Avenger | 2. The Investigation

Hello, Avenger listeners, It's Steve Fishman and I'm really glad you've tuned in. I hope you love this show as much as we do. A quick word on an upcoming bonus episode. We're doing a bonus with Miriam, the real Miriam. We'll be asking her questions, your questions and getting answers. She'll update us on what's going on in her world and a lot has Please email your questions or thoughts or comments too. Info at Orbitmedia dot fm. Oh and Fisher Stevens can answer your questions too. He's our co

Thanks. Before we begin, please note that for this story we interviewed Medium and everyone else for dozens of hours in Spanish. We hired actors to voice their words in English. Also, this episode contains sensitive content and it's intended for mature audiences. Medium visits Giancadlo's apartment for the first time. It's two thousand and seven. They had met several days earlier at a cafe. This time he greets her with his very own freshly brewed coffee.

His apartment was very small, a minuscule kitchen, a single bathroom and just two rooms, a tiny living room and a bedroom with a working desk next to his bed.

But Jiancarlo's apartment did have one nice perk and.

I must window with a gorgeous view of the city. Sunsets were just stunning. We sat in his living room. He had these old armchairs from the sixties, not very comfortable, so kind of perfect. You didn't get too relaxed.

Medium was recommended to me by a fellow journalist. She had the insider knowledge of a survivor, so I wanted to know more about her.

And that's because Giancadlo really needs medium. When he first arrived in Argentina, he came out of boredom looking for adventure.

I always say that I became a photographer because it was the perfect excuse to go out and do something.

He soon found he had some relatives there and his connection deepened.

Then I saw a movie about the dictatorship. It hit me hard, the darkness and what he said about us as human beings.

He decided to stay and he wanted to focus on the hidden detention centers, photographing them, but he also knew he needed help. That's how he found medium. Gian Cadlo needs her to commit to an investigation. She will give his work legitimacy and authenticity. And she's a well known investigative reporter with access to more people in places than any Italian photographer could ever hope for.

Medium was just perfect for me. I wanted this to work, so all these questions, I thought of them like releasing a mosquito right next to her here, just to see how she would react.

He was prodding her, poking her, and knowing her to get a reaction.

Gian Carlo said that if we were going to work together, we had to know each other better. He was already assuming that me showing up was me agreeing to work with him. He pretended to care, telling me I didn't have to answer his questions if I didn't want to, But really he didn't care if they made me uncomfortable.

This is also a tactic on Jihan Cardlo's part.

I treated her like a person, not as a survivor, with respect, but not too much.

Really. Giancarlo is as too. He's nice when he needs to be, but he's after something. He needs to charm her into joining the investigation and into trusting him with the secrets of her past.

He wanted to know about my childhood, also about my anarchism, my kidnapping, and how I had survived. It was question after question. Honestly, I told him more about me than he did about himself, and he just seemed to share what was convenient for him.

I tell her that I grew up near an airport, how my father used to be friends with a pilot, so every Sunday it would take me to go to look at airplanes. I remember being amazed, completely hypnotized by the site.

He also pose to her a way to look at the past.

Growing up in Rome, having access to places like the coliseum, It's always been so easy for me to give a soul to things and places. Rok will live longer than me, it will stay, I will die, So I look at objects and places like their witnesses.

Jihangadlo tells her he wants to document Argentina's dictatorship through photographs, a book that will show the victims, their faces, their truths for all the world to see. And also he wants to show the tools used to disappear people, like the planes that flew the death flights. Jiangadlo has an obsession about tracking down those planes, those witnesses to history.

I feel like our roles were reversed. Like he is the young storyteller asking the big questions, but I am the one that should be questioning him. That gives me a lot of pause. But as I keep talking, my doubts, my distrust start to disappear. He's so informal, so open, so earnest, that I give in me the experienced investigative reporter. I let myself get recruited by this Danito, this charming Italian guy.

And from there I revealed my cooking and coffee making scales, and it was like a switch. We start paving the way for the investigation with lots of food, lots of pasta.

His house became a whole new universe for me. We would alternate between my cigarettes and the ones he rolled by hand, and that amazing coffee he Brew. We became friends and developed, I would say a very intense relationship. We decided to start looking for the planes together.

From Orbit Media, I'm Andre Skawa Shadow. This is Avenger, the story of Medium Lewin. Episode two, the investigation. Medium arrives at Jiangado's apartment that first time with a lureful Cilingo's book in hand. Silingo is the former Navy officer you heard of in the last episode. Giancarlo had given her that book on their first meeting at a cafe.

