03/02/2025: Ukraine-US and Death Flights
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vladimir putin couldn't be happier scott because what he sees is all of the pressure on zielinski all of the pressure on ukraine and no pressure on him the allies look at the video and see what what they see is is something that's just confounding a discussion that doesn't reflect the reality of the war in ukraine the degree to which this war is a crime against humanity

Tonight, the saga of an airplane that doubled as an instrument of murder. During Argentina's ruthless dictatorship in the mid-70s, the Skyvan PA-51 was used to throw victims alive into the Atlantic Ocean. To quote-unquote disappear thousands of innocent citizens seen as a threat to the state. Dumping prisoners out of an airplane seems so extreme. Why would a military resort to this? No reason.

trail no clues whatsoever that could incriminate them. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes.

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A most dangerous war took a perilous turn on Friday. In what was planned to be a brief, cordial greeting, President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky squared off in the Oval Office and left an alliance shaken. For three years, the West has stood against Russia's unprovoked invasion of an innocent country

Ukraine is a vanity war for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin who covets an empire. And for that alone, more than one million have been killed or wounded on both sides.

President Trump has boasted only he can end it quickly, but in the last two weeks his chaotic attempt alarmed allies and encouraged enemies. By Friday, he was scolding the man who stands between Russia and the rest of Europe.

You're in no position to dictate what we're going to feel. We're going to feel very good. You will feel influenced. We're going to feel very good and very strong. You will feel influenced. You're right now not in a very good position.

You've allowed yourself to be in a very bad position and he happens to be right about it. You're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now. With us you start having cards. Right now you're playing cards. You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. You're gambling with World War III. You're gambling with World War III. The meeting itself was a gamble and the public had never seen anything like it.

the president dressing down Zelenskyy, whose people had done all of the dying to stop Putin short of the border of NATO. Vladimir Putin watches the video from the Oval Office, and what does he see?

Vladimir Putin couldn't be happier, Scott, because what he sees is all of the pressure on Zelensky, all of the pressure on Ukraine, and no pressure on him. H.R. McMaster knows. He was national security advisor in Trump's first term. He's a retired army general, senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, and a CBS News contributor.

The allies look at the video from the Oval Office and see what? What they see is something that's just confounding, a discussion that doesn't reflect the reality of the war in Ukraine, the degree to which this war is a crime against humanity. And they think, how can President Trump be berating the leader of Ukraine while he says kind things about Vladimir Putin?

We have seen those crimes against humanity in mass graves of Ukrainian civilians and in their obliterated cities. Behind a murderous front line, Russia occupies 20% of Ukraine and bombs all the rest.

American-led sanctions isolated Putin. But last month, President Trump flipped U.S. policy on its head. He opened peace talks with Russia and did not invite Ukraine.

At the same time, he spread a deceitful history of the war. But today I heard, "Oh, well, we weren't invited." Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. Ukraine did not start the war. Next, the president said this: We gave them, I believe, $350 billion. But let's say it's something less than that, but it's a lot.

It's $122 billion, not $350. The next day, Trump went after Zelensky. A dictator without elections. Zelensky better move fast or he's not going to have a country left. Got to move, got to move fast because that war is going in the wrong direction. Zelensky is not a dictator. He was elected in 2019. There hasn't been a vote since because of the war.

On February 24, Trump's tilt toward Russia reached the UN, where America voted against its allies and sided with Russia and North Korea, opposing Ukraine.

Alarmed, the leaders of France and Britain hurried to the White House. In these last two weeks, we've heard him call Zelensky a dictator. We've heard him say it was Ukraine that started the war. What is going on? Well, President Trump, as we all know, has a tendency to say outlandish things.

Sometimes that's to shake the situation up and creates some sense of change. But oftentimes what he doesn't consider is how his words could impede his own agenda or how his words actually can cut against US interests or be received abroad in a way that's much different from the way his political supporters will receive those words in the United States.

