Scilingo, Adolfo Francisco

   Argentine navy captain and member of the notorious Escuela Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA, Navy Mechanics School) during the “dirty war.” Ending almost 20 years of silence, Scilingo confessed to participating in “death flights.” He said that from 1976 to 1983, thousands of prisoners were thrown alive into the Atlantic Ocean from navy aircraft after being stripped, drugged, and weighted down. His story is told in a book, El vuelo, by the writer and human-rights activist Horacio Verbitsky. Published in 1995, El vuelo was translated in 1996 as The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior. In April 2005 a Spanish court sentenced Scilingo to 640 years in prison for his participation in the flights—the first time a country ever convicted someone in person (as opposed to in absentia) for human-rights crimes committed outside its borders. Scilingo, 58 at the time of his sentencing, is serving a 30-year term—the maximum under Spanish law. The indictment had been made by Judge Baltasar Garzón.