Andres Caballero
speaker
52 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Andres Caballero’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
just terrify these people and get them so scared that not only would they give me the cash, they would give me their terror. It made me feel strong. All I know is we're f***ing helpless. All I know is anarchy. All I know is chaos. I just leaned into that.
The first time I heard about the death flights and even about the dictatorship was when I was about nine years old in my grandfather's repair shop at our house just north of the city. And one day he just thought I was old enough to hear that just blocks away in the Rio de la Plata, the river right by my house, people had been thrown from planes into the sea and killed.
Immediately for a kid, all these questions come up besides being horrified about why, you know? And my grandpa at the time, I remember he didn't really have any answers for me because it was the early 90s. And even though democracy returned to Argentina in 1983, it's not like we were learning about what had happened in the history books, right?
It was still a system where there was a lot of shoving things under the rug. Such a large number of people, especially young people, are now barely reconnecting with this history. And there's still so many questions, right, up in the air. But the importance of knowing what happened and how can we prevent this from happening again?
Because I think there is this collective loss of memory sometimes that happens to populations, to countries. And, you know, people just forget. And then we tend to fall into other trends.
Before we begin, please note that for this story, we interviewed Medium and everyone else for dozens of hours in Spanish. We hired actors to voice their words in English.
It's late afternoon, 1977. Miriam is in a neighborhood in Buenos Aires. She's 19. It's been a year since Argentina's military seized power. A coup to bring back peace and stability, says the military dictator. People like Medium, a young political dissident, are now targets.
From Orbit Media, I'm Andres Caballero. This is Avenger, the story of Miriam Lewin. Episode 1, The Process Fast forward three decades to 2010. It's four in the afternoon, the busiest time of day at Canal 13, a national TV channel in Buenos Aires. Miriam sits in her office chair, looking through a big glass window at the cars driving by.
In Argentina, Medium is a well-known investigative journalist. And she's relentless, going after perpetrators of sexual abuse. She's reported from Gaza, Russia, lots of places. Now, she's in the middle of the biggest investigation of her career. Medium looks at her phone. It's a U.S. number. An Argentine reporter calling from Florida, Medium had recently hired him to help her follow up on a tip.
She had sent him to meet the owner of a small plane that maybe had once been used by Argentina's dictatorship to kill hundreds of people. They were tossed out of planes, alive, into the sea. Somehow, the plane ended up in Fort Lauderdale. Medium hoped that it still held clues, evidence of the atrocities.
On the phone, the reporter confirms it's the right plane.
I spent a lot of my childhood in Argentina. In the early 90s, at my grandfather's repair shop, behind our house. It was a middle-class suburb of Buenos Aires, and every morning I would wake up to Radio Colonia, my grandfather's favorite station. Inside his repair shop, the floors and shelves were stacked with old radios, tools, and countless broken televisions.
One day, he decided I was old enough to hear about the death flights. He told me how only about a decade earlier, thousands of people had been kidnapped, loaded into airplanes, and thrown into the ocean. I was barely nine at the time. We lived several blocks from the shore. I could picture the planes above the water, bodies free-falling.
I had a lot of questions, but my grandfather didn't have answers. This was in the 90s, and many Argentines were still searching for answers about loved ones who had gone missing. Mothers, fathers were still mourning, in fear and in silence. It seemed at times that Argentina, the entire country, was looking away, intent on burying the ghosts of the past.
For a long time, journalist Miriam Lewin wanted to bury them too. For good reason. She'd been one of the disappeared. Better to forget years of captivity, of torture. Then, one day, an annoying, rude, incredibly persistent Italian photojournalist entered her life, asking lots of uncomfortable questions.
Theirs would be an unlikely alliance, but together they set out to bring justice to the victims of the vuelos de la muerte, the death flights. It would prove to be the investigation of a lifetime. The investigation would also become crucial in my search for answers. How did an entire country allow this to happen? Was there, will there ever be justice?
Where were the pilots who flew the death flights? In 2007, Giancarlo Seraudo is living in Buenos Aires. He's the annoying Italian photojournalist who gets in touch with Medium. He invites her to a cafe to take some photos.
In his 30s, Giancarlo is a bit of a nomad. He's been all over the world, telling stories, taking photos, fulfilling his obsession to document the scars left by fascist governments. Recently, he traveled from Italy to Argentina on a mission. He's become obsessed with the death flights. He's heard about Medium and decided he needs her.
A survivor and, just as important, a journalist on the ground who might help him find some answers. And Giancarlo's request comes at a good time.
She agrees to meet Giancarlo at a café in the center of Buenos Aires. It's a gray, windy day in August, and Medium comes straight from her office, wearing her signature fluorescent orange jacket, her red curly hair blowing in the wind. The café is on Avenida Nueve de Julio, a majestic avenue lined up with purple jacaranda trees.
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