During 1997 manifestations of antisemitism were no fewer or less important than in the previous year, when a peak of attacks reversed a period of decline. In 1998, however, the number and significance of such incidents again decreased. This is particularly encouraging considering that two Jewish-owned banks, the Banco Patricios and the Banco Mayo - the latter presided over by the former president of the Jewish umbrella organization, the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA, Delegation of Argentine Jewish Institutions) - ceased operations in May and November 1998 respectively amidst allegations of serious irregularities.
The decline in antisemitic manifestations has been linked to the anti-discrimination legislation enacted in 1988 and the mounting readiness on the part of the authorities and the judiciary to enforce the law. Also the government is aware of the political costs, both locally and abroad, of unchecked antisemitism. This awareness, however, does not always extend to the provincial authorities, something that is of particular importance since the provincial governor of Buenos Aires, Eduardo Duhalde, is now a serious contender for the ruling party's nomination for president (see also Parties, organizations, movements). As human rights activists have emphasized, antisemitism is an admirable measure of the health of Argentine democracy.
None of the cemetery desecrations of 1996 and 1997 has been solved, although the police have had just as little success in finding the perpetrators of crime in general. The high number of unsolved attacks - including among others the bombings of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the headquarters of the Buenos Aires Ashkenazi Jewish communal body, Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA, Argentine Jewish Mutual Association) in 1994 - prompted the Catholic cleric Hugo Mujica to wonder whether it was naive to expect that cases of Jewish concern would be solved. Both attacks are suspected of being of Middle Eastern origin (see Effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). The Jewish community remains sensitive to further anti-Jewish attacks and considers insufficient the certainly noteworthy, although still inconclusive, progress that has been made in the AMIA investigation.
Some opposition politicians and public-opinion formers continue to display prejudice towards certain immigrant groups, and the notion of a tolerant and pluralist society, advocated by various politicians and others, has not yet become a reality, notwithstanding some important advances. The tightening of border controls has been high on the current government's agenda: commenting on the introduction of digitalized identification and increased efforts to co-ordinate security and intelligence with Brazil and Paraguay, the Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Aviran, said in the Buenos Aires daily La Prensa (5 November 1997) that a 'great effort is being made to make us secure'.
The recent past has also witnessed significant initiatives by the government to encourage Argentines to confront the country's activities during and after the Second World War as well as an increased official awareness that Argentina's image suffers when anti-Jewish incidents are reported, especially if no remedial action is taken. A July 1997 commemoration of the AMIA bombing (see Countering antisemitism) was reportedly attended by many non-Jews, and a committee monitoring the investigations into the embassy and AMIA bombings (see Effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) has characterized as 'simplistic' the notion that these incidents were of merely Jewish concern.
Some Jews unhappy with the progress of the investigations of the bombings frequently challenge government officials, implicitly demonstrating that there is no particular fear of backlash. In and of itself this might be evidence of a degree of success in the Jewish community's struggle against antisemitism over the last fifteen years. If so, Argentine Jewry's post-1983 leaders should be credited for raising public awareness of the risks to democracy posed by antisemitism.
Demographic data
Total population: 34.6 million
Jewish population: estimates range from 208,000 to 249,600 (mostly in Buenos Aires and in the provinces of Córdoba and Santa Fe)
Other minorities: according to the 1991 census, 95 per cent of the population are Argentine; the remaining 5 per cent are foreigners, mostly of Spanish, Italian, Bolivian and Peruvian origin, and there are approximately 2.5 million Argentines born of Syrian, Lebanese and other Middle Eastern descent.
Religion: the majority of Argentines are Roman Catholics although there are significant Protestant and Muslim communities
Political data
Constitutional status: federal presidential democracy
Federal government: Partido Justicialista (PJ, Justicialist Party) under president Carlos Saúl Menem (since 1989)
Other main political parties: Unión Cívica Radical (UCR, Radical Civic Union), Frente País Solidario (FREPASO, Front for a Nation in Solidarity)
Legislative and municipal elections (October 1997): the PJ received only 36.1 per cent of the votes nationally (18 per cent in Buenos Aires) and lost eleven seats in the lower house of congress. The main opposition parties, the UCR and FREPASO, formed the Alianza para el Trabajo, la Educación y la Justicia (Alianza, Alliance for Work, Education and Justice), a coalition not universally accepted by each party's provincial constituents. The Alianza received 45.8 per cent of the votes nationally and 56.8 per cent in Buenos Aires. The PJ now control 118 lower house seats, the Alianza 110 and other parties 29. As for the 60-member legislature of the city of Buenos Aires, the Alianza secured an absolute majority (37 seats), with 11 places going to the PJ and 12 to other parties. (For the results of far-right parties, see Parties, organizations, movements.)
Gubernatorial election, Córdoba 1998: the incumbent Ramón Mestre (UCR) was defeated by the PJ's Manuel de la Sota
Next presidential election (1999): against the background of the 1994 constitutional reform which permitted non-Catholics to stand for the presidency, the PJ's electoral reverse in the 1997 elections prompted PJ governor Néstor Kirchner of the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, believed by some to be of Jewish ancestry, to emerge as a contender for his party's nomination for president; by 1998, however, it was his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was being mentioned as a possible deputy candidate to the front-runner Eduardo Duhalde, the provincial governor of Buenos Aires
Economic data
GDP 1997: US$296.6 billion
GDP per capita 1997: US$8,470
Inflation 1997: 0 per cent
Unemployment: 13.7 per cent (1997), 12.4 per cent (1998)
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.
Since the beginning of mass immigration in the second half of the nineteenth century, Argentina's ruling classes have not regarded the arrival of Jewish immigrants, among others, as particularly desirable. Until the late 1920s, however, Jews 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 Jews, a fraction of them identified with progressive ideas, provoked disapproval among powerful members of Argentine society, including the Catholic Church whose influence was especially marked in the 1930s. 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 gained independence in 1816.
