Argentina Junta during Falklands War - Massera, Emilio E. (Adm.)

Massera, Emilio E. (Adm.)

Code named Zero. Commander of the Navy. Member of the triumvirate (Videla, Massera, Agosti) that seized power on March 24th, 1976. During the formation of the task force to wipe out the left-wing, Massera delivered an inaugural address to the appointed officers which concluded with the exhortation to "react to the enemy with the utmost violence and without hesitating over the means employed."

Massera is known as the greatest appropriator of the "dirty war". Responsible for a massive appropriation of looted companies, homes and properties of disappeared people by means of extensive forgery of documents. One description of the method was given to the Buenos Aires Herald reporter, David Cox, in an interview with an abducted person who was forced by his captors into a collaborator, Miguel Angel Lauletta (1995):

How where the documents you made used?

 "Many participated in the sale of homes of the disappeared. A woman would tell me: make me some documents with these facts, and with the picture of such a person who is coming down to have his photograph taken. I would take the photo, make the document and the document was then taken to the officer who had requested it. It was said that with these papers they used the name of another person to sell property, the property of someone who disappeared."

"The boys should be compensated for the risks they run," Massera liked to say. When a prisoner was "sucked up" (kidnapped or "chupado" in spanish), his goods were sucked up as well, ending out in the Hold, a warehouse for books, TV sets, mattresses, washing machines, paintings, furniture, and clothes. One woman who was sent to work in the Fish Tank (an area in the ESMA so called for its transparent acrylic walls, where privileged prisoners, who agreed to colaborate with their captors used to work, monitored by closed circuit television) was greeted by her entire living-room set - wicker chairs and couch and a stereo - which was now in the Fish Tank's lounge. 

As commander of the Navy, Massera is responsible for at least 5,000 cases of torture and murders of people who passed through the ESMA ("Escuela Mechanica de la Armada," or The Navy Mechanics School), one of the most notorious of the dirty war detention centers. The ESMA was the last station for political prisoners before they were thrown alive into the Atlantic Ocean from Navy airplanes.

Admiral Massera was sentenced to life in prison by a civilian court on December 9, 1985 but was released after serving only 4 years of the sentence as a result of military pressure.