Ana Becerra Arce stands in a clearing at the site of a former detention and death camp in central Chile where she was held prisoner in 1975.
“This was where the helicopters took off,” she says, pointing to the outlines of a now-overgrown landing pad. The spot – remote but just meters from the sands of Santo Domingo beach – was ideal for General Augusto Pinochet’s secret police to discreetly board prisoners on to their fleet of Puma helicopters before flying out over the sea, and casting them – still alive – into the water.
Such “death flights” were part of a campaign to forcibly disappear political dissidents, carried by military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. Officers would often drug or beat victims before throwing from aircraft into lakes, rivers and seas.
But attempts to bring a prosecution for Chile’s very first such flight foundered as investigators never had access to a key piece of evidence: the helicopter involved was sold by the military in 2003 and shipped to the UK.
Today, its rusting fuselage currently sits in the pine forests of Horsham, Sussex, where, in a bizarre and gruesome twist, it now serves as a prop in an airsoft park.
Families of the disappeared expressed revulsion on hearing that the aircraft where their relatives lived their last moments was now being used for recreation and called for it be returned to Chile as a monument to Pinochet’s victims.
“That helicopter is stained with blood,” said Gaby Rivera, president of the Association of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD). “Of course it should not be in an amusement park.”
Chile’s first known death flight took place in October 1973, a month into Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. Three of Becerra Arce’s political comrades – Luis Fernando Norambuena Fernandois, Gustavo Manuel Farías Vargas and Ceferino del Carmen Santis Quijada – were forced on to a Puma with the registration H-255, bound to a length of metal railing and then, 20 minutes later, thrown into the Pacific Ocean.
In 2001, the Chilean army admitted to killing more than 100 people with the same method during Pinochet’s rule. But efforts to identify victims and perpetrators have been hamstrung by the armed force’s lacklustre co-operation. It was only in 2018 that a former brigadier and three pilots were officially named as suspects for the forced disappearance of the three men
But the case remains open as investigators never had access to a key piece of evidence: H-255. Stripped of its electronics, wings and blades, the helicopter’s empty hulk is the centrepiece of a game called “Heli Domination” at the Dogtag Airsoft park, where participants use low-power airguns to simulate combat.
“There’s a massive Heli in the middle, whoever can touch [it for] the most amount of time will be the winner,” says a staff member in a video filmed earlier this year. An online review for the park enthuses: “Any site where you legitimately say ‘get to da choppa’ is on to a winner.”
Rivera said that Chile’s army should have made the helicopter available to investigators, and called on officials to finally supply the names of all those who were thrown into the sea. “We demand the total truth and full justice,” she said.
Sebastián Velásquez, who represents the families of Norambuena and Gustavo Farías Vargas, said that a vital piece of evidence like H-255 never should have left Chile.
Velásquez, a lawyer at the memory and justice organisation Londres 38, said that while the army systematically destroyed evidence relating to dictatorship-era crimes, H-255 remained intact until 2003.
But it was hastily sold around the time of the first state-led investigations into the dictatorship’s crimes, which, Velasquéz said, “is cause for suspicion”.
He called on the Chilean government to bring the helicopter home to “serve as a memorial of the horror”.
UK-based publication Helicopter International reported that H-255 was purchased by the British company Askari Aeroparts around 2003. It “made a couple of appearances in 2005 at local air shows” but was subsequently broken up for spare parts.
Dogtag Airsoft owner Ross Beare said he was unaware of the Puma’s dark past until he was contacted by the Guardian.
“I took delivery of the dismantled aircraft in November 2014. It was just the empty fuselage and tail shell,” he said.
Beare said he “simply knew it was in the Chilean air force” and that the helicopter is “now looking rather sorry for itself” after being in the woodland for almost a decade.
“I’m not sure I shall be able to look at it in the same way again or how I will feel when my young son wants to sit in it and given now I know its history,” he said in an email.
Chile has been slow to recognise the brutality of the Pinochet era, unlike neighbouring Argentina, which has taken decisive steps to condemn those responsible for crimes against humanity during its 1976-83 military dictatorship.
In June, a former Argentine “death flight” plane was returned from the USA to Argentina to be displayed in the Buenos Aires Museum of Memory. The plane, Skyvan PA-51, was located in the USA with its flight log intact, a vital piece of evidence that led to the conviction of three pilots.
But the possibility of prosecuting those guilty of the atrocities committed on H-255 appear increasingly distant. With the helicopter reduced to a weathered shell, many clues have been erased. The flight log has never been located.
In 2018, Emilio Robert De La Mahotiere González, accused of piloting the first H-255 death flight, was charged for 20 years for participating in several other execution campaigns during the Pinochet regime. He served only three years in a comfortable prison facility, and is carrying out the rest of his 20-year sentence under house arrest. His daughter, Chantal Robert de la Mahotiere, is a rightwing politician who unsuccessfully ran for election to write Chile’s new constitution earlier this year and has lobbied to scrap convictions against Pinochet-era officials.
Becerra Arce said the helicopter should be erected in front of La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace as a memorial to the democratically elected government which Pinochet helped topple.
Standing at the former heliport, she recalled Luis Fernando, Gustavo and Ceferino – the three men who were forced onto H-255. She knew them personally; one had even visited her house. She last saw them in a prison camp, where they waved to one another from a distance.
“Then one day they were taken and they didn’t come back.”