The antisemitism of the Argentine elites became part of a wider xenophobia, borrowing ideas successively from French right-wing, 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 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 Latin America, immigration became increasingly restrictive vis-à-vis Spanish Republicans and Jews in the 1930s.
Nevertheless, Argentina received the largest contingent of Jewish refugees in the Americas during the period 1933-45. Not all entered the country legally but, once in Argentina, Jews generally benefitted from the judiciary's interpretation that they were part of the country's population despite their clandestine means of entry. 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 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 the arrival of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators is yet available. (The exaggerated estimate of 60,000 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 - a figure repeated by the New York Times in April 1997 - remains subject to verification.) Regardless of estimates, however, 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 was suspected of having served as a refuge or transit point for Nazi loot. Conclusive evidence of this remains to be unearthed, and has proved hard to come by for US State Department researchers monitoring the performance of various former neutral states. Instead Argentine government records that entered the public domain in the 1990s reveal that during Perón's administration various European advisers to the immigration authorities had collaborated with or served the Nazis and as such attracted like-minded immigrants into the country.
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 regarded within 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, ruled at the time by a military regime. This figure was, in fact, less than the comparable figure at the peak of anti-Jewish violence in 1962-5.
Antisemitism was tolerated or encouraged during the military dictatorship of 1976-83. 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 revealed that Jewish prisoners had received 'special' treatment in the country's clandestine detention centres which were found to have antisemitic and Nazi slogans on their walls. 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, Raúl Alfonsín (UCR), had introduced in congress. Under Menem, Argentina's international realignment also led to the adoption of an increasingly pro-Jewish and pro-Israel line, while the governments attempted 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.
In May 1997 a report by US under-secretary of state for commerce, Stuart Eizenstat (see Switzerland: Legacy of the Second World War), found no evidence to suggest that any gold or art-work plundered by the Nazis came to Argentina. However, an article in a special issue on Argentina and the Nazi era of the journal Patterns of Prejudice (July 1997) suggested that an acceptance by US President Truman that Argentina's gold reserves did not contain Nazi loot may have been an expedient to ensure the Argentine shipment in 1947 of gold to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. (The sale of such gold allowed Argentina to settle its debts in the USA after the country was prevented from using its trade surplus with Britain to finance the deficit in exchanges with the USA by sterling's non-convertibility.)
The second Eizenstat report (June 1998) confirmed that Argentina had played no crucial role in support of the Nazi war effort, although its unwillingness to sever diplomatic relations with the Allies had given Nazi agents a unique base from which to access intelligence on the Allies and to smuggle out strategically important commodities, sent to Germany via Spain. The report also acknowledged that Argentina had been the American continent's foremost receiver of Jews during the Nazi era, with some 45,000 Jewish refugees arriving during 1933-45. It restated a US Treasury Department conclusion of May 1946 that Argentina had not been a haven for looted gold or assets, including caches of gems or art treasures.
The chapter on Croatia's pro-Nazi regime raised the question of Ustasa loot having possibly followed Ante Pavelic to Argentina (see Croatia), a subject which might be clarified if access to relevant Argentine intelligence materials were granted. Clarification of the fate of Ustasa loot also hinges on various US intelligence agencies' declassification of documents concerning their Cold War utilization of Nazi-tainted Eastern Europeans as anti-Communist assets. Although approved by the US Senate, the relevant declassification bill still requires the approval of the House of Representatives.
At the London conference on Nazi gold in December 1997 (see United Kingdom and Switzerland entries: Legacy of the Second World War), Argentina announced that it would contribute to the compensation fund for victims of the Holocaust proposed by the USA. According to the periodical Informe Latinoamericano (16 December 1997) CEANA also announced at the conference that eight research units were investigating newly accessed Argentine and foreign documents, including army, navy, federal police, and central bank files. The number of research units had risen to twenty-one by the time CEANA's plenary met in Buenos Aires in November 1998. The plenary's official opening was attended by Stuart Eizenstat who referred to CEANA as a world-class effort, a description repeated at the closing press conference by Sidney Clearfield.
War crimes
In March 1997 the publication by a Madrid daily of a list of Nazi agents who, under the protection of Franco's Spain, escaped deportation after the war, included at least three cases of individuals who at some point resided in Argentina. Walter Kutschmann, a former Gestapo boss in France and Spain, lived in Argentina under the identity of Pedro Olmo; he died in custody in 1986 before he could be extradited to Germany. The late Horst Fuldner, an Argentine citizen of German parentage, served the Third Reich as an intelligence operative in Spain. After returning to Argentina, he helped Perón recruit former Third Reich scientists and technicians. Fuldner's connection with the firm CAPRI enabled him to provide employment to some newly arrived Nazis in Argentina, among them Adolf Eichmann. Reinhardt Spitzi, another former intelligence agent in Spain, held talks in 1944 with Argentine military attaché Alberto Vélez on Argentina's need for defence material from the Third Reich. He arrived in Buenos Aires after the war with Vélez's help, and is at present living in his native Austria.
In July 1997 the Comisión para el Esclarecimiento de las Actividades del Nazismo en la Argentina (CEANA, Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina) was set up. CEANA's mandate is to determine how many Nazi war criminals settled in Argentina after the war and whether any Nazi loot entered the country. Its findings must be endorsed by an international panel including, among others, David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Sidney Clearfield, executive vice-president of B'nai B'rith International, Sir Sigmund Sternberg, chairman of the International Council of Christians and Jews (ICCJ), Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, Judge Richard Goldstone, a former prosecutor of the International Court of Justice for war crimes, and Roberto Alemann, a former Argentine economy minister and editor of Argentinisches Tageblatt, the country's foremost German-language anti-Nazi paper.