And so those words were damaging, damaging to the psyche of the Ukrainians. You know, war really is a contest of wills. And I think what you're seeing is Donald Trump delivering a series of body blows to the Ukrainians in a way that could affect their will to continue to fight. Zelensky's will to fight led him to push for the meeting Friday.

Trump had demanded Ukraine sign over the rights to billions of dollars in mineral wealth to pay America back. Zelensky came to sign the deal. Well, thank you very much. It's an honor to have President Zelensky of Ukraine. President Trump began generously. I give tremendous credit to your generals and your soldiers and yourself in the sense that

It's been very hard fighting, very tough fighting. They're great fighters and you have to be very proud of them from that standpoint. But now we want to get it over with. These public Oval Office meetings are planned for weeks with issues settled in advance, but this was hasty. Neither side was prepared.

Trump spoke of loss in the war, both the victim and the aggressor. They're not American soldiers, but they're Russian soldiers and they're Ukrainian soldiers, and we want to be able to stop it. Zelensky seemed irritated when his people were equated to the invading Russians. Whether they're in Russia or Ukraine, think of the parents of all these people being killed.

Needlessly, they came to all its earth. Should have never started. Trump helped arm Zelensky in Trump's first term, but now he has all but cut off aid. Trump is pushing a quick ceasefire without an international guarantee of Ukraine's security,

which is Russia's position, too. I'm not aligned with Putin. I'm not aligned with anybody. I'm aligned with the United States of America and for the good of the world. I'm aligned with the world, and I want to get this thing over with. You see the hatred he's got for Putin. It's very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate. He's got tremendous hatred. Protocol prevailed for 40 minutes until Vice President J.D. Vance said diplomacy could have ended the war long ago.

the path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy. Can I ask you? Sure. Yeah? Yeah. Okay. Vance had struck a nerve with a man who has buried tens of thousands of his countrymen. It got worse when Vance told Zelensky he'd seen Ukraine on TV. Zelensky explained that Putin, a mass murderer indicted for war crimes, could not be trusted.

A ceasefire without a security guarantee would be naive. What kind of diplomacy, J.D., you are speaking about? What do you mean? I'm talking about the kind of diplomacy that's going to end the destruction of your country. Mr. President, Mr. President, with respect, I think it's disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media. It was the White House that called in the media. Ukraine's ambassador,

couldn't bear to watch. The problem is I've empowered you to be a tough guy. And I don't think you'd be a tough guy without the United States. And your people are very brave. But you're either going to make a deal or we're out. And if we're out, you'll fight it out. I don't think it's going to be pretty, but you'll fight it out.

But you don't have the cards. But once we sign that deal, you're in a much better position. But you're not acting at all thankful. And that's not a nice thing. I'll be honest, that's not a nice thing. Immediately after the meltdown, many Republicans rallied around the president, saying Zelensky was at fault. But Republican Congressman Don Bacon has worried about Trump's approach to Ukraine since last month. I hope it's not as bad as it sounds.

Congressman Bacon represents Omaha. He's a retired Air Force general who knows what America means to NATO. America's the leader of the free world. We're the indispensable power. Nobody can stand up to Russia and China if we're not a part of that. And Ukraine's the victim. And I think Putin's made clear that he wants to reestablish his old borders.

And that's not in our national security interests. So to me, this is a national security issue, but also a moral issue. Would you say that Donald Trump is appeasing Vladimir Putin? Appears that way, though I can't get into his motives. I don't know his motives. Some people think he's doing this for negotiating and maybe help get a better deal. I don't know. All I know is what he says. And when he says that Russia is not the invader, that's Ukraine's fault, that's just wrong.

Is there danger in this? Yep, there is. I fear what this means. We've had—we came out of World War II, you know, the dominant power, the indispensable country for freedom. We've had NATO. And I worry that this framework is going to collapse. When the United States sided with Russia and North Korea at the United Nations, what message did that send? Well, the first message it sent to me was shame.

