 46-year-old Uruguayan, Sebastian Santana, who was doing research for a film about the disappearance of five Argentinian and Uruguayan left-wing activists arrested in 1977 in Paraguay.
According to archival documents found in Paraguay in 1992, the five prisoners, whose whereabouts are still unknown, had been taken to Buenos Aires on board an Argentine navy plane.
Santana said he found the plane, in poor condition but in one piece, through the Argentine Navy’s Facebook page and blogs by aviation enthusiasts. According to this information, the jet was used for personal purposes by Admiral Emilio Massera, a dignitary of the Argentine dictatorship, between 1976 and 1978, and ended his career as an air taxi in Uruguay.
In a press release, Francesca Lessa, researcher at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) and specialist in Operation Condor, welcomed the find.
“The plane is a material trace of the crimes committed and its location in Uruguay may advance ongoing investigations in Argentina that are still trying to determine the final fate of the victims,” ??she wrote.
Operation Condor was a coordinated plan between the military dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s to eliminate left-wing opponents of their regimes. The United States, aware of this plan, had not opposed it.
06/20/2023 09:57:01 – Buenos Aires (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