The judiciary agreed in June 1998 to grant the extradition of Dinko Sakic, a former commander of the Jasenovac concentration camp, and of his wife Nada Sakic (née Luburic), formerly in charge of the female section of the Ustasa concentration camp Stara Gradiska (see Croatia). While both were sought by Croatia and Yugoslavia, they were extradited to Zagreb in accordance with the post-Cold War notion that war criminals and criminals against humanity should be tried in the countries where their alleged atrocities were committed.
By way of contrast, no countries with jurisdiction in such cases have requested the extradition of Ivo Rojnica, a former Ustasa official whose name appears among the signatories of a 1941 decree banning the free circulation of Serbs, Jews and others in the district of Dubrovnik. Accused by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of being a war criminal after Croatian President Tudjman tried to have him appointed as his country's first ambassador to Argentina, convincing evidence on him has been hard to collect. Although Wiesenthal's Israel representative, Ephraim Zuroff, invited the Instituto Nacional anti Discriminación, Xenofobia y Racismo (INADI) to see their evidence incriminating Rojnica, Zuroff's Argentine counterpart, Sergio Widder, was quoted in the mainstream daily Clarín (15 May 1998) as saying that concrete proof on Rojnica was still lacking.
The 1998 opening of an INADI branch in the city of San Carlos de Bariloche, in the Patagonian province of Río Negro, prompted the Israeli ambassador to suggest that Nazis living in Bariloche should be aware that they will not remain free for much longer. In response, the mayor of Bariloche, César Miguel, said that the passion provoked by the subject of the persecution of Jews during the Second World War often results in generalizations and a loss of perspective. Bariloche councillors, including PJ, UCR and FREPASO members, supported a resolution asking the Argentine foreign ministry to invite the Israeli ambassador to give it all the information he has on the subject.
Constitutional reform in 1994 accorded ethnic minorities the right to be represented in government and incorporated 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, as well as the far south. Their standard of living is below average and they have higher rates of illiteracy, chronic disease and unemployment.
There is continued hostility towards immigrants, especially from Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru, some of whom have entered Argentina illegally for economic reasons. Newcomers from Korea and the Argentine offspring of earlier Middle Eastern immigrants suffer similarly. There has been more awareness about those of Middle Eastern descent since Menem, himself of Syrian Muslim ancestry, became the first Arab-descended head of state.
In February 1997 the leader of the opposition UCR in the lower house, Federico Storani, referred to Menem as a 'turco' - an offensive nickname for Arab immigrants - on live television during journalist Jorge Lanata's current affairs programme. In March 1997 a letter from Ignacio Copani to the mainstream Buenos Aires paper Clarín linked 'turcos' with crime. Copani said that since 'a Moroccan-looking' fellow passenger on a train in Europe had stolen US$30 from him, he has been under the impression that 'turcos are always robbing me'.
Anti-Arab sentiment, together with a limited knowledge of the Middle East, is widespread in the media. In November 1997, for example, the Buenos Aires business daily Ambito Financiero referred to Iran as 'an Arab state', and the Buenos Aires daily La Prensa called Hizbullah an Iranian fundamentalist group.
Undoubtedly, prejudice against Arabs and Argentines of Middle Eastern ancestry has been exacerbated by the suspicion that the bombing of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA in 1994 were of Middle Eastern inspiration (see Effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). Against the background of such claims, a book by Juan Salinas published in June 1997, AMIA el atentado: Quiénes son los autores y por qué no están presos (The AMIA Attack: Who Are the Perpetuators and Why Aren't They in Prison?, see also Publications and media) insinuates a Syrian connection with the AMIA bombing. Salinas wrote: 'there are many Arabs, in particular Syrians, who appear to be involved', a hypothesis that has not been put forward by the Argentine, Israeli or US governments. In fact the sole detainee of Middle Eastern ancestry in connection with the bombing is the Druze-descended Alberto Telleldín.
The book La Frontera (The Border) by Hernán López Echagüe, published in 1997, deals with the frontier between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, a region which hosts many Lebanese immigrants suspected of playing roles in the two bombings. López Echagüe - who claims to be a member of an AMIA-sponsored team of journalists investigating the AMIA attack - told La Prensa in December 1997: 'the "turcos" [who] own more than half of [Paraguay's] Ciudad del Este stops [and reside in Brazil's Foz de Iguaçu]' donate 'funds, armaments', whether 'for Hizbullah or other causes'. A joint statement from all the Brazilian political parties supported the Lebanese people in the Foz de Iguaçu region against these claims.
In May 1997 the Federación de Entidades Argentino Arabes (FEARAB, Federation of Argentine Arab Institutions), an organization associated with the Syrian Ba'ath party, requested that the supreme court hold a public session to examine the various hypotheses surrounding the bombing of the Israeli embassy, a move opposed by the DAIA. FEARAB argued that it was important for the public 'to see the evidence that may have been assembled, rather than [be offered] only one version of its contents' by some interested party.
In December 1997 Argentina formally recognized the Druze faith. This was consistent with other official gestures towards Argentine Arabs including the visit to Argentina by the former leader of the Algerian Front de libération national (National Liberation Front), Ahmed ben Bella, and the government's donation of a building to house FEARAB (see also Publications and media). Despite these positive steps, FEARAB's offers to collaborate with the Maronite-dominated Unión Cultural Argentino Libanesa (UCAL, Argentine Lebanese Cultural Union) indicate that Argentine Arabs feel threatened.
