“It’s good that they’re being hunted down and dragged from their holes.” Lirolay Moyano was describing how she feels at the news of last Tuesday’s arrest of Julio Poch who is suspected of involvement in the deaths of around 1000 political prisoners in Argentina.

Lirolay Moyano came to the Netherlands with her mother from Argentina as a 6-year-old. They fled their homeland after seven members of their family had been killed by the junta. The arrest 30 years later of the pilot, Julio Poch, fills Ms Moyano with a grim satisfaction:

“He should be tried and made to spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement. Of course, I’d like to hack him into little pieces, and do the most terrible things to him, but I wouldn’t lower myself to behaving like an animal.”

Death flights
Like other members of her family, Ms Moyano mourns relatives and friends who didn’t survive Argentina’s ‘dirty war’. During the years of General Jorge Videla’s dictatorship, from 1976 to 1981, about 30,000 opponents of the regime were persecuted and killed.

‘Death flights’ were one of the methods the junta used. Anthropologist Ton Robben has spent years researching the violent years under the military regime. Witnesses told him how political prisoners were held in Buenos Aires’ notorious ESMA navy college. Every Thursday, a five-strong committee came to the illicit prison to decide who was no more use to the intelligence services and could be got rid of.

“The next day those people were given an injection to make them drowsy. Then, they were taken by lorry to the airport. Between 20 and 40 people went per flight. The plane would take off and fly over the southern Atlantic. They’d be given a heavier injection, completely stupefying them. They were then undressed and thrown out of the plane.”

Bad upbringing
Mr Poch left Argentina to come to the Netherlands, working for the last 20 years as a pilot on international flights for Transavia. The 57-year-old often bragged to colleagues about how he had been in charge of ‘death flights’. He defended the Videla regime, calling its opponents terrorists whom Argentina wanted to obliterate.

Ms Moyano has had more than enough of the stories told to justify their deeds by those who worked for the junta:

“Those who did these things have even claimed that it was because they had been badly brought up by their mothers and other such nonsense. In order to justify what they’d done. But nothing justifies your tying a person up, electrocuting them, raping them, using appalling conditions to terrorise them and then, finally, shooting them, torturing them to death or strangling them.”

Following his arrest, Mr Poch is being held in Spain. Argentina will request his extradition. The Spanish authorities say he is charged on four counts involving the deaths of about 1000 people.