The Federal Chamber of Cassation for Criminal Cases confirmed convictions for crimes against humanity committed at the ESMA and Campo de Mayo, upheld life sentences for the “Death Flights,” and highlighted the character of these sites as extermination centers. The country’s highest criminal court rejected the appeals of the defenses and confirmed the convictions against Jorge Luis Magnacco and Víctor Roberto Olivera, as well as the life sentences for the pilots Ángel Delsis Malacalza and Eduardo José María Lance, according to the rulings of the Second Chamber. In the ESMA case, Judge Alejandro W. Slokar upheld the “concentrationary paradigm” and defined that clandestine center as a space of extermination, with systematic practices of dehumanization of the detainees. His votes were accompanied by Daniel Antonio Petrone and Gustavo M. Hornos. The ruling emphasized the role of Magnacco as a doctor linked to the clandestine maternity ward and the Naval Hospital, and noted that the imprisonment of pregnant women constituted an extreme form of gender-based violence within the plan to appropriate children. The conviction of Olivera for the illegal detention of a mother and her daughter under the “liberty under surveillance” modality after their passage through ESMA was also confirmed. In the Campo de Mayo case, with votes from Slokar, Ángela E. Ledesma and Guillermo J. Yacobucci, the mechanics of the “Death Flights” as an extermination tool were highlighted, in which prisoners were thrown into the sea or rivers from aircraft. According to what the Argentine News Agency could learn, the resolution highlighted the importance of the findings of the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology to reconstruct the functioning of the repressive apparatus and prove the disappearances. The ruling described that the bodies found on the coasts of Buenos Aires allowed “to turn suspicion into certainty” about these practices and stressed the evidentiary difficulty due to the lack of direct survivors of the flights. Likewise, it was established that Malacalza and Lance had functional dominion over the repressive operations from the Aviation Battalion 601, which underpinned their criminal responsibilities. The ruling also warned about the need to preserve memory sites and probatory material, and alerted about the impact of measures that could affect the bodies in charge of their safeguarding. Finally, the tribunal affirmed that the judicial recognition of these facts constitutes a form of “exercised memory” against negationism and reaffirms the State's obligation to guarantee truth, justice, and non-repetition.
