The “Happiest Days” of Argentina’s Repressors
In the early eighties, four “repressors” from the Naval Mechanics School—the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada or ESMA, the Argentine military dictatorship's deadliest extermination camp—were posted to South Africa to hide them from international crime allegations against them. As soon as Argentinian officers Alfredo Astiz and Rubén Chamorro relocated to the nation of apartheid, South African armed forces began carrying out “death flights”—a tactic for annihilating political prisoners identical to the one used by the ESMA. This was followed shortly afterwards by the arrival of Jorge “Tigre” Acosta, who owned a lavish mansion in Cape Town, and Jorge Perren, an experienced “counterinsurgency soldier” hired by South Africa to teach at the Naval Staff College. "I spent the happiest days of my life in South Africa," Astiz once said. Protected by a strategic alliance between the Argentine and South African navies, the ESMA's repressors were put to use for a couple of years on the other side of the ocean until their discovery by the press. This is the story of their sojourn in South Africa, with many gaps but previously unseen images and testimonies, too.
It's February or March 1979, and Jorge Acosta has one regret. Since late 1976, Acosta—a lieutenant captain that goes by the name of Tigre, or Tiger—runs the clandestine detention centre headquartered in the Navy Mechanics School or ESMA, one of the Argentine military dictatorship's deadliest extermination camps. Over the past two and a half years, Acosta has ordered the killing of hundreds, thousands, of male and female prisoners—there's no way of knowing just how many, since they’re flung out of aircraft into the ocean during night-time flights. But Acosta has also kept a few victims alive, and over the past few months they've been released. And this is something that now, in February or March 1979, he regrets.
“He was freaking out at the time,” ESMA survivor Amalia Larralda would recall thirty years later during a trial in which Acosta and other repressors would be sentenced to life in prison for murders, abductions, tortures, and thefts. “He was feeling lonely, rejected by the officers that had turned their backs on him for having left people alive. He said they'd created an out-of-control monster. He gave orders and counter-orders. His own men were complaining.”
Since 1977, Acosta had begun applying what he called a “recovery process” to dozens of detainees. Under the ploy of converting them ideologically and wiping “subversion” from their conscience, this experiment forced them to work for the political project of Admiral Emilio Massera, a navy commander-in-chief and member of the military junta until 1978, when he retired with the fantasy of running for president. Acosta is an officer that lacks both the smarts and the military merits—Massera himself would describe him decades later as “an irrational lunatic with an atom bomb in his head”—and his power always sprang from his no-middleman relationship with the Admiral. He has felt protected enough by Massera’s indulgence to keep a “staff” (as he referred to them) of prisoners alive under his command.
But Massera isn't running the Navy anymore and the ESMA has become one of the main targets for international condemnations of the dictatorship. Two prisoners, Horacio Maggio and Jaime Dri, managed to escape and publicly identify some of the repressors, Acosta among them. The Inter-American Commission of Human Rights just announced a visit of inspection to Argentina and observers have the ESMA in their sights as a priority. From exile, released victims are getting ready to expose the killers. The circle is closing in on Acosta: he's too visible.
“One night, he told us that they'd messed up, that they should have killed us all because we were such bastards that we'd surely accuse them in a Nuremberg,” recalled another survivor named Adriana Marcus during the 2010 trial. “But he said he already had a strategy in place and that no one would find him, because he'd be in South Africa.”
***
South Africa, late seventies—a country governed by a system of racial segregation that maintains a strategic military relationship with the Argentine dictatorship. Apartheid's crimes against its black population have isolated South Africa on the international stage. To avoid becoming a pariah, the South African regime has approached South America's dictatorships in search of Western allies that identify with the anti-communist cause and have no qualms about human rights. The Argentine armed forces court South Africa from the 1976 coup d'etat onward, especially through the Navy, which promotes a project to create the South Atlantic Treaty Organization (OTAS), a hemispheric alliance akin to the United States's and Europe's NATO. The Argentine Navy wishes to add South Africa to a common naval front alongside Brazil, Uruguay, and perhaps Chile, against Soviet penetration in the South Atlantic. The Argentine and South African military say they fear that the Soviet ships making forays into the southern oceans are providing weapons to guerrillas on both continents. In Argentina, Admiral Massera is the great promoter of the OTAS. As 1979 comes nearer, the project promises years of cooperation, camaraderie and business between the Argentine and South African navies.
South Africa, late seventies—a country where a marine like Jorge Acosta could feel relaxed, even rewarded, once his spell in the clandestine repression has concluded.
***
This exodus of ESMA officers isn't limited to Acosta. One day, in the middle of 1979, a guard takes a prisoner by the name of Carlos Lorkipanidse to the Dorado, the room where the task unit usually plans its operations. Waiting for him in the Dorado are the wife and children of the director of the ESMA, Rear Admiral Rubén Chamorro, an officer that is very close to Massera and ranks above Acosta in the structure of repression. Since his abduction in 1978, Lorkipanidse, a photo colourist by trade, has had to help forge documents under orders of the marines. This time, they request that he take photos of each member of the Chamorro family.
