Death Plane

Today I traveled for an hour and a half on bus 92 with my friend Julian d´Angiolillo out beyond Capital Federal (as the city proper is called) to a dusty highway. (You can see it all, including the plane here). We walked along the side of the road, past a small airport, a golf club, a Peron-era public pool complex (now private), stands selling charcoal for the parilla and traditional grass huts to sit in while the flesh cooks, shanty towns, and a playground in honor of the Malvinas war. (The ubiquitous memorials to a war that Argentina lost rivals only place I know of -- the American South). We finally came to the junkyard we were looking for. There amidst old buses, watertanks, refrigerators, industrial weighing equipment, heavy metal gears, and a random assortment of industrial detritus was the recently-discovered, last-remaining plane used during the dictatorship to take drugged, kidnapped desaparecidos to their death in the Rio de la Plata. We learned from the owner, who shrugged a yes at our request to roam the property and take photographs, that the Madres de Plaza de Mayo had been there last week, just to verify what they had read about in the Pagina 12 newspaper. We circled and circled, taking photographs and quietly -- it seemed the right tone -- discussing what should become of this plane. It has sat in this spot for fifteen years already.