The Argentine Navy on Thursday signaled that it had given up hope of finding the 44 crew members aboard a submarine that appeared to have experienced a calamitous event in mid-November. The announcement was almost certainly an acknowledgment of the largest loss of life aboard a submarine in nearly two decades. Capt. Enrique Balbi, a navy spokesman, said the operation to find the submarine, the San Juan, had been downgraded from a rescue mission to a search for the remains of the vessel.
Some relatives of crew members reacted angrily to the decision and complained that they first learned about it on the news.
“This measure destroyed the last bit of hope I had,” Luis Tagliapietra, the father of one of the missing sailors Alejandro Damián Tagliapietra, told the cable news channel Todo Noticias. “I want to know what happened for real, because I don’t believe the official hypothesis at all. They lie to us.”
Captain Balbi said the navy would not “give categorical confirmation” that the crew members were dead. But he noted that the rescue effort had continued far beyond the time the submariners were likely to have survived, even if the vessel had not experienced a catastrophic event.
The disappearance of the San Juan, which was last heard from on Nov. 15, transfixed Argentines during the early days of the search. Military personnel from 18 nations rushed to a large stretch of the ocean off the coast of Patagonia to mount one of the largest maritime search missions in modern times. Roughly 4,000 military personnel, 28 ships and nine aircraft participated in the search. Relatives of the crew members largely gave up hope last week after officials disclosed that sensors had detected an unusual event that appeared to be an explosion in the area where the vessel had been sailing hours after the crew was last in contact. During that call, the submarine’s captain reported that a leak had damaged part of the vessel’s battery system. Some relatives said even then they had held out hope for a miracle.
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