“Chamorro was going abroad, and they needed a set of false documents for his wife and children,” Lorkipanidse recalls during a phone conversation in January 2022. “They made me take photos of them with three-quarter profiles, from the side and full-face. I suppose they wanted documents with other identities in case things got sticky at some point and they had to escape.”
Between May and June 1979, through several confidential decrees, the dictatorship appoints most of the marines that operated in the ESMA to posts in other countries. These discharges from the task unit are in reaction to a political decision by the Navy, which needs to lower the profile of its largest clandestine detention centre. It's likely that Massera himself has taken part in the decision, and it's certainly convenient for him—preserving his most compromised men means preserving himself.
The first designation goes to Chamorro—his destination, South Africa, where he's appointed naval attaché. A week later, the Navy dreams up a position for an “assistant naval attaché” in Pretoria, the South African capital, for a fresh-faced young frigate lieutenant—an expert in infiltrating groups of potential victims with a reputation for killing mechanically, and whose real name, Alfredo Astiz, has begun to circulate among survivors and human rights organizations. Astiz isn’t a die-hard Massera supporter, but he’s a well-trained commando who took risks like few others under Acosta's orders on the frontlines of the “war against subversion.”
Chamorro and Astiz's relocations are followed by those of other officers and non-commissioned officers sent to the United States, England, and Spain. Soon, it's Acosta's turn. He's appointed to the Argentine Naval Commission in Europe, one of the Navy's strategic bodies dedicated to purchasing naval equipment, based in London. The Navy also appoints other ESMA repressors to London, including Jorge Perren, a lieutenant captain who goes by the name of Puma and former chief of operations of the task unit. For the next few years, Acosta and Perren will maintain the same course. But their posts in London are merely a screen; they’re meaningless words on an official document. Neither one will ever set foot in England. South Africa is waiting for them, too.
***
Rubén Chamorro and Alfredo Astiz begin travelling in early June 1979. Neither the Army nor the Air Force have offices in South Africa—the Navy is the only Argentine force that does. They’re located in a discreet, chalet-style building in the Pretorian neighborhood of Waterkloof, an area filled with diplomatic residences, jacaranda trees and golf clubs. Just a few weeks ago, Chamorro and Astiz were running a death center, but now they’re the Argentine Armed Forces' highest-ranking representatives before a foreign government. Their names appear in official records; they enjoy diplomatic immunity; they earn lots of money and attend cocktail parties and events. During the first few months, everything is so simple for them. For Acosta and Perren, on the other hand, it's a long and winding road to South Africa.
The sequence repeats itself, this time with other names. One day in the middle of 1979, a guard takes a prisoner by the name of Miguel Ángel Lauletta to a house in the neighbourhood of Florida in the northern side of Greater Buenos Aires, near the ESMA. Acosta's wife is waiting there for him. Since his abduction in late 1978, Lauletta, who was active in the armed Peronist organization known as Montoneros and was one of its forgery specialists, has had to help prepare false documents under the marines' orders. This time, he is ordered to teach Acosta's wife his techniques.
“They asked me to train her so that she could falsify documents for herself, her husband and her children,” says Lauletta in a telephone conversation in January 2022. “I taught her to make identity cards, passports and international driving licenses. She took many blank documents with her, expecting there could be an emergency, I suppose.”
Acosta and his family prepare to leave the country, but South Africa is still a few months away. First, both he and Perren must pass through Europe. They were appointed to London but they travel to Spain, which is the epicenter of the exiled survivors' allegations against the ESMA. An alleged training course at the Spanish Naval War College appears in the military files of both marines, dated October 1979. But Acosta and Perren never attend. They settle in Madrid without appearing in any personnel records, and they continue to report officially in London, where they hold on to their fake posts and their salaries. Their visit to Spain has all the appearances of a covert intelligence mission.
In September 1979, almost at the same time as the marines leave Argentina, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights leads an inspection and once again places the ESMA in the spotlight. A few weeks later, a new allegation points directly to Acosta and his men: three formerly abducted women, Ana María Martí, María Alicia Millia and Sara Solarz, provide a detailed account of their time in captivity before the French Parliament. It would later be known as the “Paris Testimony,” and it includes a list with the names and descriptions of the members of the task unit. The European press gives voice to the three women's accusations. After the Paris conference, exiled ESMA survivors keep sharing information with the media. In late October 1979, the Spanish newspaper El País publishes a story stating that Argentine Navy officers responsible for hundreds of abductions and killings are in Spain on intelligence missions, using alleged naval courses or military attaché posts as cover. The article identifies several repressors who recently arrived in Madrid by their names and surnames, among them Acosta and Perren.