Argentina's Armenians estimate their number at 100,000 (maximum), making it the second largest Armenian community in Latin America. They played an important role in prodding the government to grant diplomatic recognition to Armenia. The community was disappointed in 1995 when the government vetoed a community-engineered and UCR-sponsored initiative to establish a 'day of repudiation and struggle against discrimination' on 24 April, a date linked with the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Unease following the government's veto was partly dissipated in October 1997 when Menem visited the Buenos Aires Armenian Centre. His 1998 presidential visit to Armenia took place against the background of his having earlier declared his 'affectionate, loving and caring attitude' towards that country and its people. The government has yet to set an alternative date for the proposed 'day of repudiation and struggle against discrimination'.
For many years aspiring professional soldiers had to disclose the religious affiliation of parents and grandparents when filling in applications for admission to the Colegio Militar, the army's officer training school. The requirement was aimed at weeding out non-Catholic candidates. With the shift from a conscript-based to a professional army, such a requirement was dropped by the army leadership under General Martín Balza. According to Robert Potash, a US scholar and author of four books on the Argentine army, the beneficiaries of this change, pregnant with implications for Jews and other non-Catholics, have thus far been Protestants.
Mainstream political life
Under Carlos Corach, the interior ministry includes among its staff individuals who, journalists claim, were linked with far-right and antisemitic groups in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition to Norberto Belladrich and Carlos Tórtora (both with ultra-nationalist backgrounds), whose cases have been highlighted in the past (see Antisemitism World Report 1997 ), Hugo Franco - currently in charge of the immigration bureau and formerly undersecretary of internal security under Interior Minister Carlos Ruckauf (at present the country's vice-president) - has been accused by former economy minister Domingo Cavallo of arguing 'that the bomb [against the AMIA building] was the result of an internal dispute within the Jewish community' (see Effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). According to Herman Schiller, co-founder of the Jewish Movement for Human Rights, Franco supports the theory that the embassy and AMIA bombings were the work of right-wing Jewish extremists, opposed to the Middle East peace process.
Franco's view is probably not motivated by antisemitism. That no single statement is in general sufficient proof of his attitude towards Jews is highlighted by Franco's ready application of article 21 of the immigration code - banning the admission or residence in Argentina of foreigners whose record may compromise security and public order - one of several measures designed to weed out anti-Jewish and anti-Israel elements among foreigners. In support of Schiller's implied allegation of antisemitism, however, other government officials believe that Franco may not be above antisemitism.
In July 1997 Laura Ginsberg of the Memoria Activa (Active Memory) group, which represents relatives of the embassy and AMIA bombing victims, spoke at a ceremony commemorating the victims of the attacks (see Countering antisemitism). Following her highly charged speech, Buenos Aires provincial governor, Eduardo Duhalde, was reported in the weekly Noticias (26 July 1997) as saying that Ginsberg's words were an 'understandable Jewish exaggeration'.
In 1997 Córdoba provincial governor Ramón Mestre (UCR) rejected an initiative presented at the provincial legislature to have the Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement declared non-working days for the province's civil servants on the basis that it would be impossible to declare non-working days for the festivals of the various religious and national groups. Mestre later announced that his administration would honour national law 24,571 which already declares these as non-working days for Jews, thereby rendering the proposal unnecessary.
Far-right parties
In the October 1997 elections (see General background), Aldo Rico, the leader of the far-right Movimiento por la Dignidad y la Independencia (MODIN, Movement for Dignity and Independence), was elected mayor of the Buenos Aires provincial town of San Miguel, despite his party's overall poor showing in the election; its presence in congress was all but eliminated, and Rico himself failed to be elected as a member of the lower house.
MODIN, founded in 1991 by Rico, an army officer dismissed for leading abortive military coups in 1987 and 1988, became the fourth largest political party nationally in the previous April 1994 legislative election, gaining some twenty seats. Although observers believe the party's leaders have anti-Jewish leanings, they have over the years distanced themselves from anything overtly antisemitic in order to participate respectably in the electoral process. MODIN 's difficulties in consolidating an anti-government protest vote, have been compounded by its failure to attract fresh supporters and overcome a split that occurred in 1994.
Furthermore several MODIN leaders - including Emilio Morello, a former member of the lower house of congress - are part of the so-called Carapintada group under suspicion for links to the 1994 AMIA bombing and other anti-Jewish incidents. It was alleged in 1995 that MODIN politicians joined forces with some non-commissioned army officers to trade stolen war explosives and weapons that may have been used in the AMIA attack. At the time Morello's parliamentary immunity allowed him to evade questioning by Juan Galeano, the magistrate investigating the AMIA bombing. (Had Rico succeeded in 1997 in securing his seat in the lower house, he was expected to resign in favour of Morello, thereby extending the latter's parliamentary immunity against interrogation on his suspected Carapintada connection with the AMIA bombing.) According to Clarín (12 December 1997), a former Buenos Aires police officer probing the Carapintada connection recommended that Galeano also investigate MODIN adviser Carlos Castillo for his suspected role in robbing a Jewish country club and an alleged attack against a Jewish leader.
In May 1997 some fifty young neo-Nazis marked the first anniversary of the death of a skinhead who was killed in a street fight with left-wing activists. The demonstration was organized by two relatively unknown groups, Nationalist Youth and the New Patriotic Social Order Party.
In November 1997 the New Patriotic Social Order Party hosted a celebration of national sovereignty in Buenos Aires. The event attracted youths and skinheads who called for the recovery of the Malvinas (Falkland Islands) and the reintroduction of a conscript-based army, and distributed a printed message by Raúl Sagastizábal condemning, among others, the legislators who refused to take their oath in the name 'of God and the Fatherland'.
