Argentina's Death Flights
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This episode includes discussions of murder, sexual assault, torture, kidnapping, and suicide. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. To get help on mental health and suicide, visit spotify.com slash resources. In December 1978, 35 decomposing bodies washed ashore in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Most were missing their heads and hands.

Their killers removed them to prevent identification. Only one body remained entirely intact. It belonged to an Argentine diplomat and daughter of one of the country's most prominent families. But what really set her death apart from the rest was she'd been a close friend and supporter of her country's current administration, her presumed killers. Commenting on her apparent murder,

A fellow diplomat said, quote, "The revolution has begun to devour its own children and nobody can do anything about it." Her murder seemed to prove nobody was safe. As for the other 35 bodies, their deaths barely made headlines. Among them were the bodies of two nuns last seen helping look for residents of Buenos Aires who had recently gone missing.

Before they disappeared themselves, they went on to be buried in unmarked graves. They remain there, nameless and forgotten for decades. Victims of a clandestine military conspiracy enacted by an administration no one elect. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday.

Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For today's episode, our team spoke with a survivor of Argentina's clandestine detention centers. At 19 years old, Miriam Lewin was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires and thrown into a concentration camp.

She survived, became a journalist, and later launched a campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Miriam's story is the subject of the documentary audio series by Orbit Media, Avenger, available on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Miriam was joined in the studio by Orbit's executive producer, Steve Fishman, and a producer and the host of Avenger, Andres Caballero. We are extremely grateful for their time. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. Miriam Lewin knew what she wanted to do with her life at an early age. I had always wanted to become a journalist. I loved reading. I loved traveling.

I love justice, right? And that's why I became a political activist because I wanted a society where people could have housing, could have health, education, no matter if you come from a wealthy family or not.

I, well, of course, I wanted to fall in love. I wanted to have children. But mainly, I wanted to become a journalist, which I became in the end. Miriam's father introduced her to political literature as a child. She immersed herself even further when she joined an anarchist club at 13 years old. She says she and the other members would read books and discuss theories.

By college, she was an active member of another political group, one associated with the Peronist movement in Argentina. Generally speaking, the Peronist movement supported the nationalistic and populist policies of Juan Perón, one of the most influential politicians in Argentine history.

He first rose to power in the 1940s, serving as the country's Minister of Labor, gaining support from the working class and labor unions. He was elected president in 1946, overthrown and exiled in 1956, and then re-elected president in 1973. At the time of his re-election,

Argentina was a deeply divided country and Perón suffered from health problems. His third wife and vice president, Isabel, acted as president when he fell ill. After his death in 1974, she officially succeeded him in the role and the country erupted into violence two years later. She was not prepared to become president of Argentina, right? When her government

became weaker and weaker. We started anticipating that a military coup was coming because there was a whole tradition in Argentina of military coups and weak civil governments. Juan Perón himself first came to power as part of a military coup. According to Miriam, the people of Argentina, herself included, believed that a coup could benefit the country.

that it might curb some of the ongoing unrest and return a sense of stability. But instead, the military put a lieutenant general named Jorge Rafael Videla in power. Peronism in Argentina was replaced by a military dictatorship, and Videla launched a nationwide campaign to eliminate those he viewed as political dissidents, which included young activists like Miriam.

Suddenly, everything about Miriam's life changed. The government painted activists like Miriam as perpetrators of violence and justified their own violence by claiming they were fighting a civil war. But Miriam says the responsibilities she held in her group included writing, printing, and handing out leaflets at rallies. She says she was never violent.

And even if she had been, that couldn't possibly justify what followed. They started disappearing people, torturing, raping, stealing babies, stealing properties and killing them in the streets.

There was no judicial process, no right to a fair trial. People were being taken off the streets, transported to clandestine detention centers, and never heard from again. They became the desaparecidos, the disappeared. And by the time the state-sanctioned violence was finally over, they would number into the thousands. Early on, after Videla's rise to power, Miriam and her friends went on the run.

I started fearing death, losing my friends, my boyfriend, my fellow students. You know, when you're 18 or 19, usually you don't think of death, but this was not a normal society. Miriam says in the beginning, friends, family and neighbors offered them support, but eventually the threats became too great.

Even associating with perceived dissidents could result in death. So many of Miriam's friends distanced themselves to keep their loved ones safe. Week after week, their support networks grew smaller. Miriam, at least, had love. She spent much of her time in hiding with her boyfriend, Juan. When I think of my time with Juan, it was just like 18 months ago.

