Synopsis
"Best-selling account of retired naval officer Francisco Scilingo regarding torture and murder of political prisoners during the Argentine military dictatorship. Excellent and gripping translation includes a new epilogue; afterword places these human rights violations in a worldwide context. Useful identifying list of historical figures and persons mentioned in the text"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.http://www.loc.gov/hlas/Presents the confession of retired naval officer Francisco Scilingo, in which he admitted his participation in the campaign of systematic torture and death waged by the Argentine military from 1976 to 1983
Reviews
A bestseller in Argentina, this electrifying document is the businesslike confessional of retired Lieutenant Commander Adolfo Scilingo, who admits to participating in the Argentine military dictatorship's campaign of torture and murder between 1976 and 1983. In extensive interviews, Scilingo tells Argentine journalist Verbitsky how he took part in "aerial transports"?throwing heavily sedated, naked political prisoners out of airplanes into the Atlantic Ocean. Under Verbitsky's relentless cross-examination, Scilingo also admits that he joined in a kidnapping and observed a prisoner being tortured. Aerial executions of the regime's opponents, he charges, were approved by Church authorities, and a chaplain comforted the officers after their missions. In the introduction, Mendez, general counsel for Human Rights Watch, notes that hundreds of known torturers have avoided prosecution thanks to the Argentine military's clout, and more than 9000 families still do not know the fate of loved ones. Translation rights: Planeta Argentina, Buenos Aires.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A chilling as-told-to memoir by a man whose job it once was to murder political dissidents in the name of military dictatorship. A great code of silence once surrounded Argentina's so-called dirty war of the late 1970s and early 1980s, during which several thousand political opponents were ``disappeared.'' Whether willingly or out of fear, journalists did not report the daily discoveries of mangled bodies, and until recently the Argentine government maintained that it had never officially endorsed the campaign of terror. Francisco Scilingo breaks that silence: A naval officer who routinely kidnapped suspected dissidents and threw them from planes and helicopters into the South Atlantic, he had ``never been able to overcome the shock that the execution [of military orders] caused me.'' What impresses is not so much that Scilingo chose to speak as his reasons for doing so: As a military man, he concludes that the military's involvement in terrorism was simply ``not very ethical.'' Scilingo could readily claim that he was merely following orders, but he does not; he squarely accepts responsibility for his crimes. His confession, delivered first on television, then in newspaper interviews, and now in this book with his amanuensis, Argentine journalist Verbitsky, has caused a great stir in Argentina. Before Scilingo went public, President Carlos Menem pardoned all military personnel involved in the dirty war, saying, ``Of the two parties involved in it, one was fighting for the rule of law and the others were constantly violating that law.'' Afterward, Menem ordered the military to undergo ``self-criticism,'' with the navy's chief admiral reporting that the methods Scilingo and his fellow warriors used ``were unacceptable even in the cruel context of war.'' Now, however, the generals and admirals are retracting their confessions, and Scilingo has been jailed for making fraudulent claims. The dirty war thus goes on, despite this valuable book. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Verbitsky, a leading Argentine journalist, interviews former naval officer Francisco Scilingo, who became the first military participant to confess to pushing political prisoners out of airplanes over the South Atlantic during Argentina's "dirty war." His confession caused a sensation in Argentina and revived intense discussion of the horrible human rights abuses the military committed from 1976 through 1983. Although Jacobo Timerman's autobiographical account (Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, LJ 5/15/81) provides a much clearer picture of violence and the victims' suffering, Verbitsky's interviews reveal rich details about military procedures and complicity never before made available. Despite a helpful introduction, the work will be difficult for general readers to understand without some knowledge of Argentine history and politics. For academic and larger public libraries.?Roderic A. Camp, Latin American Ctr., Tulane Univ., New Orleans
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Even in the age of CNN and the Internet, many readers are likely to be ignorant of the horrifying facts contained in this book. Between 1930 and 1980, Argentina experienced no fewer than one military coup per decade. The 1970s and 1980s featured systematic torture and murder of political dissidents in what the Argentine military establishment called the "dirty war." The Flight takes its name from the practice of throwing kidnapped, tortured, but still living victims into the sea from military airplanes to dispose of their bodies. Today, after some 20 years of fitful government attempts to uncover what happened, some 9,000 victims are still simply "disappeared." Regrettably, journalist Verbitsky's account, which is based on a series of interviews with the first military officer to confess to his part in the dirty war, is diminished because it is filled with legalistic, semantic hairsplitting about a staggering record of organized crimes against humanity. Still, this catalog of horrors belongs in public libraries, which have always supplied one good answer to the problem of ignorance. Thomas Gaughan
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