Because the bodies were effectively disposed of there is little or no information as to how many died.

In the mid 1990's, Adolfo Francisco Scilingo, a retired navy commander, provided details. He said the military dictatorship disposed of hundreds of people during dirty war by dumping them, unconscious but alive, into the ocean from airplanes.

Once the government was finished interrogating the prisoners, they were bused to the airport and told they'd be flown to a prison. First, the prisoners were given shots they were told were vitamins. The the shots actually contained drugs that put them to sleep. These people were then loaded onto airplanes and flown hundreds of miles over the ocean. Their clothes were stripped off and the bodies cast into the abyss.

In his account, published in the Argentine newspaper Pagina 12, Scilingo said he took part in "death flights" in 1977. He said most other officers at the Navy School of Mechanics in Buenos Aires, took part in the flights. He estimated that the navy conducted the flights every Wednesday for two years, 1977 and 1978, and that 1,500 to 2,000 people were killed.

"I am responsible for killing 30 people with my own hands," Mr. Scilingo said. "But I would be a hypocrite if I said that I am repentant for what I did. I don't repent because I am convinced that I was acting under orders and that we were fighting a war."

He said that after his first flight, in which he slipped and almost fell through the portal from which he was throwing bodies, he became so distraught that he confessed his actions to a military priest, who absolved him, saying the killings "had to be done to separate the wheat from the chaff."

"At first it didn't bother me that I was dumping these bodies into the ocean because as far as I was concerned they were war prisoners," Mr. Scilingo said in the interview.

"There were men and women, and I had no idea who they were or what they had done. I was following orders. I did not get too close to the prisoners, and they had no idea what was going to happen to them."