For the first time since the dictatorship began, the marines are put on the defensive by the media’s broadcasting of their identities and crimes. This is made clear in the file of another ESMA officer in Spain, Frigate Lieutenant Néstor Savio, the task unit’s former head of logistics, about whose particulars the Argentine naval attaché in Madrid notes: “He was disturbed by newspaper stories published in Spain that mentioned his name and activities.” In Acosta and Perren's particulars, the officer mentions “extremely intense and difficult” tasks, carried out under “very special” conditions around topics “with a high degree of confidentiality,” “extremely delicate” and “very well known" by the Navy's intelligence department, possibly related to the surveillance of ESMA survivors that were willing to report them. According to the naval attaché, after the marines' names appeared in the press, Acosta realized that his sojourn in Spain “compromised the institution and the country” and agreed to return to Argentina for a spell.
Soon after that, Acosta would finally embark with Perren for South Africa, the destination he'd been thinking of since he realized that the time had come to look for a place to hide.
***
In April 1980, South African newspapers print a story from the international news bureaus: the Swedish government has published the name and current position of an Argentine marine it has identified as the perpetrator of the gunshot that took down 17-year-old Dagmar Hagelin, a girl from a Swedish family that was shot and kidnapped by the ESMA task unit in January 1977 in the west side of Greater Buenos Aires. The officer's name is Alfredo Astiz and he is Argentina's assistant naval attaché in Pretoria.
Sweden's demands to the Argentine dictatorship began on the same day that Hagelin was kidnapped, when her father read a report at the police station that stated that the operation had been carried out by ESMA personnel. The case instantly became a diplomatic conflict of the highest order. The abduction had been grotesque. They shot the 17-year-old girl right on the street, in broad daylight, right in front of the neighbors—a girl that wasn't even the one they were looking for. The day before, they had kidnapped Norma Burgos, a Montoneros militant that had confessed that she would be meeting her comrade Antonia Berger at her home. The marines stood guard and waited for Berger, but it was Hagelin who arrived. When she saw the soldiers, she panicked and ran. According to the neighbors, a blond officer knelt on the ground, pointed the pistol at Hagelin and shot her in the back. She was alive and conscious when they drove her away in a car to the ESMA. It was only after they captured her that the marines realized they had the wrong person.
Sweden protested the Hagelin case for three years. The prime minister sent several letters to dictator Jorge Videla, and all were answered with telegrams: “There is no reliable information that Miss Hagelin was arrested on the orders of the authorities.” In October 1979, the “Paris Testimony” revealed new information: Norma Burgos, Hagelin's friend who had also been abducted, was alive and in Madrid. The Swedes met with Burgos and she told them that she had seen Dagmar at the ESMA infirmary, that she had a head injury but was recovering, and that a few days after her abduction, she had been taken from the clandestine detention center and was never brought back. Burgos, one of those “people left alive” that the task unit regretted not getting rid of, revealed that Alfredo Astiz had led the operation and that he himself had told her about Dagmar being shot. Over the following weeks, the Swedish authorities scrutinized the life and deeds of this Astiz person, until they discovered his destination in South Africa and revealed his name to the press.
So now South African newspapers begin to publish stories about how Argentina's assistant naval attaché in Pretoria is a repressor wanted by a European government. But Astiz doesn't have too much to worry about: the South African regime guarantees his protection. A couple of days after the Swedish allegations, Alfredo Oliva Day, the person in charge of the Argentine embassy in South Africa, sends a secret wire to Buenos Aires where he reports on a meeting he had with a representative of the South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “He stated that the South African government attached no importance to the information from Sweden,” Oliva Day assures them. “Only in the case that the local press makes demands, explanations will be limited to describing the Argentine government's response to the Swedish one.”
In fact, the local press demands explanations not only from the South African government but also from the Argentine naval attaché office. A journalist from the Sunday Tribune newspaper approaches Rubén Chamorro in Pretoria and enquires about Astiz. “I sent him away on vacation,” Chamorro answers, and then allows himself to provide his opinion on the case: “Dagmar Hagelin is no innocent, she's a terrorist.” The Swedish government reacts swiftly: its spokespeople reveal to the media that Chamorro, Astiz's higher-up in the South African capital, is the former commander of the task unit that kidnapped Hagelin. Swedish diplomacy demands the Argentine Navy allow them to question Chamorro in Pretoria, but that never happens. The ESMA men's whereabouts are now publicly known, but they are protected in South Africa.
***
Jorge Acosta and Jorge Perren reach Cape Town in the first half of 1980. The exact date is unknown, since their arrival dates were altered by hand in their files. The first reliable hint of their presence in South Africa dates from June 1980: attached to their files are two report cards signed by a South African officer for Acosta’s and Perren’s participation in a naval command course at the South African Naval Staff College. This is where South African marines are taught strategy and leadership in order to move into command posts. The college usually welcomes foreign officers for courses that last a few months.
