When Jaime Dri realized he was being held at the ESMA death camp, one thing became very clear to him: he would never make it out alive. 

It was late December, 1977, and the military junta that ruled the country was at its peak. Dri, a former provincial congressman in Chaco and a political official within the Montoneros guerrilla organization, had been kidnapped on December 15 in Montevideo, Uruguay, by local armed forces. 

His capture had been yet another operation within the framework of Operation Condor, a covert campaign by South American military dictatorships to coordinate kidnappings and assassinations of political opponents across borders.Dri was waterboarded and shocked with electric prods for days at a black site in Carrasco. In very poor shape, he was flown to Buenos Aires’ Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), Argentina’s largest clandestine center of detention, torture and extermination. 

While on the plane, he begged for water, but his captors told him he was still under the effects of electricity. A drink of water could kill him.

“It’s OK,” he answered, “I’ll be drinking plenty of water when I’m down in the River Plate.”He wasn’t just making a dark joke. Earlier that year, journalist and writer Rodolfo Walsh had published his Open Letter to the Military Dictatorship, revealing, among other things, that the dictatorship’s extermination plan included throwing kidnapped dissidents alive from airplanes into the ocean. 

The day before Dri was captured, Mothers of Plaza de Mayo founder Azucena Villaflor and French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet — who had been abducted by Navy forces several days before — had been boarded into one of these “death flights” together with a dozen desaparecidos. 

Days later, the remains of Villaflor, Duquet and three others washed up on the shores of Buenos Aires’ province. Their identification in 2005 by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team helped prove the actual existence of the death flights in court. 

Dri was taken to the ESMA death camp, where he discovered several of his fellow militants whom he believed killed had been kept alive. Junta leader and Admiral Emilio Massera had decided to spare some of the desaparecidos and turn them into a political “staff” for his own presidential project. 

Given that some of them had become active collaborators, Dri envisioned a survival strategy where he started simulating he had also “flipped”. It was a blurry line and Dri often hesitated about whether he was actually collaborating simply by simulating. 

It was, however, the only way he could stay alive long enough to do what he needed to: escape.

After a grim Christmas Eve in ESMA’s Capucha — an attic where prisoners were kept in small cubicles, hooded and shackled on thin mattresses — Dri was “lended˝ to the Army and taken to Quinta de Funes, a clandestine center in Rosario that felt deceptively open. 

It was a country villa, with two houses and a huge park. Detainees mingled with intelligence officers, shared meals, and even ate asado together. As Dri sustained a constant performance in order to survive, this looser regime allowed him to actually start conceiving potential escape plans.

Read more of the Herald’s coverage of the 50th anniversary of the 1976 military coup here

His time in Funes coincided with Tulio “Tucho” Valenzuela, a major of the Montoneros guerrilla whom the military had kidnapped along with his family, including his pregnant wife Raquel Negro. 

Valenzuela would become part of a singular episode himself. In Funes, army generals — including future junta leader Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri — talked him into becoming a double agent and murdering the leaders of the guerrilla group in Mexico. 

Tucho accepted and was flown with a handful of military spies, who would carry out the hit after he brought them near the Montoneros High Council. 

Once in Mexico City, Major Valenzuela managed to alert Montoneros and gave a press conference, revealing that the Argentine dictatorship had sent a death squad to assassinate political opponents. This triggered a major diplomatic conflict for the Argentine junta, and the Navy was forced to quickly shut down Quinta de Funes. 

Dri and Raquel were then moved to other black sites, where they devised an escape plan together. But Dri was transferred before they could carry it out. Raquel gave birth to a girl and a boy in a military hospital in Paraná, who were both stolen by her captors. 

The girl recovered her true identity in 2008, but her brother remains one of the hundreds of stolen babies currently sought by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. Raquel remains missing.

Dri never saw any of the prisoners from Quinta de Funes ever again. The Army spared him because he was considered Navy property — he was not theirs to kill. 

In early March of 1978, he was taken back to ESMA, deep inside the whale of Admiral Massera’s scheme to use former Montoneros militants as informants and advisors. That bizarre coexistence and constant simulation among army intelligence agents, active traitors, and simulating detainees were neatly depicted in Miguel Bonasso’s 1983 novel Recuerdo de la Muerte, which focuses on Dri’s journey as a desaparecido.The dictatorship was about to host the 1978 World Cup in Argentina and faced a clear danger: Montoneros had announced they would both conduct military attacks to visibly disrupt the event in front of the whole world and alert the international media coming to Argentina about the thousands of dictatorship killings.The junta devised a plan to send captured militants to the borders so they would spot and alert the military about any former comrades coming in through customs. Dri saw this as an opportunity. He worked hard to build the image of a fervent collaborator so that the head of the ESMA death squad, Captain Jorge “Tigre” Acosta, would send him to fulfill that task.

He was finally flown to Puerto Pilcomayo, a border town on the Paraguay river in Formosa that sat right across from Itá Enramada, the southernmost neighborhood of Paraguay’s capital Asunción. Water rafts were constantly coming back and forth, transporting people, cars, and petty smuggling. 

Dri spent a few days there alongside other ESMA detainees and a military guard, with a relative freedom to move yet being constantly surveilled. During his uneventful stay, pretending to be a customs agent, he managed to survey the area and evaluate the best ways to cross. 

He remembered the name of a person he knew in Asunción. He managed to secretly get hold of a Paraguayan phonebook from a makeshift bar on the pier. He found the name and wrote down the man’s phone and address, just in case. 

Then luck struck. A fresh batch of “markers” came from Buenos Aires with a new guard, a very young, inexperienced officer. 

On July 19, 1978, his teenage guard noticed they had run out of cigarettes and suggested to Dri they could cross and buy them cheaper in Paraguay.

Dri’s heart started pounding. He struggled to look calm. 

“Are you sure we can leave the post? Won’t we get in trouble?” he said, faking a responsible tone.

“Sure, we’ll be right back,” the guard said.Dri took a chance and suggested that he leave the gun behind, claiming that scuffles between Argentine and Paraguayan militaries were regular occurrences — which they actually were. Surprisingly, the young man agreed. 

Once in Paraguay, Dri pressed on, and said they should take a bus to downtown Asunción where they could buy a whole pack, which would be much cheaper. Again, the guard agreed.

Walking on the streets of Asunción with an unarmed guard, Dri was one decision away from freedom. He made it and did what he had been thinking for almost two years: he suddenly sprinted away. 

He managed to get in a taxi, but his guard got a hold of him. They fought in the back seat, Dri screaming he was a Peronist political prisoner. When the man stopped the car, he managed to escape while the guard argued with the driver. Exhausted, he got inside a young couple’s car, invented a story about an accident and had them drive to his old friend’s house.The man, whose identity Dri never revealed, helped him reconnect with his Panamanian wife and organize his way to Panama City, where she was waiting for him together with his two children. He had been a desaparecido for almost two years. 

Dri denounced his entire ordeal and detailed the ESMA workings before the international media in Europe. Decades later, he became a key witness in several trials for crimes against humanity against his torturers and other dictatorship agents.

He ended up spending the rest of his life in Panama as a university professor. He died in 2025.  

The only man to ever escape the infamous ESMA death camp and survive, Jaime “Pelado” Dri used to remember that as a political militant he had only two certainties: the first one was that being a freedom fighter meant you had to be willing to give your life for the cause. 

“The other one was that every political prisoner has a moral obligation to escape.”

*Updated on March 23, 12:17 p.m.

© Buenos Aires Herald