But I believe it was more intense than my other marriages, which lasted much later, 16 years, 20 years now with my husband. But the thing was that every time you woke up, you didn't know if it was going to be your last time with that person you love.

So we made love a lot. We hugged each other a lot while sleeping. And we tried to make the most of the time we had left because we had the feeling that they were after us and that they were going to find us anytime.

Miriam and Juan wanted to get married, but going to City Hall was too risky. So they held a secret ceremony at a coffee shop above a gas station in Buenos Aires. They exchanged whatever rings they could find and afford and asked a fellow activist to officiate. He talked to us about our future relationship.

as a revolutionary capital and a revolutionary family. It was very inspiring in a sense because he told us that the beauty of our relationship is that we were willing to sacrifice our life for the future of mankind, of our country.

Their group had heard rumors about what was happening at the government's secret detention centers, the cruelty and torture inflicted on those captured. "Unbearable situations."

And my greatest fear was giving names that could lead to the arrest and the assassination of my comrades, people I love, people I dreamt of a better society with. And that's why it just seemed normal, this abnormal situation of carrying a signed pillow.

You heard that right. Members of Miriam's group made homemade cyanide pills in case they were ever arrested. A grim reality for activists during this time and a reflection of the unimaginable conditions of military rule. For Miriam, the day of her arrest came when she was 19 years old. Argentina's secret police tracked her down in the streets. She had the pill on her person.

When they arrested me, I tried to swallow it and they made me spit it out. But while I was trying, I looked up to the sky and thanked God to let me die for my friends. It was a sacrifice. I thought it was worth doing, right?

Miriam learned the military was interested in very specific information.

They wanted to know the whereabouts of her close friend and fellow activist, Patricia. Patricia was the daughter of a high-ranking Air Force officer. Miriam says she couldn't help them because she didn't know where Patricia was. But that didn't stop the torture. After hours of questioning and electric shocks on the verge of passing out, she made a decision. She gave them a location.

The car ride was a momentary hiatus. Miriam would not be freed anytime soon.

Her abductors made her call her parents and tell them she was safe and still on the run, while armed men stood by to ensure she cooperated. She spent roughly the next 10 months alone in a cell in a secret location just a few blocks away from the federal police headquarters in Buenos Aires. The questioning continued, as did the torture. Without any other company,

She says she developed a deeply complex relationship with one of the officers who guarded her cell. I was 19 and he was 21. He brought me the Bible to read, several books about religion and isolation.

You know, I'm Jewish and he was Catholic, so he dreamt of my conversion, right? So I would tell him, "Look, do you think that Jesus would approve you torturing young girls like me?" And he told me that in isolation and deprived of everything, I had become a saint and that he admired me.

So when he told me straight away that they were going to kill me, I told him, can I ask you something? Can I ask you to shoot me? And please let me look you in the eye. I don't want to be blindfolded when you kill me. Miriam survived that first detention center only to be brought to another.

And at some point, she heard rumors as well as firsthand accounts about what was happening to some prisoners. Stories she didn't want to believe about a method of killing that was difficult to trace. Throwing unconscious prisoners from planes into the ocean. To this day, Miriam Lewin doesn't know what happened to the young man she unofficially married before her capture happened.

But she believes he was most likely arrested and killed. As for her friend Patricia, Miriam's abductors claim she blew herself up with dynamite during a confrontation with the military. But I don't know if that's true because that's the version. What I know is that the...

Incredibly, Miriam says, she's buried in the military sector of a cemetery in Buenos Aires, a decision that couldn't possibly have been her own. Miriam's second detention center was a place called ESMA. It's now a World Heritage Site. But at the time, its public-facing purpose was as a mechanic school for the Navy, which

Few knew that around 5,000 Argentine citizens were being brought through its doors and detained against their will. Well, it's weird because the place is beautiful from an architectural point of view. The buildings are surrounded by trees, some parks, and you can even find flowers. But still, I don't like going there.

because it reminds me of the absence of thousands of people killed there. An estimated 30,000 people were disappeared and brought to centers like Esma. We now know many of them were taken from their cells, drugged, hooded, bound, and thrown out of planes alive. A method of execution that has since been referred to as death flights.