Senator Angus King is an independent from Maine, serving on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees. I always try to think of, you know, what's the argument on both sides? I cannot think of a rational argument for pulling our support from Ukraine. Senator King likes to point out that Europe has given more than the U.S., and Ukraine has given the most. They've done the dying. All they've asked for us is to send them the means to defend themselves.

In this moment, what should Congress be doing about Ukraine? I think they have to start speaking up because if we persist in walking away from Ukraine, it will be the greatest geopolitical mistake that this country's made since World War II. Back in the Oval Office, President Trump revealed something of a common cause with the Russian president.

Trump complained he and Putin had been slandered for years by allegations that Russia helped Trump's campaigns, allegations Trump ties to his Democratic opponents. Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia

Russia, Russia, Russia. You ever hear of that deal? That was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff. It was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it. We didn't end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden's bathroom. It came out of Hunter Biden's bedroom. It was disgusting.

That rant was familiar to Trump's first-term national security advisor, H.R. McMaster. McMaster left the White House after 13 months in a falling out with the president. But even back then, he was warning Trump about Vladimir Putin. He appeals to President Trump's sense of aggrievement, right? Donald, like me, you've been treated so unfairly.

And he's been very successful at it because he's a master manipulator and one of the best liars in the world. You seem to be saying that President Trump is being played. He is being played. And he's being played like other presidents have been played, like other leaders have been played, through that same playbook of Putin's. Today, the allies stood with Zelenskyy.

In London, a flash summit was arranged with leaders including those of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the head of NATO, and the British Prime Minister, who announced new negotiations by Britain and France potentially taking the lead for peace out of the hands of President Trump. All right, I think we've seen enough. What do you think?

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Every once in a while, we come across a story so extraordinary that it resists belief. Tonight, the saga of an airplane that doubled as an instrument of murder. During Argentina's ruthless dictatorship in the mid-70s, the Skyvan PA-51 was used to throw victims alive into the Atlantic Ocean. To quote-unquote disappear thousands of innocent citizens seen as a threat to the state. Those disappeared were meant never to reappear.

Forty years after the end of the dictatorship, many of its crimes remain unsolved and unresolved. When an unlikely pair of investigators went looking for the death plane, their search for truth uncovered state secrets, damning evidence, and a reminder of a dark period that echoes into the present.

It was quite literally a vehicle for evil. This British-made sky van, now 50 years old, is grounded for good here at the former Navy School of Mechanics, or ESMA, in a Buenos Aires neighborhood. The facility is now a museum and a memorial to the 30,000 citizens tortured and murdered during the dictatorship.

This was a death camp, looming large in the middle of a thrumming city. Images of the victims adorned the walls. Most were students, dissidents and union members, never charged with a crime. This plane, where many of them met their death, would have been lost in the contrails of history had it not been for an Italian documentary photographer, Giancarlo Chiraudo.

Why was it important not just to return this plane to Argentina, but here, to ESMA? It's very important for the memory for the next generation. This is real. This is an evidence. This was an instrument of that, but now is a witness. The cockpit, just as it was when the military pilots flew their clandestine death missions.

flying far enough over the Atlantic so the bodies wouldn't likely be recovered, and then dumping the victims out alive. To climb inside the plane is to experience an unmistakable chill of the past. Giancarlo grew up loving planes, but this flying coffin ended that romance. — You're emotional seeing this. — See, very emotional. Very emotional.

How did a young Italian photographer, armed only with a camera, an eye for detail, and burning curiosity, come to unravel one of the great national shames of Argentina? It all began in 2003, when Chiraudo was in Buenos Aires working on a project about the disappeared. He heard about the death flights in the 1970s, but the stories were never fully told. So many unanswered questions and so little accountability.

If there were flights, he reasoned, then surely there were planes and there were pilots. So where were they? You knew those death flights existed. How did you start your search for the planes? I had an idea, but to start the investigation started with media.

