 Luis María Mendía

Luis María Mendía (April 21, 1925 – May 13, 2007) was the Argentine Chief of Naval Operations in 1976-77, with the rank of vice-admiral.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).