According to witnesses, military officers would sometimes tell the prisoners they were being released and play music for them to dance in celebration as the sedatives took effect. Miriam is reportedly one of about 150 de separacidos to survive detention. She can't say with any certainty how she got so lucky,

But at a certain point, she says, members of the government saw value in prisoners like her. And I learned that there was this plan by the commander of the Navy, Admiral Emilio Macera, who wanted to become president of

And he knew that if he wanted to become president, he had to seduce the Pernist voters. And as we were Pernists, he was using us to build his political plan, absorbing our knowledge of the movement while we were in prison and we were like slaves, right?

Those with useful skills were given specific tasks. As a former journalism student who could speak multiple languages, Miriam was made to translate news stories from abroad. The Argentine government was worried about reports being published overseas about human rights violations happening in their country. They also made Miriam write articles they could send to media outlets as propaganda.

For example, when the World Cup came to Buenos Aires in 1978, they made Miriam write a piece about it. The event served as a source of national pride and an easy distraction from the allegations of abuses. The same abuses Miriam was a victim of. She could hear the roars of the crowd celebrating when Argentina won the final game.

Unbeknownst to most, she was hidden away in a prison cell near the stadium, listening from behind a wall just a few feet away from some celebrants. Miriam believes, after spending so much time as an unwilling participant in her government system, they eventually assumed she was a willing participant, that after everything, she had somehow been reformed.

It's how she found herself having dinner with General Macera at a fancy restaurant. A dinner he invited her parents to. Miriam hadn't seen her parents in nearly two years. They didn't know any of what she'd been through because she hadn't told them. She hadn't been able to.

Even sitting across from them, she knew that to speak ill of her abductors could risk her life or her family's safety. She remembers her parents gifting General Macera a bottle of nice scotch and thanking him for keeping her safe. Miriam was eventually allowed to leave ESMA and move into an apartment paid for at great cost by her parents. But even then...

She wasn't free. She was kept under surveillance while continuing to work for General Macera's press bureau and other departments of the government. Around this time, she fell in love with a man who was her fellow prisoner. She got pregnant. She married. And shortly after, she asked her repressors for permission to leave the country. They denied her request at first. And her son was born in Buenos Aires.

But by the spring of 1981, they finally let her leave the country. She moved to New York and for the first time, had a moment where she felt free. I was having tea with my aunt, my uncle and some friends. And one of them said in Spanish, right?

said "Desaparecido" aloud. And I kind of looked at the door because I felt the military were coming in, kicking open the door and they were going to grab me. And I realized that in Argentina you could not say the word "Desaparecido" in a coffee shop, if you are at the elevator,

with witnesses, if you were riding a bus, right? I said, wow, here I can say the word desaparecido aloud. That means we are free. Miriam says she later found evidence that the military was surveilling her even in New York. She and her family remained in the United States until Democratic elections were restored in Argentina in 1983.

Later, the men who abducted her were put on trial for their crimes against humanity. Survivors of the detention centers were asked to testify in court.

Many were afraid, too. We didn't trust the police. It was really dangerous, but I did. I always felt it was my historical responsibility. And when my mother asked me, why you're getting into trouble again, I said, look, mom, I'm Jewish. If I had been a survivor of Auschwitz, would you question my will to testify?

And she never answered. She understood. The trials, which are now known as the truth trials, were unprecedented. The outcome of each was known before they began. Due to two pieces of legislation passed in 1986 and 1987, members of the military junta could not be criminally sentenced or punished.

The first, known as the Full Stop Law, suspended all judicial proceedings for anyone accused of forcibly disappearing another person. And the second, known as the Due Obedience Law, prevented any member of the military below the rank of colonel from being punished for following orders, regardless of what those orders entailed. So...

While the trials resulted in a lot of ugly truths coming to light, they ultimately held no consequences. You run across the perpetrators in the streets, at the drugstore, at a coffee shop, wherever, right? Public transportation. And you could do nothing about it.

In fact, Miriam once ran into the young man who guarded her cell and fed her Christian texts when she was 19. He suggested they get coffee, and she agreed. Years had passed since they last saw each other, so Miriam asked if he still worked for the military. He told her no, that he was going back to college to study engineering, something they had discussed during her captivity.

I didn't think at the time he was spying on me. I didn't feel in danger. I just felt it was human interest. His intention was honest.

Now I wonder if he truly wanted to see how I was, or if he wanted to check if I was still dangerous for the military or what. I don't know. I will never know. Miriam eventually learned he was, in fact, still working for the military as they sat there having coffee. He never went back to school for engineering.

She says he worked in intelligence services until 2007, which may be around the same time Miriam helped put him behind bars. Human rights groups went on to protest the laws that kept Argentina's dictatorship immune from prosecution. In 2005, the country's Supreme Court struck both laws down, finally opening the door for criminal trials to begin.