In November 1997 the neo-Nazi Partido del Nuevo Triunfo (PNT, New Triumph Party) was relaunched as 'the political, militant and electoral expression of Argentine national socialism'. The party, originally called Alerta Nacional (National Alert) and founded by Alejandro Biondini, adheres to a far-right ideology and has a limited following. Biondini's use of the Internet to disseminate antisemitism gives him an edge over other far-right groups (see Publications and media).
Jewish cemeteries continue to be targets of attack. The cemetery of Villa Clara in the province of Entre Ríos was desecrated in July 1997, while the cemetery in Rosario in Santa Fe suffered similarly in October 1997. The attackers went undetected.
In December 1997 in Buenos Aires thirty-five tombs were destroyed in the main Jewish cemetery in La Tablada, and nineteen tombs were damaged in the Ciudadela cemetery. Reports from residents in Ciudadela that a band of hooligans had been active in the vicinity of the cemetery on the night of the desecration resulted in Página/12's front page claim that 'former officers of the Buenos Aires provincial police hired a group of thugs to desecrate the Jewish cemetery'. The allegation remains unsubstantiated and no one has been charged with the attack. Interior Minister Corach offered the federal government's full 'co-operation and backing to punish the perpetrators' and to clarify 'such deeds, shameful to all Argentines'.
The fact that the December desecrations took place in areas that are under the jurisdiction of the Buenos Aires police force lends credence to the theory that the purge of some 6,000 corrupt policemen (about 500 during 1997) from a 47,000-strong force is linked to such desecrations. Although most of the purges took place after the 1992 embassy and 1994 AMIA bombings there was renewed uncertainty within the force in December 1997 when the provincial legislature approved a six-month extension of emergency law 11,800, a prerequisite for new purges of senior officers (see also Religious antisemitism). The then DAIA president Rubén Beraja, who said in January 1998 that Jewish community leaders had suspected police involvement in desecrations in 1996, expressed concern that the new attacks could have been perpetrated by former provincial policemen trying to sabotage police reforms devised by Buenos Aires governor Eduardo Duhalde.
In January 1997 swastikas were daubed on the walls of the Zionist youth club Noar Zioni in Córdoba; the incident was declared 'unacceptable' by the DAIA authorities.
In October 1997 Sanatorio Garay, a medical clinic in Buenos Aires, tried to force a Jewish doctor to work on the Day of Atonement, threatening punitive measures if he refused. INADI told the clinic that in accordance with law 24,571, the Day of Atonement was a non-working day for all Jews and secured a retraction of their threats.
In November 1997 the DAIA branch in the province of Tucumán published an article in the local paper, La Gaceta, about San Roque old people's home's refusal to allow a visit from pupils of a local Jewish school. The provincial ombudsman, Sergio Díaz Ricci, declared that 'impeding entry [to the home] on the sole strength of [the proposed visitors] being Jewish is an intolerable Nazi attitude'. An investigation is underway to establish whether San Roque receives official funding.
In May 1997 Father Rafael Braun, one of the country's leading Catholic intellectuals, told Clarín of the existence of 'extreme right-wingers with an antisemitic mentality' among the Catholic Church's following. Braun did not deny that he might be describing members of the Buenos Aires provincial police force, some of whom have been accused of involvement in the AMIA bombing (see Antisemitic incidents).
Braun, a Catholic University lecturer and recipient of the B'nai B'rith 1996 human rights award for his support of Christian-Jewish dialogue, added that 'the centuries-old antisemitic attitudes within the Catholic Church' were undoubtedly among the factors contributing to the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
Nevertheless, in an exchange with Michael Lerner, the editor of the US Jewish periodical Tikkun, Braun took issue with the view that the Catholic Church 'had not gone far enough in challenging the [country's] military [rulers] for their antisemitic practices during the 1970s' (see Antisemitic legacy). Braun argued that the Church could not be held collectively responsible for the actions of only some Catholics and stressed that it was among 'the few [institutions] that had afterwards engaged in self-criticism' of its performance during that period. He added that such self-criticism was not evident 'among the Jewish community as regards what goes on in Israel, with its own extremist groups, or the suffering of Palestinians and Christians there'.
In October 1998 Sister Marta Pelloni, a progressive Catholic nun, referred to Argentine Jews as 'foreigners' during an address at a Memoria Activa function. However Sister Pelloni immediately apologized for her statement.
An article in the August 1997 issue of Libertad de Opinión (see Publications and media) presented a comprehensive list of Holocaust-denial authors. The article concluded that 'the exposure of the falseness of the "Holocaust" would sweep away the foundations of the Zionist entity, the self-styled Israel, and the whole "industry of sorrow" that has produced so many substantial economic benefits for the millions of "survivors"'.
Although nationalist and far-right groups exploited the press freedoms achieved with the revival of democracy in 1983, the number of far-right publications decreased following the adoption in 1988 of anti-discrimination legislation. Patria Argentina - although published irregularly and poorly distributed - is one of the most obvious surviving far-right publications.
In September 1997 Patria Argentina condemned Jewish 'insolence, haughtiness, unheard-of arrogance [and] undisguised contempt for anything that does not respect their views'. The publication also claimed the existence of a plot to create a Jewish state in Argentina's sparsely-populated southern region, the so-called Andinia plan. Referring to the embassy and AMIA bombings, the publication condemned the 'endless [Jewish] insults and arrogance vis-à-vis rulers and magistrates - among whom are many members of their own group - for what they see as negligence in solving both terrible attacks'.
The same issue was also critical of the Catholic priest Father Carlos Mullins for an article he wrote on the third anniversary of the AMIA bombing (July 1997) which showed him to be 'a servile spokesperson of the Yankee synagogue'.
Publications about Martin Borman and Adolf Eichmann, published in 1996 by Ayer y Hoy, a Buenos Aires-based publishing house which in previous years sought to discredit the hunt for Nazi war criminals and those who engage in that pursuit, continued to be available at various bookshops and newsagents in 1997 and 1998.