The college director highlights in Perren's particulars that “when working in small groups, he made very significant contributions” and that “his experience and operational knowledge were very valuable for his team.” Around 1980, Jorge Perren has no operational knowledge other than what he acquired as head of the ESMA task unit’s abduction activities during the Argentine dictatorship’s “war against subversion,” which is similar in essence to the one being currently waged by the South African regime to abolish political resistance to apartheid.
For the South African Navy—an institution with a modest role as a coast guard in the early part of the century that now wishes to put itself forward as an anti-communist sentinel for southern Africa—a soldier like Perren has valuable practical knowledge that soon warrants recognition. In October 1980, in his evaluation of Perren as a student at the South African Naval Staff College, Naval Attaché Chamorro reports: “Captain Perren has distinguished himself from his South African colleagues to such a degree that a formal request has been made for him to continue serving in the South African Naval Staff College School next year, this time as a teacher.”
***
It's noontime during the winter of 2021 when retired South African Rear Admiral André Rudman joins a video interview from the bar at the Seven Seas Club, one of the oldest naval centres in South Africa. It's in Simon Bay, a few kilometers from Cape Town. Rudman, the club's honorary president, would be an average-looking octogenarian were it not for a black patch that covers his right eye completely, giving him the air of an old seadog. Like any officer who served in the South African armed forces during apartheid, Rudman is Caucasian. So are the colleagues keeping him company today at the bar, retired rear admirals Arné Söderlund and Theo Honiball, who partake in the interview and seem friendly, although they let Rudman do most of the talking.
Rudman was the director of the South African Naval Staff College in 1980. He is the officer that supervised and graded Acosta and Perren as students at the college. He says the two Argentinian marines became “very good friends” of his.
“I have only good memories of those gentlemen. I liked them a lot. They were here with their wives and children. I saw Acosta's family a few times. They were open and friendly, they'd invite us to dinner, we had get-togethers. We had barbecues. We also had ties with the Chilean and Uruguayan navies, but for me Argentina was special. There were geopolitical reasons for getting closer: the isolation of both our countries and the water border we share in the South Atlantic.”
“Did you also meet Chamorro and Astiz?”
“They were in Pretoria, but since Argentina had officers in our college in Cape Town, we'd invite them whenever there was a special event. I met Chamorro when I was the director of the college. I remember he gave me a miniature lighthouse, and I told him: ‘It can come in handy—we can switch it on when the bar is open and off when it closes.’”
“Did Argentinian officers advise the South African Navy on counterinsurgency?”
“I don't know, I don't know. It may have happened at a higher level. They may have provided some advice. But I'm not aware of a formal exchange of information.”
“Did you know their background at the ESMA?”
“I knew that Acosta had been in naval intelligence and Perren in a special anti-terrorist task unit. They came to our college as students, and later Perren joined the teaching staff, although by that time I had already left as college director.”
In 1981, after a semester as a student, Jorge Perren is invited by the South African Naval Staff College to join its teaching staff. In an email in 2021, South African Vice Admiral Robert Simpson-Anderson, Rudman's successor as director of the college and later Chief of the South African Navy, writes that “Captain Perren assisted us in tutoring and evaluating our students and was entrusted with research tasks,” although he says he doesn't remember what those tasks consisted of specifically. While Perren works for the South African Naval Staff College, Acosta has left the school already, although he remains in South Africa with a new position created for him: assistant in Cape Town to Chamorro's attaché, who resides in Pretoria.
After the media revelations about his role in the Hagelin case, Alfredo Astiz follows in Acosta and Perren's footsteps and joins the South African Naval Staff College as a student. He also makes friends there with his local comrades and receives a decoration from the South African Navy. When Astiz's name is mentioned in the video call with Rudman, one of the colleagues present, Arné Söderlund, a former member of the South African Naval Staff College board of directors and former head of intelligence for the South African Navy, opens his mouth for the first time.
“Astiz liked to do translations for our Border War, where Cuban pilots had gotten involved. A few foreign officers helped us translate radio conversations that we intercepted [from the Cubans]. Astiz didn’t work for us, but in some cases he provided assistance, since Cuba was a common enemy.”
In the early 1980s, the South African army tries to stop pro-Soviet advances in southern Africa, where countries like Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe have just gained their independence from European powers and are governed by black and socialist movements. By 1981, Namibia takes the main stage in the conflict as a nation occupied for decades by South Africa that is fighting for its independence with the support of advisors and soldiers from the Soviet Union, Cuba and Angola. South Africans refer to the conflict as their “Border War.” Soviets, Cubans and Angolans participate in it, but there are also officers from different Western countries who collaborate with South Africa for a variety of reasons.