Miriam is Miriam Lewin. She was a young student activist in 1977 when she was kidnapped, tortured, and sexually abused. She was then taken to ESMA and was among the few who survived, though she never knew quite why. Later, she became a leading investigative journalist in Argentina, best known for unearthing the crimes of the dictatorship. When Chiraudo first contacted Miriam, she told him she had other things on her mind.

And I said, "Look, we were looking for the desaparecidos, the missing people, and then we started looking for the bodies." So we had plenty to think about. People, not things. Yeah. And he said, "I come from a different culture. In Rome, when they are digging a tunnel to extend the subway lines, they find a

a plate or a sculpture, and they stopped everything for like three years, right? He comes from a culture where objects are witnesses to history, and that hadn't occurred to anyone here. Yeah. Giancarlo's passion paired with Miriam's reporting chops and her own experience at ESMA.

She'd seen other prisoners taken to the basement and given what they were told was a vaccine. Only years later did she learn that it was a sedative and that those drugged prisoners were put on board planes, flown over the ocean, stripped of their clothes before being flung to their deaths.

Dumping prisoners out of an airplane 10,000 feet above an ocean seems so extreme. Why would a military resort to this? Deathlights allowed them to disappear the bodies of the disappeared. No trail, no clues whatsoever that could incriminate them.

Miriam and Giancarlo began their search, poring over military records, hunting down sources, and combing the internet. They discovered that in the 1970s, the Argentine military purchased five sky vans.

workhorses used for transporting cargo, troops, and... Two of the fleet were shot down by the British during the Falklands War. Argentina's surrender in that conflict ended the dictatorship in 1983.

The rest were sold off. They tracked one plane to the United States, where it was being used for skydiving excursions. Maybe the owners didn't know about the terrible, obscure past of these planes.

In 2008, Miriam and Giancarlo found the plane in Fort Lauderdale and later paid it a visit. To their surprise, the owner provided them with all the technical logs, detailing every journey the plane had ever flown. I was very, very excited. I couldn't believe that.

I couldn't believe it. They brought the logs back to Argentina and asked for help deciphering the technicalities. But even decades after the dictatorship ended, there was still lingering paranoia. Aviation experts didn't want to talk. What they said, no, no, no way. They could kill me. But they were nothing if not persistent.

They track down a source who explained the highly suspicious journeys occurring Wednesday nights tracing a route over the middle of the ocean. The departure and arrival points the same. When he looks at them and goes, "Oh gosh, this is gold." Why did he say that? This is the first time that death lives could be documented and proven.

Finding the logs was one thing, but Miriam and Giancarlo were determined to solve one of the most notorious and heinous abductions of the dictatorship. Every week, the mothers of the disappeared marched in the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the presidential palace, demanding to know the fate of their missing sons and daughters. The mothers became the most potent symbol of resistance against the dictatorship, and soon they became targets themselves.

In December 1977, a group of 12 mothers and their supporters, including two French nuns, were meeting here at the Holy Cross Church in Buenos Aires when they were hauled away and taken to ESMA. They were seen by fellow prisoners being tortured and then never seen again. Azucena Vizafor was one of the mothers. She had been searching in vain for her son who had disappeared.

Cecilia DiVincente is her daughter. As the days turned into months, turned into years, what did you think had happened? In reality, we didn't know what happened. Every single day, we thought she was coming back. New Year's, Mother's Day, every day we lived like this.

What Cecilia and the other victims' families didn't know, in the days after those kidnapped were last seen, a rare storm washed up six bodies some 220 miles from Buenos Aires. Authorities in the nearby towns secretly buried the remains in unmarked graves, and a local doctor issued death certificates, noting the bodies had suffered multiple blunt force traumas. What did that mean? This means that they were compatible

with those bodies having fallen from height. In the years after democracy was restored, forensic anthropologists began unearthing evidence of the dictatorship's crimes. In 2005, bodies in the cemetery were exhumed and identified. Five were victims of the Holy Cross kidnapping.

