Argentina
Since 1989 the Partido Justicialista (PJ, Justicialist Party) has been
Argentina's ruling party. Carlos Menem was re-elected as president in May
1995 under the reformed 1994 constitution. While the PJ improved its standing
in the 1995 legislative elections, to the detriment of former president
Raúl Alfonsín's Unión Cívica Radical (UCR, Radical
Civic Union), the first election of a mayor for the capital was won by the
UCR's Fernando de la Rúa in 1996. A three-term senator for Buenos
Aires and head of his party's organization in the capital, De la Rúa
obtained 40 per cent of the vote against the PJ candidate's 19 per cent.
At the same time, the race for the city's assembly also confirmed the weakness
of support for the PJ as the left-of-centre Frente País Solidario
(FREPASO, Front for a Country in Solidarity) ended up with twenty-five seats,
the UCR with nineteen and the PJ with only eleven seats.
In December, President Menem's loss of his court case against Horacio Verbitzky,
a journalist with the Buenos Aires daily Página/12, the paper's
editor Ernesto Tiffenberg and its publisher Fernando Sokolowicz, was hailed
by James Neilson, the former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, as a gain
for freedom of expression. Verbitzky had quoted unflattering references
to Menem by the prominent trade unionist Lorenzo Miguel regarding Menem's
moral authority to promote military officers tainted by the military regime
of 1976-83. The judge rejected the argument that quoting Miguel's well-known
assertion was an affront and ordered Menem to pay costs.
The government has yet to heed an International Labour Organization (ILO)
recommendation to recognize the Argentine Workers' Hub. This organization,
set up as a rival to the officially recognized General Confederation of
Labour, claims to represent 667,000 workers, the government employees' union
being among its most important members.
The perception of corruption among office-holders grew sharper. This is
due partly to the fact that, according to the Buenos Aires daily La Nación
(15 September 1996), since 1993 none of the forty legislative proposals
concerning, inter alia, public ethics, corruption-related penal code modifications
and the ban on holding second jobs by government officials and civil servants
has been adopted.
Seeking to close a dark page in Argentina's recent history, the government
introduced a $200,000 compensation payment for some 7,000 families of those
who were abducted and murdered in 1976-83. Given that one condition of the
package is that the families must accept that their loved ones are dead
without necessarily knowing what became of them after their disappearance,
some, like the founding leader of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, the human rights
group set up by relatives of the military regime's victims, have refused
the compensation.
In April 1996, the plenary assembly of the Episcopal Conference approved
a document in which the Catholic church asked forgiveness for its sins during
the military regime. Nearly thirteen years after the restoration of democracy
in Argentina, the church lamented Catholic participation in human rights
violations and admitted that what it had done had been "insufficient
to prevent so much horror". Whereas Monsignor Miguel Hesayne, bishop
emeritus of Viedma (Neuquén province) was dissatisfied that the document
did not criticize vigorously enough the absence of "gestures of repudiation
of violence", Monsignor Jorge Casaretto, chairman of the Episcopal
Conference's media commission, said the document enabled each diocese to
examine its own record.
Menem's sacking of economics minister Domingo Cavallo in July entailed none
of the consequences feared by some and desired by others. This was partly
due to Cavallo's replacement by Roque Fernández, a former president
of the central bank.
The 1996 rate of economic growth was 4.4 per cent, considerably higher than
that predic-ted by many forecasters, and an inflation rate of 0.1 per cent
was the country's lowest in fifty-two years. While those in employment have
continued to benefit from the end of hyper-inflation under Menem, unemployment
rose from 16.4 per cent in 1995 to 17.3 per cent in 1996 as a result of
privatizations, private sector adjustment and lingering recession. Argentina's
foreign debt rose by 10.4 per cent to $97.1 billion.
Since the beginning of mass immigration in the second half of the nineteenth
century, Argentina's élites have not regarded the arrival of certain
groups, Jews among them, as particularly desirable. A degree of intolerance
towards Jews has its historical roots in the Inquisition as well as the
Spanish colonial legacy in Argentina and other Latin American states.
Jews were at first not deemed wholly undesirable. On the contrary, until
the late 1920s they were among the beneficiaries of generally unrestricted
large-scale immigration, which was thought to be imperative for the country's
modernization and development. The arrival of increasing numbers of Jewish
immigrants, a fraction of them identified with progressive ideas, provoked
disapproval among powerful members of Argentine society, including the Catholic
church. The nationalist reaction to unrestrained immigration that surfaced
around 1910 spilled over into an anti-Jewish pogrom in January 1919, the
so-called "Tragic Week", one of the most serious episodes of anti-Jewish
violence since Argentina's attainment of independence in 1816.
The antisemitism of the Argentine élites became part of a wider xenophobia,
borrowing ideas successively from French right-wing, Falangist, fascist
and Nazi sources. During the 1930s, such influences were strongly felt in
the Legión Cívica (Civic Legion), the foremost visible exponent
of antisemitism at the time, as well as among members of the military. From
1933 onwards, antisemitic activity increased, encouraged particularly by
diplomatic and other Third Reich representatives. Against the backdrop of
the anti-leftist and anti-Jewish biases in Argentina and other countries
in the region, immigration became increasingly restrictive vis-à-vis
Spanish Republicans and Jews in the 1930s. Nevertheless, Argentina received
the largest contingent of Jewish refugees in Latin America during the period
1933-45, even more than the USA if the figure is calculated on a per capita
basis. Not all entered the country legally but, once in Argentina, Jews
generally lived unperturbed. Later, not less than 10,000, and perhaps more
than three times as many, were among the major beneficiaries of a post-war
amnesty, which also legalized the situation of Nazis and other groups.
In the early 1940s, the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista (ALN, Nationalist
Liberation Alliance) was established. This comparatively small pro-Nazi
group was a junior partner to a seceded fraction of the mainstream UCR and
the labour movement, the main supporters of Juan Perón's bid for
the presidency in the 1946 elections. By 1953, Perón had succeeded
in weaning the ALN away from antisemitism, as the organization openly stated
a year later.
