Alice Domon

In 2012 an Argentinian prosecutor filed charges against the Dutch-Argentinian pilot Julio Poch for flying the navy plane which supposedly dumped Domon, Duquet and three other women into the Atlantic Ocean.

In 2011, Alfredo Astiz, who had infiltrated the Mothers of the Plaza and organized the abduction of the twelve in December 1977, was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for that and other crimes against humanity. For his torturing at ESMA, he had been nicknamed "The Blond Angel of Death."

Astiz also went to trial. On 27 October 2011, Alfredo Astiz was convicted by an Argentinian court and sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity committed during the Dirty War.

In July 2005, the Chief of Police of General Lavalle informed Cattani that they had identified more unmarked graves in the town cemetery. Judge Cattani ordered that new excavations be carried out by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, who discovered two rows of graves side-by-side. They found eight skeletons: five female, two male, and one uncertain (classified as "probably male").

In 2003 during the administration of President Nestor Kirchner, Congress repealed the Pardon Laws. The Argentine Supreme Court ruled they were unconstitutional, and the government re-opened cases of war crimes during the Dirty War. In 2006 Miguel Etcholatz was the first former officer convicted and sentenced to life in a new series of trials. Prosecutions continued.

In 2000, a small plaza in Buenos Aires was named "Hermana Alice Domon y Hermana Leonie Duquet," in honor of the sisters. Their lives are celebrated in an annual commemoration at the Santa Cruz church of San Cristobal, where they had worked and where the remains of Duquet and several Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo are buried.

El Infiltrado: La Verdadera Historia de Alfredo Astiz, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1996, by Uki Goñi (in Spanish)

During this period, in 1990, Captain Alfredo Astiz was convicted in France of kidnapping Duquet and Domon, and sentenced in absentia to life in prison by the Appellate Court in Paris. At that time, the bodies of the two women had not been found, so he could not be charged with murder.

From that point on, Judge Horacio Cattani began to accumulate cases about desaparecidos. Passage in 1986 and 1987 of the Ley de Punto Final and the Ley de Obediencia Debida, respectively, caused an end to the investigation. By 1995, Cattani had collected an archive of 40 square meters containing potential answers to questions about the missing bodies.

Sister Alice was taken directly to the secret detention center in the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics (ESMA), under the control of the Argentina Navy. She was said to be have been put in detention wearing a hood that cut off all sight. She was held for approximately 10 days, during which she was constantly tortured and interrogated. Horacio Domingo Maggio and Lisandro Raúl Cubas, survivors of detention at the ESMA, related what they knew on the subject in testimony to the national commission in 1985:

After democracy was restored, the government held a national commission to collect testimony from survivors about desaparacedos and treatment at the hands of military and security forces. In 1985, the government tried the top former officers of the military in the Trial of the Juntas. Investigations had been made of hundreds of other officers. Under threat of a military coup, the Congress passed legislation known as the "Pardon Laws" in 1986 and 1987, ending prosecution and establishing a kind of amnesty for acts on both sides during the Dirty War.

After the restoration of democracy in 1984, the investigations of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons and the 1985 Trial of the Juntas led to the exhuming of graves in the cemetery of General Lavalle, searching for evidence related to war crimes. Skeletal remains were found belonging to some cadavers found in 1977 and later on the beaches of San Bernardo and Lucila del Mar. The remains were used in the trial against the Juntas and then stored in sixteen bags.

Secret government documents from the United States Government declassified in 2002 show that the US Ambassador to Argentina advised the State Department in March 1978 that bodies washed up on beaches of Buenos Aires Province likely included those of missing French nationals, the nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet; as well as three founders of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo: Azucena Villaflor, Esther Ballestrino and María Ponce, and two other mothers. As noted in the memo, this was based on reports by Agence France-Presse, published in French and international papers on 28 March 1978 and a reliable source within the government. Apparently this information was kept secret.

