MundoAndino Home : Argentina Guide at MundoAndino
Adolfo Scilingo
Topics: Argentine military personnel
Adolfo Scilingo (b. 1947) is a former Argentine naval officer who is currently serving 30 years in a Spanish prison after being convicted on April 19, 2005 for crimes against humanity. The court found that he was on board military planes which jettisoned 30 naked, drugged political dissidents into the Atlantic Ocean during the rule of the military junta between 1976 and 1983. Scilingo had earlier attracted great notoriety for publicly confessing to journalist Horacio Verbitsky, to participating in the so-called death flights, the first of a series of public confessions collectively called in Argentina the 'Scilingo effect' (Feitlowitz 1999). The Spanish case is remarkable as it is the first use of a new Spanish law whereby people can be prosecuted for crimes committed outside Spain. Scilingo's confession prompted Argentines residing in Spain to press charges against him. It also led to Chileans living in Spain to file charges against their former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who was later arrested in Britain at the request of Judge Baltasar Garzon.
On 4 July 2007, the Supreme Court of Spain increased Scilingo's prison sentence to 1084 years and altered the conviction from crimes against humanity to that of torture, terrorism, and attempted genocide. [*].
See also
Alberto Angel Zanchetta, a military chaplain who reported to Scilingo
References
Jonathan Mann, "Macabre new details emerge about Argentina's 'dirty war'", CNN, March 23, 1996.
Margarite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, 1999.
Horacio Verbitsky, "Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior", 2005.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Adolfo Scilingo