Miriam used photos to identify that man who guarded her cell, and she says he was sentenced to around 13 years in prison. Meanwhile, as a journalist, Miriam shied away from writing about her personal experience as a survivor. I felt that I couldn't keep the necessary distance if I cover stories related to the gathership.

That's why I kind of avoided it. Miriam kept her distance from the topic for years. Then, one day, an Italian photographer named Giancarlo Serrato approached her with a request. He said he wanted to take her picture. She was hesitant, but ultimately agreed. After talking to me at a coffee shop, he asked me, have you ever thought where I

or the planes of the death flights? And I answer, no, I never did. I don't see it could be of any use. I mean, they're just objects.

and in Italy, they had a whole different view of the value of objects. So from this wholly different culture, Giancarlo understood that the aircrafts were important because they could hide proof at that identifying and locating objects

The planes could lead us to the pilots of the dead flights. And so Giancarlo and Miriam launched an investigation to find the planes and hopefully bring those pilots to justice.

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Step one in Miriam and Giancarlo's investigation was locating the planes that were used for the death flights. Years had passed, and they had very little idea where to begin. We started working at his place.

A charming apartment where he cooked Italian pasta and brewed coffee and we smoked cigarettes and drank wine and everything. I used to go there after work. I was working as an investigative reporter for Channel 13 newscast.

And, I mean, locating the planes was easier than we thought. First of all, we had the testimony in a book of a repentant Navy officer. The Navy officer had participated in two of the flights. By the time Miriam and Giancarlo launched their investigation, he had blown the whistle and given an interview with two Argentine journalists. They then wrote a best-selling book on the subject called...

But then he wrote his own book. It was a bizarre book, but with lots of information. He gave the models of the aircrafts that were used for the death flights. One of them was the SOS Kaivan, an Irish plane, very novel, very versatile, high-tech.

highly appreciated in the aeronautical world. And the other one was the Electra. Through digital records, they could trace the transaction history of the planes. When they were first built, who bought them, and how many times they had exchanged hands since. They learned that three of the planes used were actually still in use.

One was in Luxembourg and being used for commercial flights. Another was in the UK and operated by defense forces. And the third was in Florida, owned by a private courier. So they sent a Miami-based freelance journalist named Bruno to interview the owner. Miriam prepared a long list of questions for him.

Of course, the owner of the Skyvan didn't know anything about the death flights. But when the interview ends, the owner tells Bruno: "Do you know I have the technical logs, the whole history of the plane?"

So he photocopies a couple and calls me. And I tell him right away, please, Bruno, go back and photocopy or video register the whole life of the plane, at least from 1976 through 1982. Well, he does that and he sends in all the stuff.

They tried to get in touch with the owner of the Florida plane,

But Miriam says once he learned what they were doing, he fled the country. So they reached out to a second pilot who was able to identify some glaring irregularities in the plane's technical flight logs. From her experience as a survivor, Miriam knew the death flights typically happened on Wednesdays.

Records indicated that many of those flights had taken much longer than they should have if the plane was making a routine trip. A flight from point A to point B might take hours longer than it should, far more than could be accounted for by an unforeseen delay or margin of error. The only problem was their pilot wasn't willing to go public with his findings for their story.

They needed to find someone else who would. So we called a very special character. He's a doctor, he's a pilot, he's a movie director, he's an actor, he's a tycoon also. His name is Enrique Piñeiro. He's the son of one of the wealthiest family's

The story eventually premiered on television news. Miriam says that at that point, they had the names of the pilots who flew those suspicious flights. But they chose not to reveal them. They needed more evidence. And they were worried that the pilots might flee the country before they could be charged. And they were worried that the pilots might flee the country before they could be charged.

Many were still working for international airlines. Coincidentally, Giancarlo might have flown with one of them on his many trips back and forth from Italy. Miriam handed all the evidence they found over to a judge so the judge could investigate further. She did so with the support of Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel.

Esquivel was an artist, activist, and death flight survivor. Kidnapped by Argentina's dictatorship in 1977 for his outspoken views, he was tortured for 14 months before being forced onto a plane. He would have been thrown into the ocean that day had radio calls not come in telling the pilot to turn around.

international pressure was getting too great. The military decided he was best kept alive. Despite testimony from survivors like Esquivel and entire books on the subject, the nature of the death flights have made physical evidence hard to come by. An untold number of victims have been lost to the ocean. But as we mentioned earlier, bodies have washed ashore. Among them,

two kidnapped nuns. By chance, a storm with unusually strong southeastern winds washed their bodies ashore three days after they were last seen. Based on the timing and location, the judge was able to tie the nuns' deaths to the Florida plane, along with at least 10 other victims, and ultimately tie them to the pilots on board.