The Internet has become a popular medium for far-right and antisemitic groups. Libertad de Opinión is an antisemitic on-line publication set up in 1997 by Alejandro Biondini and his small group of followers (see Parties, organizations, movements and Holocaust denial). In an effort to secure Arab support, Libertad de Opinión 's July 1997 'issue' contained references to the supreme court's May session in which experts from the national engineering academy concluded that the 1992 embassy bomb exploded inside the embassy premises, thus implying that the bomb was a 'Jewish affair'. This prompted UCR president Rodolfo Terragno to recommend legal action against Libertad de Opinión for creating the false impression that the supreme court had adopted a view counter to that of the state intelligence service, federal police and gendarmerie specialists (see Effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).
In Libertad de Opinión 's August 1997 issue an article by FEARAB leader Nélida Khaled condemned Juan Salinas's book AMIA el atentado for tarnishing the image of Argentine Arabs (see Racism and xenophobia). Khaled claimed that the AMIA and DAIA ordered Salinas to write the book (Salinas himself admitted in June on the Memoria y Realidad radio programme that he had received AMIA funding for his research). FEARAB's attitude to the bombings has been partly influenced by the vicissitudes of the Middle Eastern peace negotiations and partly by the perceived threat to Argentine Arabs because of suspicions that the attacks were of Middle Eastern origin. While, at the time of the 1992 embassy explosion, FEARAB claimed it was caused by the blowing up of the arsenal kept by the Israelis, the organization two years later sent a message of solidarity to DAIA following the AMIA attack. Also, the president of FEARAB for North and South America, Horacio Haddad, attended DAIA's sixtieth anniversary celebration. Although FEARAB did not at first distance itself from Khaled for choosing the far-right Libertad de Opinión to make her end views known, by the year's end her association with FEARAB had come to an abrupt end.
Salinas's book claimed that the principal targets of the 1994 AMIA bomb (with its alleged Syrian connection) were Mossad agents operating under DAIA cover. Such a claim arises from Salinas's misrepresentation of a DAIA unit monitoring antisemitism (housed in the AMIA building) as Israeli because of its link to an institute of Tel Aviv University.
With an introduction by Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy (see France), the pamphlet Los atentados judíos en Buenos Aires (Jewish Attacks in Buenos Aires), written by the Argentine Norberto Ceresole, was issued in Spain in August 1997 and allegedly distributed in Argentina by the Syrian embassy. A former Marxist, Ceresole lived for a while in Europe on the grounds that 'the state and a part of Argentine society had been occupied by the forces of Judaism'. He argued in the pamphlet that the embassy and AMIA attacks were the result of 'Jewish fundamentalist terrorism' which has infiltrated the Israeli secret service and is linked to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Ceresole goes on to suggest that, after the bombs, the means by which public attention was deflected away from Israeli internal divisions included the unleashing of 'an international Jewish campaign' on the subject of Nazi gold. The pamphlet also said that 'the take-over of Argentina' - an anti-Jewish myth loosely associated with Theodor Herzl's allusion to Argentina as a possible site for a Jewish state - was actually being planned. This take-over, Ceresole argued, required the destruction of Peronism, which Jews sought to bring about by defining 'Argentine society as "antisemitic"', thereby presenting 'the most transcendental popular movement in the country's history, namely Peronism, as indigenous "Nazism"'. In December 1998 FEARAB cancelled a lecture that Ceresole was intending to give at its Buenos Aires headquarters, a building granted to FEARAB by the Menem government (see Racism and xenophobia).
Under the title 'Jewish Argentina', reminiscent of the title of an anti-Jewish book of the 1970s by Horacio Calderon, a cover story on the third anniversary of the AMIA bombing in the Buenos Aires magazine Noticias (26 July 1997) was illustrated with a Star of David in front of a burning flame. The caption said that 47 per cent of the population did 'not believe Jews to be part of [Argentine] society'. This figure was presented as coming from a 1994 survey - presumably to suggest a relationship between such a public opinion and the AMIA bombing - when in reality it came from an American Jewish Committee/DAIA-sponsored survey conducted in December 1992. The misdated statistic was also taken out of context because the survey's foremost finding was that the conditions conducive to antisemitism in Argentina at that time did not prevail, even if xenophobia and other prejudices could not be ignored.
The Israeli ambassador Yitzhak Aviran's 1997 foray into domestic Argentine affairs (see Effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) provoked resentment among politicians and helped blur crucial distinctions in the media and elsewhere between Israelis and Argentine Jews. There has accordingly been a recent increase in the interchangeable use of the terms 'Israeli' and 'Israelite', a misleading equation which threatens the communal leadership's definition of Argentine Jewry as an ethno-religious group. Examples include the reference to AMIA as an 'Israeli' institution in the business daily Ambito Financiero (20 November 1997) and left-wing Diario Popular (19 December 1997), or to Ciudadela as an 'Israeli' cemetery in the liberal La Nación (2 January 1998).
The ongoing investigations into the attacks on the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA in 1994 continue to make progress, although no major breakthroughs have yet been seen.
With such an inconclusive state of affairs the Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Aviran, warned of the likelihood of a third attack. Gordon Gray, a US State Department director of counter-terrorism, said in November 1997 (quoted in the Buenos Aires daily El Cronista ): 'Unfortunately attacks can occur in any country now. We have no concrete information [about a forthcoming attack in Argentina] but I would say that they [the Argentines] must be vigilant.'