The day Giancarlo gave me the book, I got home, put on some music, poured myself a glass of wine, and spent the entire night reading and smoking.

Marlboroughs it sounds as if she's reading a romance novel, except she isn't. Silingo's book is about death and planes. It's a first person nareed, a confession by a man who helped kill hundreds of people by tossing them out of planes into the ocean.

Such a bizarre looking thing. This cover, it's salmon pink, like the one they use for trashy romantic novels. Then the title Porciannuca mas Forever never More with exclamation marks.

In his book, medium read for the first time an account of a death flight from the point of view of a murder. He writes about the thirteen prisoners inside the plane. They're heavily sedated, lying on the floor. A doctor opens this wooden box filled with syringes and injects the prisoners with a second dose of tranquilizer Finande. That's the actual audio of alol Fosilingo retelling his experience through a television interview. The doctor gives them a powerful doze.

At one point Silingo slips and almost falls out of the plane.

He almost tumbles out the rear cargo door. For the next death flight. He attaches himself with a rope to the inside of the plane's door, and I read.

The descriptions of people being injected with tranquil visers.

Medium had never come across such a vivid account of the actual mechanics of this killing machine. In his book, Silingo even recounted the procedure for preparing prisoners at the detention center. Twenty five people, men and women were lined up in the dark hallway of a basement. No one said a word. A Junta officer put on loud music and forced them to dance. Then the doctor injected them with the first dose of tranquilizer. Little by little, the

Then details of people being transferred on trucks and loaded on planes.

It was all terrifying, But for Medium and Giancarlo the book served another purpose. They find some clues.

Silingo literally lays out the specific models of the planes, like the sky Van.

No one had dug into these details yet, including Medium, one of Argentina's top journalists. The names and models of the planes, they were all there overlooked for years. In jian Cadlo's apartment, they work side by side. It's intimate. The apartment is so small that Medium often spreads her work on gian Cadlo's bed when there's no room on his desk.

The fact I would spend my free, very limited time working on this investigation, an investigation that's based on my own story, it really motivated me, you know, and I felt comfortable with Giancarlo, and he knew how to give back.

Jian Cadlo is a master multitasker, cooking amazing Italian dinners while going over his findings from the day's work. It's like the investigation into these hidden crimes is being fueled by good food, coffee, and cigarettes.

We were like an actual couple. That's the type of relationship we had, but without the sex. Like a good couple, we understood each other, we had common goals, and we had each other's backs.

Medium is older than Jiancardlo by a dozen years, but they meet at a time when they're both going through difficult moments in their personal lives.

We were both sort of broken, and I guess we were each feeling a void with our relationship.

Medium's boyfriend had left her for a younger woman, and Jiancadlo was going through his own difficulties. Little by little, in between the investigation and the tangents where they went on about their personal lives, they start to build trust and the investigation starts gaining momentum. Now that they have the names of the planes, they begin to learn more about them.

These planes can dispose of their cargo in flight. For example, the sky Van, which is a pretty small plane, has a rather large rear door.

In this plane, the sky Van doesn't look like most small planes. It's rectangular shaped with two propellers. It's nicknamed the flying shoe Box. It also has this spacious cabin.

You would never say this is a beautiful plane. On the contrary, it's horrible. It looks like a big bird with a big beak and a giant belly.

And she becomes obsessed with the planes. They're possible smoking guns.

I was hooked and this suddenly changed the way I saw Giancarlo from who does this foreigner think he is asking all these questions to the sky might be riot, it's an outsider, but it probably sees things we don't see.

But Giancarlo wasn't just a support for Medium. He doesn't just have her back. He has his own agenda.

So he started asking me questions about the dictatorship, about my time in captivity.

Medium knows what he's trying to get at, but she's uneasy about her past. These are painful memories. She still trusts Giancarlo, and she tells him about her kidnapping.

I'm at this bus stop in Buenos Aires and I'm in survival mode. I start fighting back, screaming, you know, yelling my name and my mother's phone number as loud as I could, and people want to help me. But then the men pull out their guns and they scare everybody away.

It's May nineteen seventy seven, a year since the military coup in Argentina. In a group of armed men and playing clothes surround Medium.

Then they drag me into the back of the Ford Falcon and they take off. They put a hood on me. I could hear them talking through a radio, and they start insulting me, calling me a bitch. They knew my name, they knew exactly who I was, and there was clearly a sort of perversed excitement inside that car.