Azucena Vizafor was one of them. The ultimate purpose of these death flights was to disappear the victims and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Your mother did not disappear, did she? The mothers and the nuns fought death just as they fought when they were looking for their children. The ocean brought them back as proof that the military was trying to disappear them.

Miriam and Giancarlo began building a timeline for the days after the 12 were kidnapped from the Holy Cross Church. And there it was in the logs. A three-hour flight over the Atlantic the night of December 14, 1977. What's more, the log contained the names of the pilots. I think this plane is a gift, yes, from the sky.

For Miriam, the hard-boiled investigative journalist, this was the jackpot. I thought that no one would deny what happened back then, seeing that proof, seeing that horrible proof of a group of women being thrown alive into the ocean.

The pilots of those death flights, they were hiding in plain sight. It was a glimpse into the banality of evil.

Two of them were flying international commercial routes for Argentina's state airline. Miriam and Giancarlo's investigation figured prominently in the largest and perhaps most sensational trial in the country's history. In 2017, decades after the fact, an Argentine court convicted 48 people linked to ESMA for crimes against humanity.

The pilots who flew the Skyvan PA-51 death flights were sentenced to life in prison. For Miriam and Giancarlo, there was one last assignment, bringing the Skyvan back from the United States to Argentina, where it would be a source of truth, irrefutable evidence of the horrors of the past. Questioning, denying, or even vindicating what happened in those years will...

lead us into darkness again. We always said, never again. So it was on a misty morning in June 2023, the Skyvan PA-51 arrived at its final destination. Giancarlo was there taking the last pictures of this personal odyssey, this 20-year investigation. The families and friends of the victims were there as well.

you have to consider that I could have been a passenger of one of those flights. So I always ask myself why I survived. I wonder if this investigation helped provide an answer. Yes. Now I know definitely that there was a goal, there was a purpose of my survival: to get justice.

One mystery of Argentina's dictatorship finally solved. But most of the families of the 30,000 disappeared never learned what happened to their loved ones. When we come back, we'll tell you about one family's decades-long search for a missing baby. Save on Cox Internet when you add Cox Mobile and get fiber-powered internet at home and unbeatable 5G reliability on the go. So whether you're playing a game at home... Yes, go! ...or attending one live...

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Argentina returned to democracy in 1983, but the trauma from those seven years of dictatorship persists.

While more than a thousand military officials have been tried and convicted for kidnapping, torturing, and murdering Argentine citizens, most of the families of the 30,000 disappeared never learned what happened to their loved ones.

Tonight, we'll tell you of one family's search for a baby stolen by the military in 1978. It's a story about truth and memory, both of which have been attacked under the country's president, Javier Millet, a populist leader who's vowed to make Argentina great again.

After years of economic stagnation and runaway inflation, in 2023, Argentina elected an economist as its president, Javier Millet, a chainsaw-toting, self-proclaimed sex guru and true libertarian. While he's met favor for revitalizing the national economy and slashing bureaucracy, he's met criticism for his open sympathy for military rule, his denial of its brutality.

and his defunding of human rights programs. After 40 years of democracy, we never thought we would have to fight against these denialists. But we know the truth. We lost an election, but we won't give up. We will resist, which is what we've done all our lives. Age 94, Tati Almeida is the president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Maggio.

For half a century, she's been searching for her son Alejandro, who left for classes one day, never to return. When they took the most precious thing a mother has, her child, we went out like lionesses looking for our cubs. They called you "los locos," the crazy ones. You didn't take that as an insult. Were you crazy?

We were crazy with pain, with rage, with helplessness, because we mothers know what it's like to carry a child for nine months in the womb and then have it ripped away from you like that.

25 years ago, 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon came to the Plaza de Maggio to report on the story of Patricia Roizenblatt. In 1978, she was eight months pregnant when she and her husband Jose were hauled away by armed government thugs. Patricia was taken here to the ESMA death camp.