This is documented in formerly-classified Document #1978-BUENOS-02346 written by the former U.S. Ambassador to Argentina, Raúl Castro, to the Secretary of State of the United States, dated 30 March 1978, with the subject line "Report of nuns death". The document reads:

According to witnesses who saw her there, over a period of about 10 days she was interrogated and tortured, forced to write a letter claiming participation in guerrilla group opposing the government, and photographed in a staged setting in front of a Montoneros banner. That group of detainees, including Sister Léonie Duquet, was "transferred", a euphemism for being taken out and killed. Bodies washed up on beaches south of Buenos Aires in December 1977 and were quickly buried in mass graves, but a March 1978 Agence France-Presse article reported that the bodies of the missing two French nuns and others associated with the Mothers were believed to have been among them.

In December 1977, Sisters Alice and Léonie, along with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other human rights activists, prepared a request for the names of those who disappeared and for the government to divulge their whereabouts. The reply was publicized in the newspaper La Nación on 10 December 1977, the day Alice Domon disappeared. The name Gustavo Niño was found among the signatures as a false name, used in May by navy captain Alfredo Astiz, to infiltrate the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

Between Thursday 8 and Saturday 10 December 1977, a group under the command of Alfredo Astiz, a Marine captain and intelligence officer, kidnapped a group of 12 people connected with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Among them were the French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, along with Azucena Villaflor and two other founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Astiz had infiltrated the group, posing as a family member of a desaparacido and using a false name.

On 15 December 1977 La Nación published a notice from the EFE news agency entitled "Vivas y con buena salud" (Alive and in good health). The article reported that the Mother Superior of the Congregation in France said that the Sisters Léonie and Alice had been detained but remained alive and in good health. She said the information came from the Papal Nuncio in Argentina.

On either 17 or 18 December 1977, the two sisters and the rest of their group were trasladadas ("transferred": a euphemism used by the military when murdering dissidents) to the military airport in Buenos Aires. They were put in a Marine plane and thrown out of the plane while still alive, landing in the sea off the coast of Santa Teresita, where they died as soon as they hit the water.

As a result of forensic DNA studies in August 2005, the five female remains were found to belong to five of the women captured between 8 and 10 December 1977: Azucena Villaflor, María Ponce de Bianco, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, Angela Auad, and Sister Léonie Duquet. All of them have since been buried in the garden of the Santa Cruz church in Buenos Aires. No evidence has been found for the remains of Alice Domon.

Domon was a member of a group directed by Father Ismael Calcagno, first cousin of Jorge Rafael Videla, the dictator in power from 1976 to 1981, at the time of both the kidnapping and the murder. Alice Domon and her fellow nun Léonie Duquet were introduced to Videla because he needed assistance for his son Alejandro, a disabled child whom they taught and looked after in the Casa de la Caridad in Morón. In Buenos Aires the two sisters devoted their time to social work amongst the inhabitants of the city’s poorest townships. Alice Domon was assigned there along with Léonie Duquet, a French religious sister with whom she established a deep friendship.

Following the military coup of 24 March 1976, the junta began extreme repression of political opponents and state terrorism. Domon decided to get involved with human rights organizations. Upon her return to Corrientes, she lodged at Léonie Duquet's house.

Domon was dedicated to her social work with the inhabitants of shanty towns. In 1971 she went to Corrientes in order to collaborate with the Ligas Agrarias organization, which was formed by the small producers of cotton.

Alice Domon was born in Charquemont in France's Doubs region. As a girl she entered the Paris Foreign Missions Society. It invited her to Argentina in 1967, where she lived in Hurlingham and Morón, of the industrial corridor of Buenos Aires. She taught catechism to handicapped persons and worked with the poor.

Alicia Domon (23 September 1937 – 17 or 18 December 1977) was a French nun who was one of two French nationals in Argentina to be "disappeared" in December 1977 by the military dictatorship of the National Reorganization Process. She was among a dozen people associated with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group, who were kidnapped and taken to the secret detention center at ESMA.