In the post-war period, Argentina also witnessed the arrival of some 80,000
Germans, with 19,000 settling in the country from 1945 to 1955. Thousands
of immigrants from other Central and East European states put down roots
in the country too. Many were tainted by association with the Third Reich.
No definitive figure for Nazi and collaborationist war criminal arrivals
is yet available. Moreover, the exaggerated estimate of 60,000 German and
other war criminals has been seriously questioned by scholars; even the
New York Times's reference in 1993 to more than 1,000 Nazi and other
war criminals in Argentina remains subject to verification. Regardless of
estimates, Nazi and other war criminals arrived in Argentina during Perón's
incumbency and lived unmolested long after he was deposed in 1955.
Like other Second World War neutrals, Argentina is suspected of having served
as a transit point for Nazi loot.
During the 1960s, the nationalist Catholic and antisemitic movement Tacuara
mobilized large numbers of young people and rocked public opinion with its
increasingly frequent violent racist attacks. Israel's kidnapping of Adolf
Eichmann in May 1960, an episode generally seen in the country as the Jewish
state's trampling on Argentine sovereignty, was among the factors exacerbating
anti-Jewish attacks during the incumbency of Arturo Frondizi, a member of
the League against Racism and Antisemitism a few decades earlier. Of the
313 antisemitic incidents recorded worldwide in 1967, 142 took place in
Argentina. This figure was, in fact, less than the comparable figure at
the peak of anti-Jewish violence in 1962-5.
Antisemitism was either tolerated or encouraged during the military dictatorship
of 1976-83 and Jews were over-represented among the junta's victims. An
estimated 10 per cent of the more than 10,000 documented cases of disappearance
during this period of state terrorism are estimated to have been Jews, a
greater number than those victimized during the "Tragic Week"
or any other time. On the return to elected governments in December 1983,
the officially appointed National Commission on the Disappeared, which investig-ated
the country's clandestine detention centres, revealed that Jewish prisoners
had received "special" treatment, with antisemitic and Nazi slogans
found on the walls of such detention centres. A small fraction of those
involved in human rights abuses were tried and convicted by the democratic
governments that followed. While all those jailed were later pardoned in
a highly controversial move by President Menem, their prosecution, however
incomplete in the first place, is without precedent in Argentine (and Latin
American) history. In 1988, bipartisan support resulted in the adoption
of anti-discrimination legislation, which the then president, Alfonsín,
had put to congress.
Argentina's international realignment also led to the adoption of an increasingly
pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli line, while attempting to retain a measure of
independence vis-à-vis Washington. The present Argentine government
has also made a commitment to combat antisemitism and to rid the country
of its image as a safe haven for Nazi war criminals.
The revised constitution accords minorities the right to be represented
in government and incorporates international agreements intended to promote
their economic, social and cultural rights. Estimates of the size of the
indigenous population vary from 60,000 to 150,000. Most live in the northern
and north-western provinces and in the far south. Their standard of living
is below average and they have higher rates of illiteracy, chronic disease
and unemployment.
Hostility continues unabated towards immigrants from neighbouring and nearby
countries, especially Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru, some of whom entered Argentina
illegally for economic reasons; towards immigrants from Korea, the first
of whom arrived in Buenos Aires in 1965; and towards the offspring of the
much older immigrant community from the Middle East.
As the economic position of South Korea improves, hostility towards the
work ethic and other cultural traits of Korean immigrants in Argentina (their
economic success and eating habits being among the most usually questioned)
has not only virtually put an end to their influx but has also turned Argentina
into a country of emigration for the Korean community.
Regarding immigrants from the Middle East, the proposed building of a Sunni
mosque and Islamic centre on prime real estate, granted by President Menem
to Saudi Arabia, not only gave rise to misgivings among the UCR opposition
(ostensibly based on the gift's considerable value), but also laid bare
the adherence to pre-Vatican Council notions of Cardinal Antonio Quarracino,
the archbishop of Buenos Aires. Writing in the Buenos Aires daily Clarín
(27 March 1996), the Catholic primate expressed disgust at the gift of the
plot of land and referred to Islam as a great heresy and to the prophet
Muhammad as the descendant of "degraded idolaters from savage Arabia".
The Muslim group's traditional low profile in Argentina resulted in no one
seriously taking issue with Quarracino except Hojatol-islam Mohsen Rabbani,
the Iranian cultural attaché in Buenos Aires. However, the Cardinal's
outburst was interpreted in the journal of the US Academy of Franciscan
History as emblematic of the Argentine Catholic hierarchy's dated views
on certain subjects and reluctance to undergo intellectual renewal. Two
months after the initial piece, at the time of Cardinal Edward Idris Cassidy's
visit to Buenos Aires to promote ecumenism, Quarracino belatedly came to
stress the importance of dialogue with non-Catholic faiths, including, for
the first time, an explicit reference to Islam. Nevertheless, whereas a
private letter to Rabbani, leaked to the leadership of Argentina's Muslim
and Arab institutions, revealed Quarracino had offered the Iranian diplomat
his unreserved apologies for the offence unintentionally caused, the Cardinal's
second Clarín article (22 May 1996) admitted only to having erred
when calling Muslims "Muhamaddans". The mismatch between Quarracino's
public and private assertions can be seen as a mirror of Argentine society's
own prejudices towards both groups; on this occasion, the latter led to
silence on the part of other interested parties vis-à-vis the country's
aggrieved Muslim and Arab-descended citizens. Quarracino has since been
replaced by Monsignor Estanislao Karlic as chairman of Argentina's Episcopal
Conference.
In August 1996 the foundation stone of the future mosque and educational
centre was laid in a ceremony attended by, among others, Saudi Arabia's
minister of Islamic affairs, Abdullah al-Turki, and his Argentine foreign
and religious affairs counterpart, Guido di Tella. Before the end of the
year, congress also adopted draft legislation first introduced in July 1995
that declared the Islamic new year and another Muslim festival non-working
days for the country's Muslim inhabitants (14,262 according to the 1960
census; self-estimate 650,000).