She's blindfolded and forced out of the car.

They make me go up some stairs. They lead me into a room, make me take off my clothes. Then they tie me to a table with my hands and feet crossed. They take off my blindfold, and I see a guy with green eyes staring at me. He's balding, probably in his thirties, and he says, Medium, look at me. I'm responsible for your life and your death. As long as you cooperate with us, nothing will happen to you.

Ten men standing there, just staring at Medium.

One of them talks right into my ear while holding my hand and caressing my hair. Others start insulting me. How many abortions did you have? How many men did you sleep with? I start panicking, and while one guy is trying to calm me down, another screaming at me, and another starts fondling me.

One guy brings over a plastic bag and puts it over Medium's head. When she starts to asphyxiate, he removes it.

I kept telling myself to stay calm. I knew they just wanted information, so I focused on breathing, deep breath.

But it's not over. She sees an electric crod just.

The crackling sound itself, it was terrifying, and then the electric shock. It was unbearable.

One afternoon, Giangadlo and Medium are in the apartment. There's coffee cigarettes enrolled by Giancarlo. There's the big window with that beautiful view of the city, the trees.

We were reading and carefully rereading every detail, looking for clues that would lead to the plains.

But Giancarlo has more questions. Things he has to know, no matter how rude or painful the questions are to Medium, did Medium know about the death flights? What she was in captivity?

Some details about people being transferred came up, So I asked her, did you have any idea that this was happening while you were in captivity?

This is a delicate moment. That first day of her captivity, that Green Night official had told Medium that she must cooperate or die. So what did cooperation entail?

I mean? As prisoners of the junta, we had no official knowledge of the death flights? Well, we weren't sure they were real. We didn't know.

But Jiancarlo presses Medium, So when exactly did you first hear or suspect about people being thrown from planes?

Into the sea. Every Wednesday, they transferred prisoners to what they claimed was a medical facility in Patagonia. That's where they would be reformed, and then eventually they were told they would be reintegrated to society. Later, we saw their shoes and their shirts pants. We wondered what actually had happened to them. When we asked, our captors told us they had to change clothes. But one day a prisoner

So you did know about the death flights.

Like I said, we didn't really know for sure, and we didn't want to believe it. We chose to be in denial. It made living in those horrible conditions a little bit less horrible. It's like a survival mechanism. It's like a patient with terminal cancer. They know they're going to die, but they latch onto every little bit of hope they can find. They're not constantly thinking about how they're going to die, so they'll try anything to stay alive.

Giancarlo is quiet. He's a good listener in his apartment. It's getting late, I can say.

One of the things that hurts the most is not having closure around the deaths of my friends. It always leads me to ask myself, why did I survive? The truth is, I don't think I'll ever be able to answer that question. But now I feel like this investigation could help me understand that a little better, and it could help bring those who murdered so many people to justice.

Weeks after her kidnapping in nineteen seventy seven, medium sits in a small, dirty, makeshift cell. There's a door with a few small holes to let oxygen in, but she isn't really there.

I would often imagine I was remodeling my dream apartment inside my grandmother's building. I had always dreamed of moving into that apartment with.

One juan Is Davis, the activists she had fallen in love with in episode one. They had just been married and gone underground not long before the coup, the daydreaming is cut short. The torture has stopped, but her captors grill her constantly. They want information about her comrades. They make her call the safe house, to which she reported every day when she was underground.

Nobody would want to talk to me. I had obviously missed my daily check ins for weeks, so every time I called they answered, but they knew I was compromised, and they just ended the call.

But every day they brought a phone to her cell.

Every day, they insisted. Every day they brought the phone, and I told them it was pointless to keep calling. But one day, out of the blue, the person that picked up the phone at the safe house answered my call with a code for a meeting.

In the next episode, Argentina is chosen to host the World Cup, the biggest sports event out there, right in the middle of the repression, with the entire world watching.

The stadium was just blocks away. I felt helpless. It was painful because the World Cup blinded all argent Times from what was happening, and we the disappeared. We were the number one victims of that blindness.

From Orbit Media, This is Avenger, the story of Medium Lewin I'm Your Host and senior producer Andrescavacheo. The series was produced by Seguielrodrie Sandino and edited by Monica Campbell. Original score Nicolas Pachela, mixing and mastering Christopher Hoff and Austin Smith. Assistant producers Andres Feschtenholz and Eleanna Gillespie, FactCheck

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