The South African Naval Staff College that houses the ESMA repressors is right in the central hub for Border War operations: the coastal city of Muizenberg, about thirty kilometers from Cape Town, where the South African Navy has its headquarters for the Silvermine nautical command centre, a military intelligence base that monitors Soviet and pro-Soviet shipping communications in the south of the continent. Silvermine's radars detect every movement by air and by sea over thousands of square kilometers, and it belongs to a monitoring network that connects the anti-communist efforts of the United States, the United Kingdom, and other NATO-aligned countries. Nowhere does the OTAS project supported by the South African and Argentine navies make more sense. And nowhere else do the veteran Söderlund’s recollections of Astiz collaborating as a translator of communications intercepted from Cuban pilots in the Border War become more plausible.
Three weeks after the interview, however, Söderlund takes back his words in a brief email: “Since 1979 we have used Spanish-speaking recruits to intercept Cuban communications on the northern border of Namibia. We used our own officers who had attended courses in Spain or South America, and on occasion foreign officers. After our interview I got in touch with friend that spent a few months there to confirm whether he had met Alfredo or any other officer from the courses taught at the South African Naval Staff College. He confirmed that he never crossed paths with any of them. In that case, my impression that Astiz may have been involved was possibly wrong.”
Possibly. One way to confirm this would be to check Astiz's military file, but this isn't possible because, at some indeterminate moment over the last four decades, his file disappeared without explanation from the Navy archives.
***
In mid-1979, right in the middle of the Border War, the South African army implements a new tactic for eliminating prisoners from dissident groups: death flights. Militants from black revolutionary organizations that fall into the hands of apartheid troops are flung from airplanes into the waters of the South Atlantic, on clandestine flights operated by South Africa from the coast of Namibia. The practice continues until at least 1987, its victims hundreds of members of opposition groups such as the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania and the Southwest African People's Organization, SWAPO, the nucleus of the Namibian independence movement.
In his book Death Flight: Apartheid’s Secret Doctrine of Disappearance, published in 2020, South African journalist Michael Schmidt reconstructs the history of the Delta 40, the South African forces' special flights unit. According to Schmidt, the first flight took place on July 12, 1979, when one of the Delta 40's creators, Colonel Johan Theron, threw two members of the SWAPO armed wing into the ocean from a distance of three thousand meters above sea level. Two decades later, Theron would confess during trial that he repeated the operation hundreds of times and that the victims were injected with an overdose of tranquilizer before being loaded onto aircraft: an annihilation mechanism identical to the one used in the ESMA. In the late seventies, Theron and his Delta 40 commanders are living in Pretoria, the same city where Rubén Chamorro and Alfredo Astiz arrived just a month before the first South African death flight.
There isn't any documentary or testimonial evidence for the time being that the ESMA officers shared their expertise on death flights with the South African military. It's the kind of thing about which no one leaves a record. Under the most conservative hypothesis, it was mere coincidence that just when the ESMA task unit arrived in South Africa, the South African armed forces began flinging prisoners from planes.
***
Jorge Perren's first son was born in 1969. He is a diplomat and is named after his father and grandfather. His grandfather, Rear Admiral Jorge Enrique Perren, played a key role in overthrowing Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, when he commanded the coup at the Puerto Belgrano naval base in the south of the province of Buenos Aires. Grandfather Perren was an old-school anti-Peronist, an unconditional Navy cadre, an officer with robust intellectual training who went on to write a book.
“I had great respect for my grandfather. I visited him unfailingly every weekend,” says Jorge Perren (son) in a video call in June 2021. “My grandfather and I could discuss politics and we did it a lot; I enjoyed it. With my father it was different. He'd get overexcited, very euphoric when he talked about politics."
Jorge's parents divorced when he was a child. His mother remarried an unorthodox economist—a political prisoner of the dictatorship whom Jorge sees as his “father in practice.” His biological father, repressor Jorge Perren, formed a new family with his second wife, the mother of his two youngest children, with whom Jorge had almost no relationship.
“When I'd go to their house it was clear that there wasn't a good atmosphere. They had a very strange lifestyle, as if they lived in isolation. At one point I told my father that if he wanted us to continue meeting, it would have to be at my grandparents’ home.”
One time, when Jorge was eight or nine years old, his father took him to the ESMA.
“My mother almost killed him. He took me and introduced me to a group of four or five detained women. I had no idea what was going on, but even at that young age I realized that something was very wrong there. I think the women wanted to hide it, to play nicely with me, but the mood was very strange, something that stuck in my mind.”
Another time, when he was ten, his father invited him to spend a couple of weeks in Cape Town, where he had moved with his wife and other children.
"I travelled to South Africa that time to visit him, and twice more. I was terribly bored there. We’d never go out for a walk. I think we went to the beach once or twice, and that was it. My father didn't have a social life. He only took me once to the place where he had his activities [the South African Naval Staff College] and introduced me to some South Africans. And he left me at Acosta's house a couple of times to play with his children, who were my age. But I don't remember him having dinner with Acosta even once."
“What was the relationship between your father and Acosta like?”