Largely externally induced, such advances by Argentina's Muslims cannot
hide the fact that the remaining state of suspicion over the alleged Iranian
and/or Arab intellectual responsibility for the blowing up of the Israeli
embassy (1992) and that of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina
(AMIA, Israelite Argentine Mutual Association) Buenos Aires Jewish community
centre building (1994) (see effects of anti-zionism) has exacerbated anti-Muslim
prejudice on the one hand, and led to increased assertiveness on the part
of sections of the predominantly Christian Argentines of Arab descent on
the other. Testimony to the latter development is the demand of the Buenos
Aires Council of Islamic Institutions in April 1996 for an immediate halt
to "anti-Arab and anti-Islamic racism; anti-Muslim discrimination and
defamation; baseless accusations, e.g. the [Israeli] embassy and AMIA [bombings];
media censorship".
A further expression of intolerance generated by the Arab-Israeli conflict
is that denounced by Raúl Padró, a PJ Buenos Aires city council
member, together with another member of the same party. Padró brought
to public attention the deletion of the name Palestine from all the nameplates
in that street's seven blocks. A number of interviewees in the Buenos Aires
liberal daily newspaper La Nación (28 November 1996) ascribed responsibility
for this incident to local residents opposed to the 1995 renaming of a street
previously known as Rawson. Inasmuch as there is a sizeable Jewish presence
in the neighbourhood, the bias in favour of Rawson is all the more curious
given that, in addition to its being the name of a southern city, it is
the surname of the first president following the nationalist military coup
of June 1943 with whom Perón's ascent to power is linked.
The existence of a group entitled Juventud Nacional Socialista de Salta
(JNSS, Salta National Socialist Youth) was reported by El Tribuno,
a daily in the north-western province of Salta. The paper quoted Sergio
Acosta, a JNSS activist, who boasted that the group's membership included
people who had become judges and legislators. El Tribuno linked Acosta
with graffiti calling for the death of Bolivians, Jews and homosexuals,
while his wife reportedly admitted that both had been active in the far-right
Movimiento por la Dignidad y la Independencia (MODIN, Movement for Dignity
and Independence).
MODIN's attainment of "respectability" following its abandonment
of its former path-its military forerunners were involved in mutinies-and
its active participation in ballot-box politics, which brought it four seats
in the lower house, must be looked at sceptically. Two MODIN legislators,
former sergeant Jorge Pacífico and former captain Emilio Morello,
participated in a group involved in merchandising firearms purloined from
army arsenals. MODIN sympathizers are also suspected of having been involved
in an attack on the journalist Martín Olivera in May 1996. Investigating
a local connection in the AMIA bombing, Olivera was, according to Clarín
(7 May 1996), beaten up by attackers who warned him "not to bother
MODIN".
A more aggressively anti-Jewish group in greater Buenos Aires is Verdad
y Justicia, Movimiento Cívico Militar por la Recuperación
Argentina (Truth and Justice, Civic Military Movement for the Recovery of
Argentina), four of whose members were detained in October 1996 in connection
with the vandalization of Argentina's principal Jewish cemetery (see manifestations).
This incident was followed by police probes into the group's possible connection
with the attack on the Jewish cemetery in Salta, including the possibility
of a link with the JNSS.
In the early 1960s, Carlos Tórtora, an aide of the interior minister,
Carlos Corach, was active in the Concentración Nacionalista Universitaria
(CNU, Concentration of Nationalist Universitarians), an ultra-nationalist
organization accused of the assassination of a University of Mar del Plata
student. According to Herman Schiller, co-founder of Argentina's Jewish
Movement for Human Rights, before joining the interior ministry's staff
Tórtora occupied a high position in the state intelligence secretariat.
Tórtora's ultra-nationalist background, like that of Norberto Belladrich
(another Corach aide), should not necessarily be seen as evidence of his
current attachment to a similar ideology.
Another former ultra-nationalist in office was Rodolfo Barra, who became
Menem's public works secretary in 1989. Barra also served as a supreme court
judge from December 1993 to June 1994, and was minister of justice for the
next two years. As a secondary school student in the 1960s, Barra joined
the Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Secundarios (UNES, National Union
of Secondary Students), the youth branch of the right-wing Catholic organization
Tacuara, and was in charge of UNES publications, according to the Buenos
Aires weekly news magazine Noticias (22 and 29 June 1996). More recently,
Barra has been identified with Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic organization
founded in Spain, which has no extremist connections. Yet by June 1996,
when he proclaimed his repentance regarding his Nazi youth, he had lost
the confidence of a section of Argentine society. On 22 June 1996 the vice-president
of the Delegación de Associaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA, Delegation
of Israelite Argentine Institutions), Luis Steinberg, was quoted as saying
that if Barra had been a Nazi, "he has now shown himself a democrat,
and this is praiseworthy". However, frustrated by the unsolved Israeli
embassy and AMIA attacks, "the average Jew [finds] it inadmissible
that Barra should continue in charge of a ministry", was stated by
the president of the DAIA, Rubén Beraja, later that month. A few
days later, Barra's deputy, Elías Jassan, who is Jewish, was entrusted
with the justice portfolio.
Former general Carlos Suárez Mason, whose notoriety stems from his
role as commanding officer of the Palermo army garrison during the military
regime of 1976-83, admitted to anti-Jewish "prejudice" in an interview
with Noticias (5 October 1996). Such prejudice, he declared, had
not stood in the way of his many Jewish friendships. Still, Suárez
Mason opined that a one-time ALN leader, Patricio Kelly, "deserves
no respect, even more so now that he is in the service of the Jews".
Argentines of different political stripes would have few problems with the
first part of Suárez Mason's assertion, especially as former Israeli
diplomat Benno Weiser Varon, among others, has described Kelly as a pistolero
(gangster). But the fact that Kelly's takeover of the ALN leadership
in 1953 confirmed the group's shift from Judeophobia to apparent Judeophilia,
in addition to World Jewish Congress (WJC) documents attesting to his successful
fundraising thereafter among Argentine Jewry, were interpreted as "clearly
aimed at encouraging or inciting hatred". Judge Claudio Bonadío
ordered a Suárez Mason deposition on the grounds that, if confirmed,
the aforementioned statements were presumably in breach of the anti-discrimination
legislation.
