Aerial view of Campo de Mayo taken on January 18 Courtesy of EAAF
In Campo de Mayo, the largest military compound in Argentina, the last dictatorship (1976-1983) hid three detention centers, through which more than 4,000 people passed.
Most were killed with death flights: the military threw them into the sea from airplanes after drugging them.
Four decades later, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) seeks to clarify whether there were also bodies buried somewhere on its 5,000 hectares, as some witnesses have mentioned.
They started from the air and then they will continue on the ground.
On January 18, a plane with two crew members equipped with a laser scanning system and a high-precision GPS traveled the entire military area for five hours, which is 30 kilometers from the city of Buenos Aires and has a quarter of your extension.
“On the land there is a great variety of buildings, vegetation and so on.
We decided to use, for the first time in Argentina, LIDAR technology in an airborne flight to determine areas of interest ”, says Marcelo Castillo, a member of the EAAF who has been exploring Campo de Mayo for 15 years.
"It is unprecedented in Latin America because so much technology has never been entered into a military facility to carry out searches of this type," says Luis Fondebrider, president of the EAAF and a founding member of this team that has participated in missions in more than 50 countries throughout of his 35 years of life.
“The Armed Forces rarely authorize entry or do so with many controls, as in Uruguay.
They have not entered Spain, ”he adds, highlighting in this case the collaboration of the Argentine Ministry of Defense.
"It is necessary to discard this painful doubt, for the family and for our democracy," said the head of the Human Rights Secretariat, Horacio Pietragalla, who is promoting the creation of a place of memory in the place.
The use of this technology allowed obtaining a detailed drawing of its entire surface that is now being analyzed by experts from the National University of La Plata.
"Do you mark us where there are graves?
No. It marks where there are undulations and depressions that serve to determine areas of interest ”, clarifies Fondebrider about the work plan agreed with the judge Alicia Vence, in charge of the investigation.
Image processing and data interpretation will take about three months.
With the results in hand, non-invasive proximity tasks will be carried out in the selected places, such as the use of georadars, electromagnetic probes and multispectral cameras.
If the necessary probability is reached, it will be excavated for bone remains.
The EAAF has been working on the property since 2006, but so far it has not found clandestine burials.
The plane also flew over the Plaza de Aguas, an area not yet investigated and which is outside the current limits of Campo de Mayo because it was sold in 1978. In a letter sent in 1984 to the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Conadep ), an intelligence agent marked the place as a women's concentration camp.
For now, there are no testimonies of survivors who speak of this possible clandestine center, but the new technology will allow to obtain more indications.
The laser scanning technique will also be used in other clandestine detention centers in Argentina, in the provinces of Córdoba, Tucumán and Santa Fe. “In La Perla, in Córdoba, we know that there were no flights [of death], but it is a huge area.
We have been working for ten years, but then we did not have this technology, ”says Fondebrider about the expectations of finding clandestine graves.
In return, the passage of time works against new discoveries.
A well with more than 120 bodies
One of the places planned to fly over is the Pozo de Vargas, in the northern province of Tucumán.
There the EAAF has already excavated 31 of the 35 meters of this mass grave.
So far they have found the skeletal remains of 121 victims of the Argentine dictatorship, of which 110 have already been identified.
"They are not complete bodies, just bones," describes Fondebrider.
The corpses were burned before being thrown to the bottom.