A Story of Two Isles - the Falklands - part 10 - A Hijacked Airliner

On September 28th of 1966, a new incident had both Argentina and the Falklands in suspense. A whole airliner, belonging to Aerolíneas Argentinas, had been hijacked and the situation was threatening to become an international incident. The "Operation Condor", as was the name which their members had given it, had begun. Inside the Douglas DC-4 LV-AGG plane from Aerolíneas Argentinas, there were 18 youngsters(17 males and a female) with a mission. They were laying low, some of them even concealing weapons under priest´s cassocks. They belonged to a ultra nationalist argentinian group and they were mostly Peronists(A proscrited party back then). Dardo Cabo, also known as Lito, a tall and thin young man who just turned 25, was a journalist and a metallurgic union(syndicate) delegate, he was also the head of the operation. His second in command was Alejandro Giovenco, of 21 years old, a short stocky guy nicknamed "Nearsighted" because of his thick glasses. They both entered the cabin with guns and ordered the plane´s commander to change course. The pilot obeyed, and the plane, with 35 passengers onboard, changed its heading to the Falklands. Amongst the many passengers of the plane was the argentinian governor of the National Territory of Tierra del Fuego, Antartida and Islands of the Southern Atlantic, the rear admiral José María Guzmán. In the same plane also travelled the entrepeneur and journalist Héctor Ricardo Garcia, which owned the Crónica newspaper. The youngsters had already calculated everything: The hijacking of the airplane, the surprise landing, and each member had its assignments revised meticulously. The airplane landing was pretty spectacular, its commander Ernesto Fernandez had to land it with a gun to his head and in a 800m long horsetrack, avoiding high tension cables, near the governor´s home, curiously very close to where just a few years earlier Miguel Fitzgerald had descended. The airplane slowly came to a stop, while curious kelpers gathered around. After quickly taking them hostages, the youngsters renamed the city to "Puerto Rivero"(Rivero Port), honoring the famous Gaucho Rivero(do you remember him? we spoke about him previously in this saga), and raised the argentinian flag. The original idea was to split into three groups and take the governor´s house, the civic center and the millitary center. Controlling all that, they would effectively control the islands. But as life has a tendency to show us: not everything develops as the way we intend it to, and they learned that lesson as well as soon as they were surrounded by approximately 50 members of the self-defense force of the islands, and they have to entrench inside the plane. From there onwards, a tense negotiation was conducted by the island priest, Father Rodolfo Roel. After a few hours, the plane´s passengers were hosted in some of the private homes of the town. However, the hijackers still had several kelpers as hostages, and a circle of british soldiers were pointing their rifles at them. Onganía, the de facto "president" of Argentina at the time, and I put it in quotes because the country was under a Millitary Dictatorship, qualified the condors as pirates, and said that the maximum penalty would be applied as son as they were returned. The priest made them come to their senses: "You have already accomplished your objective. You have raised the argentinian flag here and you put the Falklands in the front page of your newspapers". And so, they made a deal, if they deposed their weapons, they would be given assylum in the local church. All of this happened, but the rebels didn´t surrender their weapons to the british because they didn´t want to reaffirm the british sovereignty over the islands. Instead of that, they handed over all their weapons to the airliner pilot. The next day, the youngsters embarqued in the "Bahia Buen Suceso" ship, but as soon as they sailed away from the coast, they were arrested. They spent the next 9 months in a prison in Rio Gallegos(Santa Cruz Province, Argentina). They would have had to spend many more months there, but their act had awakened a nationalist fervor in the people and in the streets they were lauded as heroes, so the judges went easy on them. These rebels had a dark side however, since in the following years they would be involved in several guerilla acts. Dardo Cabo would die in 1977 during a simulated prison escape, and his second Alejandro Giovenco died in broad Corriented Avenue(One of the principal avenues of Buenos Aires) while carrying a bomb in his briefcase. Their heroic nationalist act was recognized beyond their connection to clandestine violence, and its why today there is a street named "Dardo Cabo" and another one named "Operativo Condor"(Condor Operation) in the Buenos Aires province in Argentina.