The verdict in the trial for the so-called “death flights” in Campo de Mayo will be known on July 4, when the Federal Oral Court No. 2 of San Martín announces the sentence in the case it is investigating the crimes of four victims, whose bodies appeared on the coast of Buenos Aires.
The debate, marked by the testimonies of dozens of ex-conscripts from those years, began in October 2020, and according to what Pablo Llonto, lawyer for the lawsuit, told Télam, “there is a lot of expectation regarding the verdict because The process had very strong and very substantial evidentiary elements”.
Ciro Annicchiaricho, complainant from the Human Rights Secretariat, spoke in the same way, telling this agency that “There is a large amount of evidence, for which the expectation of the sentence is total.”
The hearing -which will be held in person- is scheduled for 9:30 am and will begin with the last words of the accused, while it will be broadcast on Canal La Retaguardia, indicated the relatives of the victims.
From the complaint, Llonto said that “the evidence has been very specific, very comprehensive of all the elements”, and among them, he cited “the appearance of human remains on the coast, the testimonies about those four victims (whose bodies were thrown) seen in Campo de Mayo; and above all, the testimonies of the colimbas”.
These were collected, in particular, thanks to a campaign carried out by the State in 2011 and 2012, which “generated many who made the colimba to spontaneously present themselves to testify.”
In this sense, the lawyer added that the peculiarity of the trial had to do with the fact that “There were many testimonies from ordinary people, that is, from people who at that time were not involved in militancy or in the Army.”
“At this point, it was transcendental, the story of the young people who made the colimba and who declared, thus removing a strong backpack from them, something that could be seen in the emotion that many of them showed in the hearings,” said the lawyer. , and contrasted it with the “confidence of the accused in denying everything that happened.”
Similarly, Rodolfo Novillo, brother of Rosa Corvalán, one of the victims, was very “hopeful” that “after more than 40 years of the events, there may be, I don’t know if there is justice, but at least peace.” , so that my sister can rest as she never could”.
For next month, a tribute ceremony is being prepared in honor of Rosa Corvalán and the 30,000 disappeared detainees, which will be held in Córdoba, in the Plaza de la Memoria in Villa Allende.
Rosa was disappeared in 1976 and her body was found months later, already in the year ’77on the coast of Buenos Aires, where the Federal Police buried him as NN until finally the forensic analysis of the remains could be accessed and his identity was verified.
During the trial, the responsibilities of a group of retired soldiers in the kidnapping, torture and murder of four people in total were analyzed, including high school students Adrián Rosace and Adrián Accrescimbeni, Rosa Corvalán and Roberto Arancibia, who were kidnapped and held captive in Campo de Mayo, and whose bodies appeared on the coasts of Magdalena, Punta Indio and Las Toninas and were identified by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.
At the start of the discussion, There were five defendants: the head of the Military Institutes Command and multiple convicted of crimes against humanity, Santiago Omar Riveros, and the retired soldiers Luis del Valle Arce, Delsis Malacalza, Eduardo Lance and Alberto Conditi.
But the latter was left out of the trial months after it began, due to an irreversible deterioration in his health.
With the exception of Riveros, the rest of the accused were military pilots and integrated different areas of the Aviation Battalion 601 that worked in Campo de Mayo.
For its part, the prosecution requested life sentences for the four defendants.
The request for sentences from the federal prosecutor Marcelo García Berro and the assistant prosecutor Mercedes Soiza Reilly coincided with the complaints from the Human Rights Secretariat, the province of Buenos Aires and those representing relatives of individual victims.
Prosecutor Soiza Reilly told this agency that “even before hearing the sentence, this trial has managed to unravel the repressive apparatus that remained hidden for more than four decades, where its perpetrators achieved an inconceivable impunity in a rule of law.”
“The trial made it possible to rebuild the repressive apparatus that made it possible to carry out the death flights in Campo de Mayo” and that “it was not an easy task, on the one hand, because most of the victims of the Campito are missing, and on the other, because of the secrecy that was given by the force itself,” he explained.
And he added: “The premise from which the perpetrators of these crimes started was silence” but “with the future of democracy, a few self-confessed soldiers and, above all, the few survivors of the Campito became aware of the existence of this mechanism of death and it was like that, as more than forty years later we are historically judged this criminal section”.
“The expectations we have with this trial are very high, the evidence material that we materialized in the trial was overwhelming to prove the participation of each of the accused responsible parties,” said the prosecutor.
From the complaint, Llonto added that “It was always known that the method of extermination in Campo de Mayo was flights” but that “the methodology was not known within Campo de Mayo” something that could be known thanks to the testimonies of the former soldiers.
About 60 witnesses passed through the trial.
Llonto also highlighted the visual inspection that was carried out in Campo de Mayo “in the middle of the pandemic” where “we saw the used planes that were abandoned there, of Italian origin, to which they called Herculitos.”
“Some of them are individualized and some of them are going to be placed in what will be in Campo de Mayo, a memory space,” added the lawyer.
Meanwhile, Novillo added that for the relatives, getting to know the verdict has to do with “closing a circle” and said that due to the importance it will have for the loved ones, “we have asked to be able to enter the hearing that day.” .
“We want to witness the reading of the resolution of this issue, after everything we have lived through. I think it will be a closure for this dramatic story,” he concluded.
