Luis María Mendía

According to confessions gathered by Horacio Verbitsky and made by Adolfo Scilingo (later sentenced to 640 years in prison in Spain), Luis María Mendía was the architect of the "death flight" assassination method (vuelos de la muerte) whereby the Argentine state disappeared people by throwing them out of aircraft over the ocean, thus making the retrieval of their corpses nearly impossible (and thus subsequent legal investigations unlikely).

Under house arrest because of his age (82 years old), in 2007 Luis María Mendía finally admitted before magistrate Sergio Torres "full responsibility" for the security forces under his direction.

Perseval, who lives today in Thailand, denied any links with the abduction, but did admit being a former member of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), and having escaped for Argentina after the March 1962 Evian Accords putting an end to the Algerian War (1954–62).

[7] Besides this "French connection," he has also charged former head of state Isabel Perón and former ministers Carlos Ruckauf and Antonio Cafiero, who had signed the "anti-subversion decrees" before Videla's 1976 coup d'état.

According to ESMA survivor Graciela Dalo, this is another tactic which pretends that these crimes were legitimate as the 1987 Obediencia Debida Act claimed them to be and that they also obeyed to Isabel Perón's "anti-subversion decrees" (which, if true, would give them a formal appearance of legality, despite torture being forbidden by the Argentine Constitution) [8]