Human rights groups estimate that 500 babies were born in camps to mothers kept alive only long enough to give birth before being killed. In a systematic campaign, their stolen babies were then given to childless military couples. Back then, Bob Simon spoke to Patricia's friend and fellow prisoner Miriam Lewin. Yes, the same investigative journalist who discovered the death plane. Why did they keep the babies alive?

Maybe they thought of it as an act of humanity. An act of humanity to take children away from the people they labeled enemies of the state and raise them as patriots? Save the baby from the subversive germ of the baby's parents and grandparents. That's right. She remembered Patricia in the brief moments after her baby was born, before he was taken away. He was a beautiful and healthy baby boy.

Patricia Rosenblit was never seen again, nor was her husband. Her mother Rosa spent years searching police stations, hospitals and orphanages for baby Rodolfo.

You and the other grandmothers have found 64 children. Yes. You must be pretty good detectives. How do you do it? Yes, we are detectives. We call each other detectives. We call each other Sherlock Holmes. But the search for her own grandchild, Rudolfo, was anything but elementary. Rosa became a founding member of the Abuelas, or grandmothers of the Plaza de Maggio.

She spent years searching for him. She was joined by her granddaughter, Rudolfo's older sister Mariana. She was in her early 20s when 60 Minutes interviewed her. I have a lot of hope that he comes to realize that he's been living a lie and that he would come looking for me.

25 years later, we return to Buenos Aires. Today, Mariana is 47 years old. Rosa is 105. In 2000, just days after our initial report aired, Mariana received an anonymous tip about a man who might be her brother. His name? Guillermo Gomez.

He was working in a fast food restaurant in a Buenos Aires suburb. So she went to visit him. You've been envisioning this moment for basically your whole life. What was the emotion? At that moment, I felt disassociated. I had a feeling of peace and relief and that everything would be okay. You're 21 years old. You're working in a fast food restaurant. And all of a sudden, one day, a young woman comes in to see you.

What happened that day? First of all, she asks me my full name. Most people don't go around asking people on the street their full name, with their whole identity, right? That seems strange to me.

I denied that I was her brother. I had a document with a different name and birth date. I didn't believe it. I didn't understand it. It was a brief encounter, but before departing, Mariana left him a book with photographs of the disappeared, including her parents. When Guillermo saw the photograph of her father José, he was stunned. It's like in a science fiction movie, when you see a picture of yourself in the past. It was a picture of me in the past.

I felt that Mariana's father didn't just look similar, but identical. You felt that in your heart? Yes, you could say that. A photograph of a man that looked like him was one thing, but a DNA test could confirm his real parentage. Did you hope it turned out one way or the other? I was very afraid. At that moment, I didn't know who I was.

The results? Guillermo and Mariana were siblings. They tried to cut through time. It wasn't even a reunion, just a union. But soon Guillermo learned the awful truth. The couple who had raised him, Francisco Gomez and his wife Dora, had not only seized him after his mother Patricia's murder, but Gomez, who worked in Argentina's Air Force intelligence, had taken part in Patricia's capture.

How did it feel when you learned that not only were the people you thought were your parents for the first 20 years of your life weren't your parents, but also they had abducted, they had appropriated you?

It's a very, very confusing time because it's like all the ties that you have at that moment are cut and you're absolutely alone. From that moment of revelation, Guillermo's life cleaved into two parts: the lie and the painful search for truth as he rebuilt his identity and learned about his real parents whom he would never meet. What is it like for you to see these pictures here?

It's necessary so that those who come here know they aren't just a number. They aren't just a grave that doesn't exist, you know? They were people. They were people that had a life that was interrupted. They had dreams. They were ordinary people like the rest.

The Esma death camp achingly marks where he was born. And it's the site of his mother's death sentence just days later. The worst thing is what happened to me here, in this place. That was the worst. Where we are right now.

Of course. The worst is that I was born in captivity like a zoo animal. My mother was also kidnapped. I was separated after three days. I was disappeared for 21 years. I'm a contradiction because I'm a disappeared person alive. I'm a person who was missing without knowing I was missing. Guillermo says his childhood was unhappy and that Gómez was violent. He sometimes hoped Gómez wasn't his real father.