Since 1991, the Buenos Aires Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized five
times, including the two most recent attacks on the capital's principal
Jewish cemetery, in the greater Buenos Aires district of La Tablada. The
latter was attacked on 19 October 1996 and a week later. On 23 October,
a caller to the capital's Ezrah Jewish hospital said that a Comando Dignidad
Nacional (National Dignity Commando) was behind the first attack on La Tablada.
Almost simultaneously, a telephone call to the interior ministry announcing
that a bomb had been planted at the hospital triggered heightened police
surveillance in and around the hospital.
Interior Minister Corach ordered federal police co-operation with its Buenos
Aires provincial counterpart in the investigation, a measure intended not
only to speed up the enquiries but also to avoid leaving them to a police
force that was not entirely above suspicion of antisemitism and was in the
middle of an externally driven process of self-cleansing. A day later, Ricardo
Russo, Aparicio Torres, Emilio Cañete and Juan Núñez,
all alleged members of a self-proclaimed Catholic nationalist group, Verdad
y Justicia, were detained and accused of the first attack.
Aníbal Termite, the first intervening magistrate, declared that there
was important evidence substantiating the group's hatred of Jews in publications
distributed among judiciary and university authorities of the greater Buenos
Aires district of Morón. In particular, Russo, a PJ activist who
had unsuccessfully sought his party's nomination for the Buenos Aires gubernatorial
race in 1987, had served as head of the foundation that promoted the cre-ation
of the University of Morón during the previous four years. By 9 November,
the four detainees were accused and prosecuted. In December 1996, on the
eve of a presidential visit to the USA, Interior Minister Corach announced,
among other things, that this attack on La Tablada had been "clarified".
This is the second such case successfully investigated. The first was the
attack on the greater Buenos Aires Jewish cemetery of Berazategui.
On 17 November 1996, the Jewish cemetery of Villa Clara, in the Entre Ríos
province, was attacked. In the three previous months, a total of sixty-six
graves were also defiled in two attacks on Córdoba's new Jewish cemetery,
in the neighbourhood of San Vicente, the first of these on the Jewish New
Year. There was also an attack on the Jewish cemetery of Salta.
Anti-Jewish statements by Mario Mansilla, a PJ councillor in the southern
city of Comodoro Rivadavia, Chubut province, led the local Jewish association
to request his expulsion in September 1996. A trade unionist, Mansilla sought
to explain the smashing of windows belonging to the Tiendas Israelitas Argentinas
(TIA, Argentine Jewish Stores) supermarket during a national strike by allusions
to people's nervousness "when they see these Jews at work while workers
are struggling for their rights". There are no Jews among the present
owners of TIA, according to the Comodoro Rivadavia Jewish Association, which
reserved the right to take legal action against Mansilla on the basis of
law 23,592.
In October 1996, the Colegio San Marón (St Marun College) in central
Buenos Aires expelled a pupil found carving a swastika on his desk. The
decision of this Maronite Mission-sponsored school was consistent with the
then education minister Antonio Salonia's announcement in March 1992 that
schools must encourage tolerance and anti-discrimination. Established at
the turn of the century in the vicinity of an area then heavily populated
by immigrants from Lebanon and Syria, the school's student population has
long been overtaken by the offspring of Argentine families devoid of Middle
Eastern connections, upward mobility having resulted in relocation to other
parts of town by earlier Arabic-speaking immigrants.
The pro-fascist inclination of Luis Buján, a lecturer in history
at the greater Buenos Aires National University of Lomas de Zamora, was
denounced by the university's student union, which made use of his lectures
and reading materials to prove their point. The dean of the university's
faculty of social sciences, Horacio Gegunde, demanded Buján's resignation
in April.
Nationalist groupings and the far right took advantage of the freedom
of the press achieved with the revival of elected governments in 1983 and,
shortly after the promulgation of anti-discrimination legislation, some
fifteen ultra-nationalist publications were still being produced in the
country. Since law 23,592, however, their number has decreased and most
surviving publications are nowadays erratically produced and poorly distributed.
A cover story in the Buenos Aires periodical Nueva Sión (29
November 1996) identified Patria Argentina and Patria Libre as
two such publications. Attesting to the former's distribution problems and
to the latter's comparative irrelevance, Nueva Sión mentioned
that photocopied articles from Patria Argentina had been circulated
in greater Buenos Aires neighbourhoods. Also mentioned was a left-wing publication,
bearing the name Patria Libre (which, although unwilling to be confused
with its ultra-nationalist namesake, made no effort to prevent such confusion).
Whereas Nueva Sión mentioned another periodical, El Fortín,
the cover story omitted all references to El Muecín among
Argentina's anti-Jewish publications. Although previously included in that
category, El Muecín-a Muslim periodical founded in August
1992, thirty-six issues of which had been published before the end of 1996-has
consistently been anti-Israeli and rabidly anti-Zionist.
Against the backdrop of the anti-discrimi-nation legislation, Ayer y Hoy,
a recently established and seemingly well-endowed Buenos Aires-based publishing
house, has been responsible for a number of quality publications that convey
their antisemitic message while carefully avoiding provoking legal action.
Among those issued in 1996 is Ayer y Hoy's magazine La memoria argentina,
the third issue of which was devoted entirely to Adolf Eichmann's presence
in Argentina, and a biographical volume entitled Martin Bormann.
Both publications sought to discredit Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Additionally,
Ayer y Hoy focused attention on Israel's alleged trampling over of Argentine
sovereignty when kidnapping Eichmann in May 1960-a sentiment shared by Argentines
of various political stripes-as well as arguing that Argen-tina "bears
no responsibility for Nazi crimes".
