Luis María Mendía

Luis María Mendía (April 21, 1925 – May 2007) was the Argentine Chief of Naval Operations in 1976-77, with the rank of vice-admiral. According to confessions gathered by Horacio Verbitsky and made by Adolfo Scilingo (later sentenced to 640 years in prison in Spain), Luis María Mendía was the architect of the "death flight" assassination method (vuelos de la muerte) whereby the Argentine state disappeared people by throwing them out of aircraft over the ocean, thus making the retrieval of their corpses nearly impossible (and thus subsequent legal investigations unlikely). This method was set out in the Plancitara military plan of 1975, during Isabel Perón's government.

Luis María Mendía did not benefit from the amnesty laws enacted during the transition to democracy (full stop law and law of due obedience) but from an amnesty declared by president Carlos Menem in October 1989. However, he appeared before the courts for his role in the ESMA case, one of the largest concentration camps and torture centers used by the military. The ESMA case was reopened by the Argentine courts following the Supreme Court's 2003 decision declaring the amnesty laws anti-constitutional. Under house arrest because of his age (82 years old), in 2007 Luis María Mendía finally admitted before magistrate Sergio Torres "complete responsibility" for the security forces under his direction. He called his subordinates "heroes". He was also questioned in the case of the disappearances of two French nuns, Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, in which Alfredo Astiz (alias "Angel of Death") is also being prosecuted.

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