It began as a meticulous plan. On the evening of 15 August 1972, a coordinated escape erupted at the prison in Rawson, the Chubut provincial capital, organized by imprisoned members of the ERP, the FAR, and the Montoneros. Six leaders reached Trelew's airport and boarded a hijacked airliner that carried them to Chile, and eventual safety. But the getaway cars meant for the rest never came; signals had been crossed. A second group of nineteen prisoners commandeered taxis and raced to the airfield - only to arrive in time to watch the plane lift off without them. Their escape over before it began, they did the one thing they believed might save their lives: they called a press conference and surrendered to the surrounding Navy, in front of journalists and a judge, trusting that witnesses would guarantee their safety.

It was a reasonable hope, and it failed. The prisoners asked to be returned to Rawson. Instead a patrol led them to the Almirante Zar naval air base, told them the move was temporary. The journalists, the judge, and the lawyers who had come as guarantors of their safety were turned away at the gate - too many people, the officers said. With the witnesses gone, the prisoners were alone with their captors. For six days the country held its breath as the government pressed Chile to return the escaped leaders, and a heavy military presence sealed off Rawson and Trelew. Behind the base's walls, nineteen people waited, stripped of the protection they had bargained for.

At half past three on the morning of 22 August, the nineteen were woken from their cells and led out. According to the three who survived to testify, they were forced to lie face down and then shot by a detachment under Lieutenant Commander Luis Emilio Sosa and Lieutenant Roberto Bravo. Most died at once. The wounded were finished where they lay. Sixteen people were killed; among them were Ana Maria Villarreal de Santucho, Clarisa Lea Place, Susana Lesgart, Maria Angelica Sabelli, Mariano Pujadas, and eleven others, each with a name, a family, a politics they had been willing to risk everything for. They had surrendered. They were unarmed. The official account insisted they had tried, once more, to escape - and that not a single sailor had been harmed.

The lie did not hold forever, though it held for a long time. That same night the government banned the press from even reporting on the dead. In the years that followed, the three survivors were themselves disappeared during the dictatorship that began in 1976, silenced before they could see justice. But others carried the memory. Not until 2012, three decades after democracy returned, did Argentine courts convict several of the officers responsible and sentence them to life, ruling the massacre a crime against humanity beyond the reach of any amnesty. One officer, Roberto Bravo, had fled to the United States in 1973; in July 2022, a jury in Florida found him liable for the killings. Fifty years on, the verdict the dead were denied finally arrived.