Reprints of many works by the Argentine author Gustavo Martínez Zuviría
(also known by the pen-name of Hugo Wast) were seized from Editora Vórtice,
a Buenos Aires pub-lisher and distributor, in April 1996. According to Argentina's
Catholic News Agency, the police operation followed a complaint based on
the anti-discrimination legislation that was lodged with judge Jorge Urso.
A one-time conservative lawmaker for the Partido Demócrata Progresista
(PDP, Progressive Democratic Party), a national library director for twenty-five
years, and a short-lived justice and education minister in the military
government that implanted religious education in the 1940s, Martínez
Zuviría's literary production includes his novel Desierto de piedra
(Desert of Stone), which won him Argentina's national literary prize, and
Valle negro (Black Valley), which won him a Royal Spanish Academy
gold medal. Another of his works of fiction, Flor de durazno (Peach Flower),
has been reprinted 100 times and, more generally, his literary output has
been translated into thirteen languages. For Jews, however, Martínez
Zuviría is essentially the author of Kahal and Oro (Gold), works
of fiction written in the 1930s and seemingly inspired by The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion.
Though not the only negative reaction, an editorial in La Nación
(16 April 1996) "energetically repudiated" the seizure, which
was seen as "one of the favoured practices of totalitarian regimes".
If La Nación's column of readers' correspondence is anything
to go by, the messages of reproof were outnumbered by favourable letters,
including one by José Castiñeira de Dios on behalf of the
board of the Argentine Writers' Association. He congratulated the editorialist's
defence of the distinguished Catholic nationalist author-despite his controversial
political arguments or the repeatedly refuted views of the country's history
that he espoused. The latter remark was a reference to, among others, a
pamphlet by the distinguished Argentine Jewish writer César Tiempo
entitled "The Antisemitic Campaign and the Director of the National
Library". Tiempo's valuable rejoinder was put out as an occasional
paper by the Buenos Aires Jewish weekly Mundo Israelita in 1935.
For her part, the author's granddaughter, María Martínez Zuviría
de Fernández Górgolas, wondered: "How can one explain
to the students of numerous schools bearing the name of Hugo Wast that reading
his books has become a crime?"
Father Quintás Barreiro, a Catholic nationalist priest in the town of Pinto, in the north-western province of Santiago del Estero, who first came to public attention in December 1995 for calling into question, among other things, the number of Jews killed during the Second World War, allegedly praised Hitler in March. Instead, Gerardo Sueldo, the provincial bishop, repudiated Barreiro's earlier assertions. Bishop Sueldo was quoted as saying that "a plurality of ways of thinking co-exist within the church, but these are inadmissible statements, an upshot of this cleric's ill-fated nationalist ideology." For his part, Guillermo Ganom, described in Noticias as Pinto's sole Jew amidst a population of 4,000 and a sure target for Father Barreiro, mentioned the latter's penchant for having his insulting remarks pass as jokes; as relayed by the same news magazine, Ganom's examples included: "The best Jew is a dead Jew, or in order to be useful Jews should be on sale in supermarkets. . . as packets of soap." Before the end of 1995, the DAIA initiated legal action against Father Barreiro under law 23,592.
In an attack on some 100 graves at the Jewish cemetery of La Tablada on 19 October 1996 (see manifestations) graffiti were daubed that read "Holocaust, the Great Jewish Lie. Inform Yourself", according to the Buenos Aires weekly Gente (24 October 1996).
The long-standing probes into the attack on the Israeli embassy and the
bombing of the AMIA building made little progress in 1996. While supreme
court judge Ricardo Levene Jr was getting ready to declare the embassy inquiry
closed owing to the absence of any firm evidence, his resignation prompted
the supreme court to take up the case collectively and create a special
task force to reactivate the investigation.
The task force, however, began inquiries based on the hypothesis of José
Manzano, interior minister at the time of the explosion, that the bombing
may have occurred inside, rather than outside, the embassy, thereby overlooking
the existence of photographic evidence of the crater left by the car bomb;
it also sought to interview the then embassy security chief, Rony Gorny,
who, according to the Israeli ambassador's Argentine police escort, had
not been in the building when the explosion occurred. In May 1996 two Pakistani
citizens were questioned by the aviation police on landing at Buenos Aires's
Ezeiza international airport in connection with the embassy attack. Like
four fellow Pakistanis detained soon after the attack, they were released
because of the absence of incriminating evidence and left the country soon
after.
As for the AMIA bombing, in May 1996 a federal court confirmed the preventive
prison sentence against Carlos Telleldín, the Druze-descended Argentine
who delivered the van used in this attack; the court also confirmed the
prosecution of Alejandro Monjo, Hugo Pérez, Miguel Jaimes and César
Fernández for their involvement in the merchandising of stolen vehicles,
and revoked intervening magistrate Juan Galeano's preventive prison sentences
against Jorge Pacífico, Juan Coppe, Ricardo Villarino, Miguel Lovera
and Tomás Saldaña, who, according to Galeano, may have had
an indirect link with the bombing. Charged by Galeano with illegal association
and possession of firearms, the federal court concluded that there was no
evidence to connect them with the attack. Moreover, in October 1996, the
federal court confirmed Galeano's prosecution and preventive prison sentences
against several members of the Buenos Aires provincial police force, including
commissioner Juan Ribelli (a former chief of a greater Buenos Aires police
station's vehicle theft division), deputy commissioners Raúl Ibarra
and Anastasio Leal, cashiered officer Mario Barreiro, and officers Claudio
Araya and Marcelo Albarracín, all of them charged with being participants
in the AMIA attack.
Whereas Argentina's security secretary, Brigadier Andrés Antonietti,
declared in April 1996 that the embassy and AMIA cases were "practically
impossible to solve" because "a terrorist cell dies with its author",
Interior Minister Corach announced in December 1996 that the reward for
information leading to the clarification of either case was being increased
to $3 million. In a reference to Israeli ambassador Yizhak Aviran's criticism,
Antonietti said that when security in Argentina was questioned by foreigners
he could not help thinking of the failure of other security systems too-in
particular, given that Israeli Prime Minister Yizhak Rabin had been murdered.