“At the time they seemed distant. My father had insinuated a few times that Acosta had his own side businesses, that he'd stolen for himself and Massera. Acosta’s house in Cape Town was enormous. He had an extraordinary standard of living with an unjustified level of lavishness. I don't know if that was the reason behind the distance between him and my father... my father had many faults, and he did things that were far more serious than stealing, but I’m certain that he never stole. Although I’d rather he steal than doing other things, don’t you think?”
In South Africa, Jorge Acosta lives with his wife and four children, two boys and two girls, in a mansion with a swimming pool and gardens in the residential suburb of Newlands, just south of Cape Town, an aristocratic neighborhood lined with parks and pine trees, rugby stadiums and lavish homes that blacks are forbidden from residing in. Although the size of the Acosta residence is impressive, it may only reflect a portion of the money the marine manages.
When he was commanding the Navy, Admiral Massera pushed forward a naval reequipment plan that now continues under the management of his successor, Admiral Armando Lambruschini. Massera still acts as a free agent for the Navy when it comes to purchasing ships, helicopters, weapons and spare parts—an activity for which, some say, he and his men charge undeclared commissions of millions. According to the book Admiral Zero: The Unauthorized Biography of Emilio Eduardo Massera by Argentinian journalist Claudio Uriarte, one account from back then ventures to say that “For his commission Massera gets the equivalent to the value of one unit of the material in question: if, for example, he’s purchasing ten frigates, then Massera charges a commission worth the dollar value of one frigate.”
In the early 1980s, Acosta and the other ESMA officers in South Africa open several bank accounts in Switzerland. They do so under the protection of their fake posts in London, which allow them to collect their salaries in Swiss francs and withdraw the money through long-distance cheques. Several years later, in 1998, Switzerland's Attorney General Carla del Ponte launched an investigation based on the hypothesis that the Swiss accounts were used to move illegal money from the Masser naval equipment deals. No matter how strong her suspicions, Del Ponte will never amass enough material evidence to bring them to trial. The ESMA men's past seems fleeting at times: you can probe it, reconstruct a few pieces, you can almost see it, but ultimately, its traces are lost in the darkness.
***
At other times, however, the past shines pristine. For example, a headline in an old copy of the South African Sunday Tribune newspaper from December 6, 1981, proclaims: “Death Camp Man Goes Home.” Alongside the title, a full-page photo of Alfredo Astiz shows him captured for the first time by a camera that belongs to the media. He's been snapped close up, from the waist up, dressed in civilian clothes, wearing a white shirt with rolled up sleeves and two open buttons revealing a hairy chest, with a silver watch on his left wrist and a silver chain around his neck, an arm on his hips and a hand on his waist, attempting to appear nonchalant—but this clashes with the look on Astiz's face as he eyes the photographer with the expression of someone who would have shot him already were the circumstances any different. He seems less jovial than survivors describe him, although the blond hair and green eyes mentioned in every testimony are unmistakable even in this black and white photo.
Death Camp Man Goes Home: a few days after his photo is published, Astiz leaves South Africa never to return. The South African journalist who managed to photograph him, William Saunderson-Meyer, has been chasing after him for six weeks, during which he published several articles on Astiz's and Chamorro's criminal past, “the Argentinian torturers sent to Pretoria.”
A year and a half after the scandal over the Hagelin case, when the press seems to have forgotten the ESMA repressors, Saunderson-Meyer revives the issue in the pages of the Sunday Tribune with renewed impact. He reviews everything known by this point about the ESMA—its infiltration and kidnapping operations; its sessions with cattle prods with the assistance of military doctors to keep interrogees alive; captives held in a space the repressors called “Capucha” (hood); clandestine births and the seizure of babies; death flights and the appearance of corpses on the river shores—and he adds specific details about the Argentinian marines in South Africa: their noms de guerre, their former roles in the task unit, their responsibilities in specific cases of disappearance and murder.
Saunderson-Meyer calls the Argentine offices in Pretoria several times and asks over and over to speak with Astiz. He even sends a letter where he mentions allegations by actors including Amnesty International, the IACHR, the French Parliament and the government of Sweden, where some sectors demand that South Africa deport him for the Hagelin case. He receives a single official response: “No comment.” While trying to find Astiz, Saunderson-Meyer gets a scoop: there are two more Argentinian repressors in South Africa. Their names are Jorge Acosta and Jorge Perren and they also operated at the ESMA. The Sunday Tribune describes Acosta as Admiral Massera's lieutenant and as the ideologue behind a manoeuvre by the Argentinian Navy to place several former members of the task unit in different foreign countries, including South Africa. Saunderson-Meyer's persistence finally pays off. One afternoon, the person in charge of the Argentinian embassy in Pretoria, Alfredo Oliva Day, summons him by telephone to a meeting at the naval attaché office, where he receives him alongside Rubén Chamorro.
“It was an intimidating meeting. They basically called me to scare me,” Saunderson-Meyer recalls in a video call. “They gave me the 'good cop - bad cop' routine. Oliva Day was more diplomatic, telling me about the Argentinian dictatorship’s efforts to improve its image in the world, and Chamorro was more aggressive, telling me that I was a stupid communist that didn't know the danger I was getting into.”
