Miriam Lewin
speaker
112 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Miriam Lewin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The trials, which are now known as the truth trials, were unprecedented. The outcome of each was known before they began. Due to two pieces of legislation passed in 1986 and 1987... Members of the military junta could not be criminally sentenced or punished. The first, known as the Full Stop Law, suspended all judicial proceedings for anyone accused of forcibly disappearing another person.
And the second, known as the Due Obedience Law, prevented any member of the military below the rank of colonel from being punished for following orders. regardless of what those orders entailed so while the trials resulted in a lot of ugly truths coming to light they ultimately held no consequences you run across the perpetrators
In fact, Miriam once ran into the young man who guarded her cell and fed her Christian texts when she was 19. He suggested they get coffee, and she agreed. Years had passed since they last saw each other, so Miriam asked if he still worked for the military. He told her no, that he was going back to college to study engineering, something they had discussed during her captivity.
Miriam eventually learned he was, in fact, still working for the military as they sat there having coffee. He never went back to school for engineering. She says he worked in intelligence services until 2007. which may be around the same time Miriam helped put him behind bars. Human rights groups went on to protest the laws that kept Argentina's dictatorship immune from prosecution.
In 2005, the country's Supreme Court struck both laws down, finally opening the door for criminal trials to begin. Miriam used photos to identify that man who guarded her cell. And she says he was sentenced to around 13 years in prison. Meanwhile, as a journalist, Miriam shied away from writing about her personal experience as a survivor.
Miriam kept her distance from the topic for years. Then, one day, an Italian photographer named Giancarlo Serrato approached her with a request. He said he wanted to take her picture. She was hesitant, but ultimately agreed.
And so Giancarlo and Miriam launched an investigation to find the planes and hopefully bring those pilots to justice. Step one in Miriam and Giancarlo's investigation was locating the planes that were used for the death flights. Years had passed, and they had very little idea where to begin.
The Navy officer had participated in two of the flights. By the time Miriam and Giancarlo launched their investigation, he had blown the whistle and given an interview with two Argentine journalists. They then wrote a best-selling book on the subject called The Flight.
Through digital records, they could trace the transaction history of the planes. When they were first built, who bought them, and how many times they had exchanged hands since. They learned that three of the planes used were actually still in use. One was in Luxembourg and being used for commercial flights. Another was in the UK and operated by defense forces.
And the third was in Florida, owned by a private courier. So they sent a Miami-based freelance journalist named Bruno to interview the owner. Miriam prepared a long list of questions for him.
They tried to get in touch with the owner of the Florida plane, but Miriam says once he learned what they were doing, he fled the country. So they reached out to a second pilot who was able to identify some glaring irregularities in the plane's technical flight logs. From her experience as a survivor, Miriam knew the death flights typically happened on Wednesdays.
Records indicated that many of those flights had taken much longer than they should have if the plane was making a routine trip. A flight from point A to point B might take hours longer than it should, far more than could be accounted for by an unforeseen delay or margin of error. The only problem was their pilot wasn't willing to go public with his findings for their story.
they needed to find someone else who would.
The story eventually premiered on television news. Miriam says that at that point, they had the names of the pilots who flew those suspicious flights, but they chose not to reveal them. They needed more evidence, and they were worried that the pilots might flee the country before they could be charged. Many were still working for international airlines.
Coincidentally, Giancarlo might have flown with one of them on his many trips back and forth from Italy. Miriam handed all the evidence they found over to a judge so the judge could investigate further. She did so with the support of Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel. Esquivel was an artist, activist, and death flight survivor.
Kidnapped by Argentina's dictatorship in 1977 for his outspoken views, he was tortured for 14 months before being forced onto a plane. He would have been thrown into the ocean that day had radio calls not come in telling the pilot to turn around.
international pressure was getting too great the military decided he was best kept alive despite testimony from survivors like esquivel and entire books on the subject the nature of the death flights have made physical evidence hard to come by an untold number of victims have been lost to the ocean But as we mentioned earlier, bodies have washed ashore. Among them, two kidnapped nuns.
By chance, a storm with unusually strong southeastern winds washed their bodies ashore three days after they were last seen. Based on the timing and location, the judge was able to tie the nuns' deaths to the Florida Plain.
Miriam's and Giancarlo's discoveries have played a role in the convictions of dozens more perpetrators. In 2023, the Florida plane used for the death flights was returned to Argentina and placed in a Buenos Aires museum at the site of a former detention center.
According to the New York Times, by that time, more than 1,100 military personnel, police officers, and civilians had been convicted of crimes against humanity. And there were still more than 300 open investigations and 14 ongoing trials. Around 70 bodies have washed ashore in Argentina and surrounding countries. Many more victims have been found in mass unmarked graves.
Showing 41–60 of 112 · page 3 of 6
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