Guijermo felt differently about Dora, who'd always tried her best, he says, to take care of him. It seems to me something complicating this even more is that

You have differentiated between how you feel about the man who raised you and the woman who raised you. Well, they were two completely different people. I grew up being afraid of him, running away from him. And she, for a long time, was practically my whole world. She was the person I called mom. Dora, the woman who raised you. I see her and I love her. And I need her in my life.

The only thing I wished for the person I had called mom was for nothing to happen to her, for her not to go to jail. But for Mariana and Rosa, Guillermo's relationship with Dora was a constant source of conflict. It felt like a betrayal. They wanted consequences. Every day, every morning, when she woke him up, she knew she had stolen someone else's son. And I don't forgive that. They stole a brother from me.

And they stole him for all my life. You don't forgive and forget? No. Gomez appeared in court in 2016. And on the witness stand, Guillermo faced him and made one final plea. I told him I needed to stop being in constant mourning for the death of my parents.

and that I needed to know when it happened, who had been responsible for their deaths, and where their remains are. And he chose to say nothing. That's what he chose as his last act of cruelty, to say nothing. Gomez was sentenced to 12 years in prison for Guillermo's abduction. Dora was sentenced to three.

After the trial, the siblings presented a unified front with their grandmother Rosa, but their relationship was all but doomed from the beginning. So little in common apart from DNA. They were, after all, separated for two decades, and there were struggles familiar to many siblings. Jealousies, resentments, issues with money.

Life isn't a movie. I wish it was a Hollywood production and this had a happy ending. The bottom line is, having been raised separated, not living together, we could never get over that distance between us. You don't have a relationship. No. We won't be the first or last siblings that don't have a relationship. But she plays a very important role in my life, in my history, and I recognize how long she spent looking for me.

Today, a year into President Millet's rule amid his gutting austerity measures, these are convulsive times in Argentina. When we were in Buenos Aires, Mariana, a celebrated artist and writer, was performing her latest experimental play to a packed audience.

It was about dictatorship, conjured memories, and her conflicted identity in the shadow of disappeared parents. Do you ever wonder whether it would be easier not to have found him and just keep living with this fantasy, this mystery brother? No, no, I don't forget it.

Because I see the suffering of those who are still looking for a brother or sister. I don't think that in any sense my life would be better if I was still looking for him because I would not have stopped for a moment. I wouldn't be at peace. We all know the seriousness of what the military have done. Stealing the babies, raising them as their own children, lying to them.

What happened broke everything, so what's broken is broken. It's very difficult for us as a society to accept that it's broken forever. But it's always better to know the most painful truth than not knowing the truth at all.

As for Guillermo, 25 years after meeting Mariana at the fast food restaurant, he's settled into his new identity. Each week, he visits the offices of the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires, where only a couple of grandmothers are still active. Today, he is a prominent human rights lawyer and has taken Grandma Rosa's seat at the table.

For all the complications and all the pain, Guillermo says he wouldn't have authored the story any differently. No regrets. There's no sense of my life would be better off if I never knew. Because you know the truth now. I would live every day the same because that led me to where I am. My life today, with all the difficulties I've experienced, is extremely positive and hopeful. Right now, you're the person you should have been. Now, the last minute of 60 Minutes.

Last November, we told you about a brigade of robots invading the art world, putting some sculptors out of work. In an underground quarry in Carrara, Italy, we met Giacomo Massari, the co-founder of a company that makes robots that sculpt. He showed us a colossal block of marble weighing 200,000 pounds. You're going to move this block out of here? We are going to move this big boy out of here.

And once they had a crane big enough, they did, hoisting the marble onto a specially constructed platform. When completed, it will be one of the largest sculptures ever made by a robot. In the hills where Michelangelo once worked with a hammer and chisel, history is being upended. I'm Bill Whitaker. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.

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