Antonietti's comments are all the more poignant when considering the bilateral
agreement on terrorism that Corach signed during a visit to Israel in March
1996 (and the accord on the exchange of information to fight terrorism proposed
by Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian National Authority president, during Corach's
visit to Gaza), as well as the DAIA president Beraja's confirmation in October
1996 that Israel's Mossad continued to co-operate with its Argentine counterpart
in both cases. None of this allayed the fears of Vice-president Carlos Ruckauf
and Foreign Minister Di Tella, expressed at the time of Israel's "Grapes
of Wrath" operation in Lebanon, that "Argentina can still witness
a fresh attack". Not ruling out a Middle Eastern-inspired attack, though,
was not akin to sharing Aviran's certainty that "we already know who
is responsible for the intellectual authorship of the attacks", a coded
reference to Iran and the armed wing of Lebanon's Hizbullah. Whereas Israeli
security sources were quoted by the Spanish news agency EFE (28 April 1996)
as saying that a Hizbullah cell had recently been apprehended on the border
between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, all three countries denied the story.
Other than the state of heightened alert of Argentina's border and other
police forces, the introduction of a new identity document for the tri-border
region's inhabitants was likely to be the three countries' most effective
tool to combat infiltration.
The "Iranian connection" theory received a severe blow when Venezuela
upgraded diplomatic relations with Tehran to ambassadorial level in December
1996. Relations had been handled by chargés d'affaires since
1994, when a former Iranian intelligence operative, Manoucheh Moatamer,
had implicated Iranian diplomats in both bombings. Shielded by a US witness
protection programme, the latter has long left Venezuela. An Iranian foreign
ministry communiqué of December 1996, mentioned by Oxford Analytica,
asserted that the elevation of relations was an obvious outcome of both
countries' verification that "Moatamer's statements were false",
an affirmation that the Venezuelan side simply did not challenge. At the
time, Moatamer's credibility hinged largely on his accurate prediction of
a forthcoming explosion in London. Curiously, an Iranian link with the attacks
on the Israeli embassy and Balfour House in the British capital was never
mentioned by UK sources; instead, those apprehended and prosecuted in London
were identified as Palestinian. Making matters worse for Moatamer's claims
was the UK's coolness vis-à-vis such an apparently privileged
source of information. Indeed, unlike Galeano's rushing to Caracas to interview
him, UK officials neither questioned the Iranian during his brief Venezuelan
sojourn nor relayed specific questions for the US officials to put to him,
according to Lord Avebury, chairman of the UK parliamentary human rights
group (monitoring, among other things, Iranian terrorism).
Caracas's tacit endorsement of Tehran's categorizing of Moatamer as a mere
"CIA spy" and unsafe source pulled the rug from under the feet
of those requesting that Argentina sever diplomatic links with Iran. Argentina's
unobliging attitude had long been depicted as the outcome of European advice
to avoid incurring Iranian wrath and a reluctance to give up the country's
foremost Middle East export market (one that has yielded an accumulated
trade surplus of more than $10 billion to the Argentine side since 1984).
Without removing Iran from among the possible suspects in both attacks,
the Venez-uelan decision justified Argentina's shying away from any hasty
reactions, as well as setting the clock back to the days before Moata-mer's
arrival in Caracas, when an Israeli government claim that the Buenos Aires
embassy attack bore Iranian fingerprints merited the following off-the-cuff
reaction by a knowledgeable Argentine cabinet member: "There is no
new evidence [on the subject], but if those responsible hailed from a country
whose name begins with I, the chances are higher that it is Iran rather
than Italy."
In April, a march was organized by the Syrian Ba'ath-inspired Federation
of Argentine-Arab Institutions in Buenos Aires's Plaza Lavalle to commemorate
the killing by the Israeli army of 101 people and the wounding of another
200 mostly Lebanese civilians, at a United Nations base in Qana in southern
Lebanon. Unattributed handbills were distributed among the 1,000 protesters
that equated Nazi extermination camps with "mere training camps for
Zionism".
Publicized by Noticias (27 July 1996), a poll conducted by Marketing
del Plata in Argentina's capital city and greater Buenos Aires neighbourhoods
revealed a mixed bag of largely uninterpreted results. Sixty-eight per cent
of the 400 non-Jewish interviewees did not believe that the Jewish community
was politically more powerful than other commun-ities; 46 per cent did not
subscribe to the notion that most of the country's wealthy people were Jewish;
64 per cent did not regard as reasonable notions of a Jewish conspiracy
to take over Patagonia (a reference to the decades-old ultra-nationalist
allegation that under the terms of a so-called Andinia plan a second Jewish
state would be created in Argentina's sparsely populated southern region);
and 61 per cent did not think that the AMIA bombing was an incident that
concerned Jews alone. At the same time, 49 per cent supported the notion
that Jews were miserly; 66 per cent believed that they deliberately isolated
themselves within the Jewish community; 60 per cent did not hold it possible
that a Jew could reach the rank of army general; and 59 per cent thought
likewise about the feasibility of a Jew's becoming head of state.
The title under which the results appeared, "Prejudice and Mythology",
belied the clear political intent of at least some within the consistently
anti-Menem Noticias to underscore the negative without offering any explanation
for other more encouraging findings. (One example of this is the sharp contrast
between a quote from Rabbi Mario Rojzman, who said that the absence of greater
non-Jewish participation in Memoria Activa's Plaza Lavalle meetings (see
countering antisemitism) and, by implication, the AMIA bombing, were seen
primarily as Jewish concerns, and the 61 per cent of the poll's interviewees
who appeared to think differently.) The paper also failed to disclose who
had commissioned the poll and, more importantly, the date when it had been
carried out.
In August 1996, no sooner had an Italian military tribunal's ruling on
former SS captain Erich Priebke (see Italy) become known, when Interior
Minister Corach and Foreign Minister Di Tella jointly announced that irrespective
of Priebke's fate, his return to Argentina, from where he had been extradited
before the end of 1995, would not be countenanced under any circumstances.