Saunderson-Meyer leaves the meeting with no new information but with a clear impression: the Argentine marines realize that their South African haven has begun to come crashing down and that exposure is becoming a problem again. And that's probably what Alfredo Astiz is feeling when a few days later, by complete accident, Saunderson-Meyer finds him filling up at a gas station in Pretoria.
“It was nighttime, and he had a driver with him in a diplomatic car. I recognized him because I'd seen an image of him that the Swedes had sent around. I approached him and took some photos. He was furious, he threatened me, he came inside the car and tried to rip the camera out of my hands. Luckily, the gas station owner was there watching everything. We argued for quite a while until we made a deal: Astiz was worried about the photos because he was covering his face in them, so he let me take a new photo of him, posing this time, in exchange for the first roll.”
That photo of Astiz looking at the camera, with the eyes of a hunted feline, is the one the Sunday Tribune publishes on December 6, 1981. Argentine media never acknowledge its existence. In the story about his chance meeting with the marine, Saunderson-Meyer provides the few quotes he managed to extract from him: “If you know what's best for you,” Astiz tells him, “don't publish my photo.” Although Astiz admits that he will soon leave South Africa, he refuses to say whether this is because of the allegations against him, which he describes as “communist propaganda.”
***
In early 1982, Astiz, Acosta and Perren leave South Africa. Only Chamorro remains in Pretoria. Although the South African Navy honourably discharges them for their “meritorious services” to the South African Naval Staff College, the ESMA men have become a potential liability for the South African regime. Their visibility grew quite suddenly, and with it the pressure by foreign governments, human rights organizations, and internal political sectors to expel them from the country had intensified like never before. A formal expulsion order never arrives and South Africa never lets go of the Argentinians' hands publicly, but both know that the days of confraternity are over.
Strategically speaking, the OTAS project goes first into limbo and then, from April 1982 onward, into terminal crisis. Although South Africa remains neutral in the Falklands war—even though there are rumors of it selling missiles to Argentina—the conflict upsets the Argentine dictatorship's priorities, and its new chancellor, Nicanor Costa Méndez, begins to criticize South African apartheid as a way of enticing black African countries, whose votes in the United Nations can be valuable in the dispute with the United Kingdom. Conditions for a hemispheric alliance between Argentina and South Africa reach a standstill.
Shortly after the Falklands War begins, surprising news reaches the South African press: Alfredo Astiz, the Argentinian repressor discovered a few months ago in Pretoria, lands on the South Georgia Islands leading a commando unit attempting to occupy them, but surrenders after a few hours of combat and is taken prisoner by the British. Sweden demands his extradition, but Margaret Thatcher's government refuses the request and returns the marine to Argentina once the war is over.
While Astiz surrenders in the Falklands, Jorge Acosta and Jorge Perren settle back into their naval careers: as soon as they return to Argentina, the Navy assigns them to the Puerto Belgrano base, in the far south of the province of Buenos Aires, six hundred kilometers from the Federal Capital and protected from the public spotlight. Although Acosta and Perren don't meet the minimum requirements to move up the naval ladder, the Navy ignores regulations and promotes them to the rank of ship captains. That's the military rank they hold when, towards the end of 1982, the Argentine dictatorship enters a phase of decomposition that would last a year until its fall; and it will still be their rank several years later, this time under a democratic government, when justice sentences them to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity.
A few months after his surrender in the Falklands, Alfredo Astiz, who has also sought refuge in Puerto Belgrano, begins to fantasize about returning to South Africa. In December 1982, he submits a visa request to the South African embassy in Buenos Aires. At this point, however, Astiz is radioactive even for a regime like apartheid, which denies him a visa with an explicit argument: “Applications with potentially sensitive international and local implications cannot be processed in the short term.” The Argentinian repressor's rejection reaches the South African press a couple of months later. A newspaper in Pretoria, the Pretoria News, manages to find out what Astiz told the South African authorities: “I spent the happiest days of my life in South Africa.”
***
Rubén Chamorro is the last one to leave South Africa, and he doesn't do so willingly. His mission as naval attaché ends in February 1983, but he remains in Pretoria. South African law provides a three-month grace period to foreign officers whose positions have ended. Once that period is over, Chamorro's situation is declared irregular by the authorities but they don't expel him, under the assumption that he will soon apply for a formal residence permit. But Chamorro waits until late 1983 to attempt to regularize his situation, a few days after the Argentine dictatorship comes to an end and the Raul Alfonsín’s democratic government is inaugurated, and then he applies for a temporary work permit from South Africa. South African authorities are still processing the request when a message arrives from Argentina in February 1984: the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the entity designated to investigate complaints of disappearances and murders, is looking to arrest and interrogate Chamorro about cases connected with the ESMA.
