A trial involving almost 800 cases of human rights abuses during Argentina's 1976-1983 military junta is under way, chronicling the use of torture and murder during the dictatorship.
The trial, in Buenos Aires, "was, is and will be the largest trial of crimes against humanity" in Argentina, said rights lawyer Rodolfo Yanzon.
It documents 789 abuse cases and is the largest trial in the South American nation since 2003. It is being held in a packed Buenos Aires courtroom, presided over by Judge Daniel Obligado, as rights activists outside wave signs demanding justice be done, decades on.
Among the accused are, for the first time, men who piloted "death flights" on which abducted leftists opposing the regime, or thought to oppose it, were tossed alive into the Rio de la Plata, in the belief they would be killed without a trace.
About 30,000 people were kidnapped, tortured and killed in what became known as Argentina's "Dirty War", according to rights groups.
Victims included Montonero guerrillas, labour union leaders, students, leftist sympathisers and in some instances their relatives and friends.
The trial is part of an effort to probe torture and crimes against humanity committed at the notorious Naval Mechanics School. Only a fraction of the estimated 5000 regime opponents who were sent there survived.
The new trial is the third involving the school, and the biggest yet.
The "death flights" were among the more macabre innovations of Argentina's seven-year dictatorship.
The military planes that flew out over the wide Rio de la Plata returned missing many of their passengers: political prisoners who were drugged to sleep and thrown alive into the sea.
A group of pilots who allegedly flew the missions are among the 68 suspects who went on trial yesterday charged with participating in hundreds of kidnappings, tortures and murders inside the mechanics school.
The leafy campus, now a human rights museum, served as a huge clandestine prison during the junta's campaign to eliminate leftist subversives.
More than 5000 political prisoners were processed there, the vast majority of them made to disappear.
Rights activists long suspected that navy planes were used to dispose of bodies piling up at the school after corpses began washing up along the coast of Argentina and Uruguay. But their big break in the case came in 1995, when former Captain Adolfo Scilingo publicly confessed to throwing 30 victims into the sea during two flights. He was eventually sentenced to more than 1000 years in prison.
Among the cases on trial is that of Leonie Duquet, a French-born nun who was allegedly kidnapped and killed on a "death flight".
The bodies of Duquet and three members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo - a rights group helping regime victims - washed up on a beach in Buenos Aires province in 1977. Locals initially buried the women under headstones that read "SN", or "sin nombre" - "no name".
Other human rights trials have focused on former military and police officials, but this one also includes civilians.
Juan Alemann, Argentina's treasury secretary during the dictatorship, is accused of participating in a torture session. Attorney Gonzalo Torres de Tolosa allegedly joined a death flight.
A blanket pardon for dictatorship crimes was overturned in 2003, paving the way for lawsuits. In September a Crimes Against Humanity Board report found that between 2008 and July this year there were 61 trials for crimes committed by the military dictatorship, with 270 convictions.
The trial is expected to take about two years, and may bring in as many as 900 witnesses.
- AP, AFP