Corach invoked the immigration code's article 21, which "absolutely
bans the admission or permanence in the country of foreigners whose record
may compromise security, public order or social peace", and ordered
immigration officials at all border crossings to take the necessary precautions.
The government decision put paid to hopes that he would return. These had
been expressed in Clarín (18 May 1996) by Priebke's wife,
Alicia Stoll, other friends and German community acquaintances, and the
authorities of the Primo Capraro school (whose honorary presidency Priebke
held). Judge Leónidas Moldes, who first ruled in favour of extradition,
was sceptical about the chances that Priebke could be tried twice, the second
time in Germany, for the same crime. Priebke's legal counsel, Pedro Bianchi,
underlined that he was requesting a certified copy of the extradition resolution,
the terms of which, he argued, specified that the former SS captain was
to be tried for the mass execution in the Ardeatine Caves near Rome, not
for other crimes he may have committed elsewhere.
An international conference on "War Criminals and Nazism in Latin America
Fifty Years Later", organized by B'nai B'rith at the US Holocaust Memorial
Museum in October 1996, heard that Paul Dokic, the Nazi puppet government
of Croatia's last commander of the Jasenovac concentration camp, was presumed
to be living in Argentina. Despite a July 1995 request by B'nai B'rith to
Croatia's president, Franjo Tudjman, to have Dokic brought to justice, and
Dokic's attendance at a veterans' meeting in Zagreb two months earlier,
Tudjman's reply that this would have to wait until the former Yugoslavia's
conflicts ended means that Dokic remains at large, whether in Croatia or
Argentina. Although Dokic is reportedly on the US justice department watch-list,
neither Croatia nor the countries that have legislation affording jurisdiction
in such cases have shown active interest in his prosecution.
In December 1996, Ricardo Mercado Luna, a UCR lower house member, introduced
draft legislation designed to create a special inquiry commission that would
investigate any illegal Third Reich gold transfers to Argentina's central
bank. Judging by a report in Clarín (8 December 1996), Mercado
proposed that such a commission should include legislators, and representatives
of the press, the Argentine Academy of History and the WJC and the Simon
Wiesenthal Center. Concurrently with this, an initiative by UCR senator
Javier Meneghini aimed to introduce legislation that would declare illegitimate
any former Third Reich assets still in the country. Three months earlier,
President Menem had agreed to subject the bank's documents to public scrutiny,
and in November 1996 Martín Lagos, the bank's vice-president, handed
over to the Simon Wiesenthal Center records of its transactions in gold
bullion since the 1930s. Moreover, a December 1996 meeting between an American
Jewish Committee (AJC) delegation and Di Tella, chef de cabinet Jorge Rodríguez
and presidential secretary general Alberto Kohan was used by the Argentine
foreign minister as an opportunity to request whatever data the AJC may
have had on the entry of Nazi gold to Argentina. The backdrop to this chain
of events is provided by the unearthing of some US diplomatic correspondence-part
of the WJC-inspired investigation by Senator Alfonse d'Amato, chairman of
the US senate banking committee, into Switzerland's role in the laundering
of Nazi gold in third countries (see Switzerland)-that suggests that Argentina
was among eight Latin American states that may have held Nazi assets in
custody or served as trans-shipment points for these, including gold plundered
from countries invaded by the Third Reich, and that taken from its Jewish
victims.
The proposal to erect a Holocaust monument in the square opposite the
national legislature was accepted in 1996. As publicized in the Boletín
Oficial (7 May 1996), draft legislation to this effect was introduced
by Claudio Mendoza, a ruling PJ lower house member, and was sponsored by
another fourteen parliament-arians from the three major parties before it
became law 24,636. A winner of the B'nai B'rith human rights award in 1994,
Mendoza had earlier supported the building of a similar monument in Resistencia,
Chaco province, "because there is always a need to remember, increase
awareness and educate to prevent the recurrence of such a moral catastrophe
as the Holocaust". The monument's design will be the subject of a competition
organized by Argentina's culture and education ministry.
On 18 July, an unofficial though equally significant monument designed by
the Argentine Jewish painter and sculptress Silvia Kupferminc to commemorate
the victims of the AMIA bombing, was unveiled in Plaza Lavalle opposite
the capital's main judiciary buildings. An initiative of Memoria Activa
(Active Memory), the group of relatives of victims and human rights activists
who since 1994 have been meeting once a week at this site to demand justice,
the monument did not initially enjoy favour with either PJ or UCR representatives
within the Buenos Aires city council. Nevertheless, support by FREPASO councillor
Eduardo Jozami (himself of Arab descent), a Jewish community intercession
with the council, as well as the prospect of a politically costly confrontation
with Memoria Activa in the not unlikely event of the monument going up anyway,
even if unauthorized, earned the group an official green light from the
city's authorities in time for the second anniversary commemoration of the
bombing.
In 1996 Memoria Activa lost Sergio Bergman from among its vocal and most
articulate activists. A conservative Judaism (Masorti) pulpit rabbi, Bergman's
dissociation from the group led him to write in his movement's periodical,
Masorti (31 May 1996), that it was time for Memoria Activa to refashion
itself. This was necessary in order to overcome a manifest failure, which
he described as Argentine society's perception of Memoria Activa as a mobilization
of solely the Jewish community; hence, Plaza Lavalle, viewed as "the
cemetery of justice", had to be abandoned in order to address Argentine
society as a whole. Some of Bergman's colleagues explained his departure
as a mark of dissidence with the radical line pressed by the more activist
within the group, while others presented the move as consistent with the
pressures brought to bear on him by an influential relative who was highly
placed in the then Buenos Aires Jewish community leadership. Inasmuch as
Memoria Activa is perceived, correctly or not, as a thorn in the side of
the DAIA president, Beraja, this background confirms that the original reticence
to authorize the monument can in no way be viewed as inspired by an anti-Jewish
animus among PJ and UCR councillors.