The Argentine supreme court rejected DAIA suspicions that Judge Carlos Fayt was trying to discredit the testimony of a Jewish witness who saw a crater outside the bombed Israeli embassy in 1992. That testimony contradicts the conclusions of the national engineering academy, presented at a May 1997 session of the court, that the explosion occurred inside the embassy (see Publications and media), conclusions that also challenge the theory of a car bomb outside the embassy as put forward by the state intelligence service, federal police and gendarmerie specialists. Since Fayt is Jewish and a former campaigner for the rights of Soviet Jewry, there is no suggestion that he is motivated by antisemitism.
DAIA's calls to entrust the investigation of the embassy bombing to Judge Juan Galeano (the magistrate in charge of the AMIA investigation) were rejected by the supreme court, which appointed instead Esteban Canevari, a supreme court secretary. Canevari, with a team of sixteen people, is to be concerned solely with this investigation, and thus more likely to breathe new life into it after the 1996 resignation of Ricardo Levene, Jr., the supreme court justice formerly in charge of the investigation whose intention of declaring the case closed for lack of firm evidence prompted his resignation.
As for the money to buy the vehicle presumably used for the car bomb, Argentina's former ambassador to Lebanon, Juan Faraldo, and chargé d'affaires Jaime Cerda confirmed in October 1997 that stamps on some of the dollar bills received for the vehicle identified a money changer in the Lebanese town of Jbeil, evidence that the bills in question had travelled through Lebanon. The same diplomats declared as genuine an Islamic Jihad document claiming responsibility for the bombing and assured the investigators that they knew of no similar Hizbullah statement of responsibility for the attack.
As for the investigation of the AMIA bombing, in October 1997 Judge Juan Galeano refused to release from custody Carlos Telleldín, the man who provided the van used in the attack. A request from Alberto Zuppi, the lawyer of two of the victims, to detain Telleldín's wife and brother as collaborators in the bombing was also refused. According to La Nación (31 October 1997), Zuppi's move was inspired by the suspicion that Telleldín knows more about the actual attackers.
In the summer of 1997 an operation by a new federal police anti-terrorist unit unearthed documents showing that, a week before the AMIA attack, Buenos Aires police commissioner Juan Ribelli had inherited US$500,000 from his father and similar amounts from his three brothers. Ribelli was imprisoned in 1996 along with three other police officers accused of being 'necessary participants' in the bombing. Since it is doubtful that Ribelli's father could have amassed such a fortune on the basis of his meagre pension, the inheritance was presumed to be laundered money that Ribelli had been paid in advance for his role in the AMIA bombing.
The affair was interpreted by AMIA president Oscar Hansman as 'a significant advance', although Laura Ginsberg (of Memoria Activa, see Parties, organizations, movements) pointed to some missing links in the Buenos Aires evening newspaper Crónica (12 November 1997), such as Ribelli's trip to the Middle East, his anti-terrorist course in the United States (completed shortly before the AMIA bombing) and his use of a false identity at the hotel where Israeli personnel sent to assist in the aftermath of the bombing were staying. UCR legislator Melchor Cruchaga was quoted in El Cronista (17 November 1997) as referring to these Israelis as 'Mossad personnel'.
Galeano also sought evidence to support the 'Iranian connection' theory from Abolhassan Mezbahi, a former member of the Iranian president's entourage. The fact that Mezbahi had been considered a reliable source of information in other contexts suggested that he may also have information about the bombings. By the end of 1997, however, nothing of substance had been found on Iranian involvement, and Menem's threat of sanctions against Iran did not materialize. In 1994 Manoucheh Moatamer, a former Iranian intelligence operative, had implicated Iranian diplomats in both the embassy and AMIA bombs. Already labelled unreliable by the UK and other countries, in 1997 the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Mahmud Mohamadi, characterized Moatamer as a former CIA agent and suggested there were 'US and Zionist conspiracies' against Argentina and Iran.
Allegations by an Israeli secret agent published in Clarín (17 October 1997) that Hamas co-operated with Hizbullah in the attacks were not pursued by Galeano. The agent's claim was seen by some as justification for Israel's botched attack against Hamas leader Khaled Mishal in Amman.
In December 1997 the legislative commission responsible for monitoring the two bombing investigations issued an extensive report under the title Informe de la Comisión Bicameral Especial de Seguimiento de la Investigación de los Atentados a la Embajada de Israel y al Edificio de la A.M.I.A. (Report by the Bicameral Special Commission Monitoring the Investigation of the Attacks against the Embassy of Israel and the AMIA Building). Created in 1996 and headed by Carlos Soria (PJ), its members include politicians and lawmakers of the ruling and main opposition parties.
The party divisions within the commission resulted in three sets of conclusions: those prepared by PJ representatives acknowledged that 'shifts in foreign policy' require a continual review of the working hypotheses of the intelligence and internal security services, and stressed the failure of successive governments since 1983 to modernize security systems when 'some regional conflicts are capable of having consequences for others who are totally removed from the conflicts'. The conclusions drafted by UCR and FREPASO members also emphasized the effect of shifts of foreign policy on theories explaining the attacks, supporting the notion that Argentina's alignment with the USA had repercussions in the Middle East that led to the attacks. Senator Christina Fernández de Kirchner (PJ) issued separate conclusions ascribing blame to an unnamed 'foreign minister and interior minister, as well as the state intelligence secretary' for failing to translate foreign policy changes into measures that would preserve the security of Argentina. Kirchner focused on government weaknesses since the advent of democracy in 1983, including Alfonsín's amnesties and Menem's pardons for human rights violators which 'deepened the culture of impunity'. Kirchner, along with the opposition parties, also suggested that the second attack on AMIA was linked to the government's lack of will to clarify the first.