They got life prison sentences. One of them unfortunately died before trial and one of them died in prison. And if you ask me why is this important to me, I can say that professionally it was a huge goal.

very important to me. But personally, being a survivor that could have been

taken in one of those dead flies who probably lost many of her comrades and friends in those flights, it was even more important, right? It felt good being able to cooperate with the identification of these murderers.

Many times people ask me, how come you survived? I always tell them, as the military, I don't know. It's completely illogical. I can't say now what for, right? Maybe I stayed alive to be able to find those people and send them to jail. Who knows? Miriam's and Giancarlo's discoveries have played a role in the convictions of dozens more perpetrators.

In 2023, the Florida plane used for the death flights was returned to Argentina and placed in a Buenos Aires museum at the site of a former detention center. According to the New York Times, by that time, more than 1,100 military personnel, police officers, and civilians had been convicted of crimes against humanity.

And there were still more than 300 open investigations and 14 ongoing trials. Around 70 bodies have washed ashore in Argentina and surrounding countries. Many more victims have been found in mass unmarked graves. The sheer breadth of convictions that the trials have led to is hard to believe.

Everything from torture, rape and murder to tearing newborn children from mothers and organizing their illegal adoptions. There are still adults living in the country today who likely don't know their real family. They've been called Argentina's recovered grandchildren and at least 133 have been identified. One year after the plane's return to Argentina...

Eleven more officials were convicted in a trial that shed light on the overlooked population of trans women who had been targeted during that time. It's a lot to reconcile, but Miriam says not everyone in Argentina looks back on their shared past with the same reaction.

In 2024, Argentina's president, Javier Malay, and his administration released a video disputing the number of deaths that took place. The military and the followers, they still have followers in Argentina, say, well, they never killed 30,000. There were just 9,000.

I can assure you there were more than 9,000 because I know a lot of families that out of fear never came forward to the nuns, the dear ones who were missing. Because they could kill you just for being the mother, the father, the sister or the friend of the desaparecido, right?

For example, my boyfriend, he had a 15-year-old sister and a 6-year-old sister. So his father was very afraid the military could come and kidnap his daughter. So he never went to the courthouse to say, look, my son is missing.

The estimate of 30,000 de sapachacitos is often cited by human rights organizations, and it's based on a variety of sources, including now declassified documents from the military itself. According to The Guardian, those records stated the military had disappeared or killed about 22,000 people between the years 1975 and 1978.

which was still five years before the dictatorship fell. But memory is imperfect. Andres Caballero was born in Buenos Aires, but isn't old enough to remember the military's rule. The first time I heard about the death flights, even about the dictatorship, was when I was about nine years old in my grandfather's repair shop at our house just north of the city.

And one day he just thought I was old enough to hear that just blocks away in the Rio de la Plata, the river right by my house, people had been thrown from planes into the sea. And immediately for a kid, all these questions come up besides being horrified about why, you know, and my grandpa at the time, I remember he didn't really have any answers for me because it was the early 90s. And even

Even though democracy returned to Argentina in 1983, it's not like we were learning about what had happened in the history books, right? It was still a system where there was a lot of shoving things under the rug. Such a large number of people, especially young people, are now barely reconnecting with this history.

And there's still so many questions right up in the air, but the importance of knowing what happened and how can we prevent this from happening again? Because I think there is this collective loss of memory sometimes that happens to populations, to countries, and people just forget. And then we tend to fall into other trends. As people have fallen into other trends, Miriam has watched division take root in her country again.

We have a lot of hate speech now in Argentina. It doesn't come from regular people, but it comes from the government. And without history, it's scary because if you encourage people to go out and kill people who don't think like them, instead of having a discussion or even an argument, it's very unsettling. It's dangerous.

Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. Thanks again to Miriam Lewin, Andres Caballero, and Steve Fishman for lending us their time.

For more information on Argentina's death flights and Miriam Lewin's investigation, check out Orbit Media's eight-part limited audio series, Avenger, out now on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast.

This episode was written and researched by Connor Sampson, edited by Mickey Taylor, fact-checked by Laurie Siegel, and video editing and sound design by Alex Button. And I'm your host, Carter Roy.