Monsignor Jorge Casaretto, bishop of the greater Buenos Aires district of
San Isidro, wrote to the Masorti Jewish movement-affiliated Bet El temple
expressing the Catholic church's pain for the attacks the Jewish community
had been suffering (see manifestations). Though not written on behalf of
the Episcopal Conference, news of this letter was leaked by Monsignor Guillermo
Leaden, chairman of the Conference's sub-commission in charge of the Christian-Jewish
dialogue, on 24 October 1996, after Israeli ambassador Aviran chided the
Catholic church for its "silence" on the "reawakening"
of antisemitism in the country.
On 24 October 1996, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (see general background)
organized a march around the square across from the Casa Rosada, Argentina's
presidential palace, to repudiate the attacks on the Jewish community.
Reacting to the vandalization of the La Tablada cemetery, President Menem
issued his "most energetic repudiation of such an attack", while
Interior Minister Corach declared himself overcome by "a mixture of
horror, indignation and shame" and proclaimed that the authors of the
outrage were "barbarians". Corach, chef de cabinet Rodríguez
and Menem's personal physician Alejandro Tfeli (like the head of state,
the son of Syrian Muslim immigrants) visited La Tablada to express government
solidarity with Argentine Jewry, while the Buenos Aires provincial vice-governor,
Rafael Romá, offered assurances of his administration's "profound
desire to turn existing clues into results". For his part, Israeli
ambassador Aviran was quoted in La Nación (28 October 1996) as saying
"we see nothing but darkness, more attacks, more threats, more hatred,
and less security". The outspoken Israeli diplomat's speech at La Tablada
affirmed that it was no longer enough "to be told that something is
being done". Angered by what is generally seen (not just in government
circles) as an accumulation of statements by Aviran that represent "an
interference in domestic affairs", Foreign Minister Di Tella asked
his deputy to meet with the Israeli diplomat. Subsequently an official communiqué
let it be known that Aviran had been informed of Menem and Di Tella's "surprise
and malaise" at his outburst at La Tablada.
In September and November, government and opposition legislators presented
a number of draft statements and resolutions in congress as well as in the
Buenos Aires provincial legislature on the Israeli embassy and AMIA investigations
and the more recent attacks on Jewish cemeteries. Introduced in congress's
lower house on 23 September 1996 and sponsored by the UCR's Juan Passo and
Ricardo Mercado Luna, the first of these complained of the slowness of the
investigation into the Israeli embassy attack; like the AMIA bombing, this
was depicted as an attack "on the Jewish community". According
to its sponsors, both "ultimately were unspeakable aggressions and
crimes of lese-humanity suffered by society in its entirety". A month
later, the vandalization of La Tablada (see manifestations) propelled UCR
senator Leopoldo Moreau to demand Interior Minister Corach's questioning
by the upper house. At the Buenos Aires provincial legislature, the PJ chairman
of its lower house, Osvaldo Mercuri, declared that all parliamentary blocs
demanded the "penalization of the vandals". For their part, UCR
senators Eduardo Florio and Roberto Cossa sought to discover whether there
was any connection between the attack on La Tablada and those on the Israeli
embassy and the AMIA, while two of their lower house fellow Radicals, Alberto
Giordanelli and Marisa Kugler, alluded to the latter incidents in their
demand to get to the bottom of the more recent outrage. On 22 November 1996,
three UCR lower house members of congress, Jesús Rodríguez,
Mario Negri and Laura Musa (herself of Arab descent), proposed a statement
"to condemn and repudiate the . . . cowardly attacks perpetrated by
sickly minds, who desecrated the Córdoba, Salta and La Tablada Jewish
cemeteries". The proposal stated that, in addition to the unjust damage
caused to those at the receiving end, such attacks "generate grave
social tensions that are detrimental to society as a whole", and cautioned
that "a civilization that shows no respect for the dead is taking the
road to destroying those alive".
Father Rafael Braun, a Catholic theologian, was among the listed recipients
of the B'nai B'rith human rights award in December 1996 in recognition of
his indefatigable campaign in favour of Christian-Jewish dialogue.
In 1996, the combination of peak levels of unemployment, growing inequality
of income distribution, the intensified perception of corruption in the
government and the discrediting of key institutions and the lack of a more
thorough cleansing of the ancien régime's main security agencies
provided a compelling background to the increase in antisemitic manifestations.
The government's efforts to improve its international image cannot be ignored
when assessing the sincerity of official wishes to stamp out antisemitic
manifestations. Not surprisingly, therefore, Rodolfo Barra was dropped as
justice minister after his ultra-nationalist past was exposed. Moreover,
Argentina's significant efforts to abandon the image it acquired during
the Nazi era translated into measures to prevent the return of a temporarily
freed Erich Priebke, and broke new ground with the presidential decision
to release records of Nazi gold bullion transactions.
Additionally, the improvement in Argentine-Israeli relations under Menem
must be considered when weighing the potential to generate antisemitic sentiment.
Argentina's unflinching commitment to a pro-Israeli foreign policy orientation
is not at stake. Moreover, ambassador Aviran's forays into Argentine domestic
affairs would have resulted in harsher measures in countries other than
Argentina. However unsatisfactory the results of the investigations into
the Israeli embassy and AMIA bombings are, these are not the only instances
when Argentine justice has been un-able to find those responsible for attacks.
Outside government, the skirmishes over interpretation of the anti-discrimination
legislation confirm the existence of a conflict of interest between the
advocacy of political pluralism and individual rights on the one hand, and
curbs on what is deemed ideologically intolerable on the other. They also
disprove the scepticism voiced immediately after law 23,592 was promulgated
that Jews would ever resort to such legislation to seek redress through
the courts.
Ultimately, bigotry cannot be fought solely through legislation. This, and
the difference between bringing lawsuits and winning them, suggests that
a carefully calculated attitude to the battles that are worth waging through
the court system holds greater promise than an indiscriminate approach.
Argentine Jews' heightened concern with the current situation, aggravated
by what they see as their lonely quest for justice in the unsolved Israeli
embassy and AMIA bombings, must be seen in the context of the relatively
favourable views expressed in opinion polls, multi-partisan initiatives
against antisemitism in congress and the Buenos Aires provincial legislature,
as well as by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and public opinion at large.
© JPR 1997