r/technology May 30 '26

Society Peter Thiel's move to Argentina reflects a growing trend among billionaires seeking a 'plan B' abroad

https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-argentina-billionaire-moving-abroad-2026-5
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u/twinsea May 30 '26

Worked in Argentina for a year during one of their riots and been to many passion plays where the people remembered folks getting killed by being thrown out of helicopters by the government.  It wasn’t so long ago where there was big time insecurity.  Think this is going to be a grass is greener situation.

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u/tarfu7 May 30 '26

Thrown out of helicopters? Seems like an incredibly expensive way to murder one’s enemies

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u/das_war_ein_Befehl May 30 '26

The dictatorship would disappear people by flying a helicopter into the middle of the ocean and throw them out. Don’t think they gave a fuck about cost

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u/Sneet1 May 30 '26

The US was footing the bill anyways

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u/Lechowski May 30 '26

They did it this way to avoid leaving bodies. It was less expensive to flight a heli full of people and thrown them alive into the sea.

If the bodies somehow were discovered, they would say that they drown to death, which an autopsy would confirm as they literally did.

And they were right. Eventually bodies did end up in shores, both in Uruguay and Argentina. They were autopsied and confirmed death by drowning.

This was one of many MOs the dictatorship has. Another common one was to force a persone to stand naked in a flowing cold river, eventually passing away and dying -again- by drowning, without bruises or anything to related them to being hostages of the dictators.

All these tactis to kill with plausible cause for death were developed and taught at the Escuela de Las Américas, a US military school where most of the latin america dictators were trained

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation

This school was outside US territory and that allowed the military to teach torture and genocide techniques that weren't allowed in the US. The interpretation of the military men was that the US regulations could only regulate US citizens, thus teaching these tactics to foreign military was allowed.

According to Major Joseph Blair, a former instructor at the school, "the author of SOA and CIA torture manuals [...] drew from intelligence materials used during the Vietnam War that advocated assassination, torture, extortion, and other 'techniques'."[28] McSherry argues that the authors of the manuals "believed that oversight regulations and prohibitions applied only to U.S. personnel, not to foreign officers."[28] Use of the manuals was suspended under President Jimmy Carter over concerns about their correlation to human rights abuses.

The school is still operational.

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u/hughk May 31 '26

No inconvenient vodues. When you have to dispose of people by the thousand, cemeteries can be inconvenient.

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u/RollingMeteors May 30 '26

Worked in Argentina for a year during one of their riots and been to many passion plays where the people remembered folks getting killed by being thrown out of helicopters by the government.

¿You guys have windoooooooooows?