Everything happens at high speed. On February 3, 1984, the South African press reveals that the Argentine government is after Chamorro. On February 15, South Africa gets rid of him and denies him the work permit. That same week, Chamorro receives the summons from the Supreme Council in Buenos Aires: they threaten him with dishonourable discharge from the Navy if he doesn't show up to testify in ten days' time. On February 18, Argentine and South African newspapers publish an unofficial version circulated by the Alfonsín government's spokespeople: they say that Chamorro had been living for the past few months in South Africa with Marta Bazán, a former Montoneros militant and ESMA survivor who, according to her former fellow captives, was subjected to a “relationship” with Chamorro during her time in the clandestine detention centre. Neither evidence nor witnesses ever appear to confirm Bazán's alleged presence in South Africa, but the story of the repressor and the guerrilla fighter allows the Argentine government to bring the case to the public eye. On February 19, 1984, the former ESMA task unit commander finally leaves South Africa. He is arrested as soon as he lands in Buenos Aires that same night and he is transferred to Ezeiza prison, where he is placed in preventive detention by order of the Supreme Council. Rubén Chamorro thus becomes the first soldier arrested for ESMA crimes. Two years later, on June 2, 1986, shortly before his sixtieth birthday, he dies of a heart attack without having ever been brought to trial.
***
The story of the Argentinian marines in South Africa could very well end right there, but it has a coda at a different time and with a different protagonist—Captain Jorge Vildoza, second in command in the ESMA task unit and one of the death flight pilots. In 1977, Vildoza kidnaps the son of a missing person. Javier Penino Viñas was born when his mother was being held captive at the ESMA. In complicity with his wife, Ana María Grimaldos, Vildoza falsifies Javier's identity and registers him as their son. In 1984, after the dictatorship ends, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo report Vildoza under the suspicion that the child he’s raising was stolen. Two years later, the repressor and his wife flee the country with false identities, but Javier Penino Viñas only discovers the truth about his family in 1998, through genetic analysis. By then, there is no trace of his kidnappers. There is an international warrant out for their arrest but there is no news of them until 2012, when Grimaldos is discovered through a series of wiretaps during a visit to Argentina. A judge orders her arrest and questions her on Vildoza. Grimaldos declares that her husband died in 2005, at the age of 75, in South Africa, where they lived together since 1995. She says that he was cremated and provides a death certificate under the name of “Roberto Sedano,” the false identity used by Vildoza.
During the legal case against Grimaldos, Javier Penino Viñas describes details about his long journey around the world with his fugitive kidnappers: their escape to Stroessner's Paraguay in 1986 with help from the Navy, which right in the middle of a democratic government provides them with money, logistical support and forged documents to leave the country; the ensuing trip to Austria, where Vildoza gets a purported job as an administrator in a European company; and the final move to South Africa, in the mid-nineties, where the repressor first obtains permanent residency and then citizenship under the false identity of Sedano. According to Javier, Vildoza chose South Africa—a country without an extradition treaty with Argentina—because the European company he worked for posted him there. To this day, however, it is unclear what he lived from exactly. Argentine authorities have tried so far unsuccessfully to clarify whether Vildoza set up personal businesses with money and assets stolen from ESMA victims.
María Servini de Cubría, the judge in charge of the investigation, isn’t satisfied with the death certificate presented by the marine’s wife, and in 2012 she sends a letter to South Africa to verify the information. She never gets a response. In 2016, Interpol concludes that Vildoza died but suggests sending an expert to analyze the certificate and clear up any doubts. In 2017, the Argentine Federal Police finally send a forensic expert to South Africa. The result is conclusive: the death certificate is false. The dead man's fingerprints don't match those registered by Vildoza with the South African government. The fingerprints of the witness summoned as a guarantor for the process are the same as those of the deceased. The witness's name is impossible to read because it's blurred. The funeral home's licence number doesn't exist. The cremation certificate that should have been provided by the authorities doesn't appear among the records. The certificate states that Vildoza died at home but the family said that he had a cardiac arrest at the hospital. This official document bears the seal of the Death Registry of the South African Department of Home Affairs but it makes it impossible to confirm whether the last of the Argentine marines in South Africa really died.
***
Jorge Vildoza's crimes will remain unpunished forever: in his extemporaneous, discreet case, the South African sanctuary accomplishes what it was set out to do. Things turn out differently for his former colleagues on the ESMA task unit, however. Jorge Perren dies in 2007 in the Campo de Mayo military prison, prosecuted for abductions and disappearances. To this day, in mid-2023, Jorge Acosta and Alfredo Astiz are imprisoned in the crimes against humanity wing at Ezeiza prison, where they have been serving life sentences for multiple causes associated with the ESMA. Both repressors were contacted for this article through their public defenders. They were asked if they recalled anything from their sojourn in South Africa. Acosta conveyed that “he's very grateful but would rather not to be interviewed.” Astiz didn't respond.
