07/27/2025: Death Flights and John Oliver

0:07Tonight, 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 trail, no clues whatsoever that could incriminate them. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. This past summer, we went with John Oliver to Edinburgh, Scotland. As you can see, this is controlled mayhem. Which hosts the world's largest performing arts festival.

0:56And where, as a young comedian... This room was, in many ways, my comedic Waterloo. He tried his hand at stand-up. And I remember walking off stage thinking, oh boy, I want to do that again, right now. 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 Nora O'Donnell. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes.

1:33Every 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. As we first reported last March, 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.

2:23It was, quite literally, a vehicle for evil. This British-made Skyvan, 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 Ciraudo.

3:08Why 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 death, 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.

3:56See, 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?

4:38I had an idea, but to start an investigation, it started with Miriam. 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.

5:24So we had plenty to think about. People, not things. Yeah. And he says, I come from a different culture. In Rome, when they are digging a tunnel to extend the subway lines, they find a plate or a sculpture, and they stop 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 drug prisoners were put on board planes, flown over the ocean, stripped of their clothes before being flung to their deaths.

6:19Dumping prisoners out of an airplane 10 ,000 feet above an ocean and seems so extreme. Why would a military resort to this? Deathslides allow 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 Skyvans, workhorses used for transporting cargo, troops, and... Leading parachutists of many nations have dropped from Skyvan, and they are unanimous that there's not another jump platform like it.

7:08Two 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.

7:52I 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 tracked 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.

8:41Finding 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.

9:13In 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 Vigafor 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.

9:58What 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 town 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.

10:47Five were victims of the Holy Cross kidnapping. Azucena Vizhufor 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 Twelve 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.

11:31What'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, being mothers and nuns, right? Innocent people, completely innocent people. 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.

12:28Miriam 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.

12:54For 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.

13:48So I always ask myself why I survive. 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.

14:32Argentina 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.

15:12After 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.

16:01Age 95, Tati Almeida is the president of the Mothers of the Plaza Di 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, a 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 Di Maggio to report on the story of Patricia Roizenblatt.

16:59In 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.

17:40An 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, almost blonde. And she told me his name is going to be Rodolfo. And she was smiling. Patricia Rosenblatt was never seen again, nor was her husband. Her mother Rosa spent years searching police stations, hospitals, and orphanages for baby Rudolfo. You and the other grandmothers have found 64 children.

18:34Yes. 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.

19:18Today, Mariana is 48 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 at 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.

20:05What 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 seemed 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 Jose, he was stunned. It's like in a science fiction movie, when you see a picture of yourself in the past.

20:44It 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.

21:34How 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.

22:15They 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.

22:57I'm a person who was missing without knowing I was missing. Guillermo says his childhood was unhappy and that Gomez was violent. He sometimes hoped Gomez wasn't his real father. Guillermo 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.

23:37She was the person I called mom. 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.

24:21And 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.

25:02So 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's spent looking for me.

25:42Today, almost two years 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?

26:18No, no, I don't regret 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.

26:54As 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 Maggio 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 Rose'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.

27:35My life today, with all the difficulties I've experienced, is extremely positive and hopeful. Right now you're the person you should have been.

27:57At 48 years old, comedian John Oliver has won 21 Emmy Awards, three Peabody's, and was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He's earned the accolades for his unique brand of meticulously researched political humor. His Sunday night show, Last Week Tonight, is now in its 12th season on HBO, giving him a perch to unleash searing satirical takes on America, his adopted homeland. So how did a British-born middle-class grade school cut-up become one of this country's sharpest comedians? As we first told you in February, we traveled near and far to find out. This past summer, we returned with John Oliver to his comedic launching pad, Edinburgh, Scotland, where modern life is set against a medieval backdrop.

28:52So tell me about this place. Well, as you can see, this is controlled mayhem. Every August, the city hosts the world's largest performing arts festival, a month-long free-for-all known as The Fringe. Artists from 60 countries perform nearly 4 ,000 shows. No act is turned away. Some of it will be great. Some of it will be otherworldly bad. But the fact that the two can exist concurrently is kind of the point. The Fringe is a magnet for comedians. As a 20-year-old studying English at Cambridge University, John Oliver felt the pull. He went and tried his hand at stand-up. And I remember walking off stage thinking, oh boy, I want to do that again right now.