All three sets of conclusions clearly demonstrate that the signatories link the bombings and Argentina's pro-USA (and therefore pro-Israeli) foreign policy, although this remains to be proved. They also recommend punitive measures against those who hinder the investigations as well as witness protection schemes. Focusing on Argentina's inexperience with international terrorism the PJ element of the commission suggested that 'lack of control and co-ordination' allowed the investigations to be derailed by the same agencies which 'acted illegally', even if the 'situation was remedied by the timely intervention of the judge'.
In March 1997 Israeli ambassador Aviran, speaking at a ceremony commemorating the embassy bombing (see Countering antisemitism), criticized the supreme court's investigations into the attack. A parliamentary initiative presented by four PJ politicians - Angel Pardo, Osvaldo Sala, Alberto Tell and Jorge Yoma - called on Menem to issue his 'strongest protest to the government of Israel for [the ambassador's] attitude, which violates the most elementary principles of international law, and harms the cordial and affectionate relations between our peoples'. A call for Aviran's expulsion from the country 'for his serious interventions in our internal affairs, and for having affected [Argentina's] national sovereignty', also came from former MODIN lower house member Guillermo Fernández Gill (see Parties organizations, movements).
A result of the official disapproval of Aviran's interference in Argentina's domestic affairs was a 1998 agreement signed by the interior ministry's INADI and FEARAB to discourage ethnic and other communities from resorting to foreign diplomatic representatives in order to secure rights which are granted by the Argentine constitution. An official ceremony to mark the enactment of the agreement took place at the presidential palace and was attended, among others, by Interior Minister Carlos Corach and DAIA secretary general Rogelio Cichowolsky, who succeeded Rubén Beraja as DAIA president in December 1998.
In 1998 Ricardo Russo, a PJ activist, was tried for infringement of the anti-discrimination law and convicted for incitement to anti-Jewish hatred. Russo, who had served as a Radio Belgrano official during part of Menem's presidency, was at first thought to be responsible - together with Aparicio Torres, Emilio Cañete and Juan Núñez - for a 1996 desecration of the Jewish cemetery at La Tablada. While the evidence for this was dismissed as inconclusive, the group's possession of vast quantities of anti-Jewish literature resulted in Russo being sentenced to thirty months' imprisonment, with shorter sentences being handed down to his co-defendants.
President Menem and Foreign Minister Guido Di Tella accepted a 1997 invitation to join the international membership of the Inter-Parliamentary Council against Antisemitism (IPCA) based in London.
The Holocaust Memorial Foundation announced plans to open a Buenos Aires Holocaust museum in a centrally located building donated by the government. Following the canvassing of architectural firms for ideas as to the museum's design, the contract for the construction of the museum was put out to tender in 1997.
In March 1997, on the fifth anniversary of the Israeli embassy bombing, there were two commemorative ceremonies at La Tablada cemetery, one organized by Memoria Activa and the other by the main Jewish communal bodies. Attendees of the latter included Foreign Minister Di Tella, Interior Minister Corach, and church and military dignitaries. A statement by UCR president Rodolfo Terragno said that the attackers had enjoyed a measure of protection from official 'incompetence, negligence or complicity', while Di Tella was critical of the results of the supreme court investigation, which he described as 'regrettable'.
In May 1997 a work of art in honour of the Jewish victims of the Second World War, as well as of those killed in the embassy and AMIA attacks, was unveiled in Buenos Aires at the Metropolitan Cathedral, opposite Plaza de Mayo. The inauguration ceremony was presided over by Cardinal Antonio Quarraccino and attended by Interior Minister Corach, the capital's mayor, Poland's former head of state, Lech Walesa, and a host of Jewish and other leaders. A year later, Argentina's postal authorities issued a stamp commemorating the Cathedral's decision to display the mural. However, since the final solution to the Jewish question was Third Reich policy and the bombings in Buenos Aires were in no way related to Argentine state policy, the American Jewish Year Book 1998 echoed the views of those who felt that the combining of the two events in a single mural was conceptually flawed.
In July 1997, on the third anniversary of the AMIA bombing, a march outside the Plaza Lavalle to commemorate its victims was attended by large crowds including senior politicians Corach and Di Tella. Government officials were at the receiving end of abuse hurled from, among others, frustrated relatives of the victims.
Di Tella announced in September 1997 that Argentina would erect a statue in honour of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat in Budapest who rescued Jews during the Second World War. After the severance of diplomatic relations between Argentina and the Axis in 1944 Sweden represented Argentine interests in a number of countries, including Hungary. The initiative also honours the country's foreign service and clerical personnel abroad who protected Jewish life and property in Europe. In November 1998 a monument similar to one erected in London at the end of 1997 was unveiled in Buenos Aires. Attended by guests such as Wallenberg's half-brother Guy von Dardel, Sweden's Trade Minister Leif Pagrotsky and a Hungarian Jewish leader, the unveiling ceremony included a speech by Sir Sigmund Sternberg, who originally secured the approval of the Argentine foreign ministry and the city of Buenos Aires for erecting the statue. As part of the foreign ministry's attempt to identify Argentine servicemen and administrative clerks who helped save Jewish lives during the war, Foreign Minister Di Tella paid tribute to Simon Margel, a former employee of the Argentine consulate in Budapest who is credited with rescuing many Jews. In addition the post office issued a commemorative stamp and the foreign ministry provided explanatory text accompanying the first cover issues which were presented at the ceremony.
The Holocaust Memorial Foundation and the University of Palermo invited
Simone Veil, a former European Parliament president, to lecture in Buenos Aires in October
1997 on the need 'not to forget the Nazi horror'. Veil, who was received by Menem and Di
Tella, was quoted in Clarín (30 October 1997) as saying: 'Here we are talking
freely which would have been impossible in Argentina some years ago.'
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Institute for Jewish Policy Research and American Jewish Committee
© JPR 1999
