Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina

By Natasha Zaretsky

Acts of Repair explores how ordinary people grapple with decades of political violence and genocide in Argentina—a history that includes the Holocaust, the political repression of the 1976–1983 dictatorship, and the 1994 AMIA bombing. Although the struggle against impunity seems inevitably incomplete, Argentines have created possibilities for repair through cultural memory, yielding spaces for transformation and agency critical to personal and political recovery.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Dec 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781978807440

Natasha Zaretsky

Natasha Zaretsky is assistant professor of history at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Book preview

Acts of Repair

Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights Series

EDITED BY ALEXANDER LABAN HINTON AND NELA NAVARRO

Nanci Adler, ed., Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture

Alison Crosby and M. Brinton Lykes, Beyond Repair? Mayan Women’s Protagonism in the Aftermath of Genocidal Harm

Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide

Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas

Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence

Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory

Douglas A. Kammen, Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor

Eyal Mayroz, Reluctant Interveners: America’s Failed Responses to Genocide from Bosnia to Darfur

Walter Richmond, The Circassian Genocide

S. Garnett Russell, Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen

Victoria Sanford, Katerina Stefatos, and Cecilia M. Salvi, eds., Gender Violence in Peace and War: States of Complicity

Irina Silber, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador

Samuel Totten and Rafiki Ubaldo, eds., We Cannot Forget: Interviews with Survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

Eva van Roekel, Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina

Anton Weiss-Wendt, A Rhetorical Crime: Genocide in the Geopolitical Discourse of the Cold War

Timothy Williams, The Complexity of Evil: Perpetration and Genocide

Ronnie Yimsut, Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey

Natasha Zaretsky, Acts of Repair: Justice, Truth, and the Politics of Memory in Argentina

Acts of Repair

JUSTICE, TRUTH, AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN ARGENTINA

NATASHA ZARETSKY

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zaretsky, Natasha, 1975– author.

Title: Acts of repair : justice, truth, and the politics of memory in Argentina / Natasha Zaretsky.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Series: Genocide, political violence, human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020037183 | ISBN 9781978807426 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978807433 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978807440 (epub) | ISBN 9781978807457 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978807464 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Political violence—Argentina. | Collective memory—Argentina.

Classification: LCC HN270.Z9 V598 2020 | DDC 303.60982—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037183

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Natasha Zaretsky

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dedicated to the memory of Berta

to the memory of David and Roza

to the memory of Jack

to the memory of Andrea

CONTENTS

Chronology

Introduction: Topographies of Violence

1El Vacío: Trauma, Narrative, and the Boundaries of Coherence

2 Dialogic Memory and the Uneven Terrain of Justice

3 Disruption and Agency in the Public Sphere

4 Sites of Memory, Erasure, and Belonging

5Nunca Másand the Intersections of Genocide, Loss, and Survival

6 On the Limits of Witnessing, On the Boundaries of Time

Conclusion: The Liminality of Repair

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

CHRONOLOGY

Acts of Repair

Introduction

TOPOGRAPHIES OF VIOLENCE

ON MAY 10, 2017, thousands of Argentines crowded into the streets of Buenos Aires to protest a recent Supreme Court ruling that they felt threatened justice and accountability. Holding white scarves in their hands, they stood on the same ground where the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) first positioned themselves to challenge the systematic disappearance of their children during Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, in what the government had called a Dirty War. They, too, wore white headscarves, which they inscribed with their children’s names and the dates of their disappearance, affirming their lives and their existence, their very being.

Forty years later, a field of white scarves transformed this space as human rights groups, unions, and ordinary citizens all stood together to protest in Argentina’s central public square. Their protest focused on the Supreme Court’s ruling related to the 2 × 1 law that would make it possible for perpetrators of crimes against humanity to receive reduced sentences. This would, they felt, endanger the nation’s historical legacy and the accountability that they hoped would ensure that such crimes would never again take place.

Though the government would eventually pass a bill that prohibited the application of the 2 × 1 law to perpetrators of crimes against humanity from the dictatorship, the May 2017 protests revealed the ongoing significance of such protests for democracy in Argentina (Zaretsky 2017a). While demonstrators were certainly focused on justice, they were also concerned about the disappearance of their history through the secondary violence of impunity—the slow erosion of official accounting that inevitably shifts the scope of what has been established as truth. This threat demanded their presence and activism, engaging the memory of past violence as a potent tool for a civil society intent on demanding justice.

The Plaza de Mayo has long been a primary site of activism. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo began their marches there in 1977, in response to the disappearance of their children by the military dictatorship in power. Week after week, they gathered in a time of state repression, donning their white headscarves to march and demand some form of truth and accountability. Such activism became a central form of opposition at that time, when an estimated 30,000 people were disappeared by the military in power. And during those years, and for decades after, Thursday afternoons were the time when the Madres entered the plaza to sustain their call for accountability and truth, demanding that their disappeared children be returned with life. Such demands remained important for Argentines even after the dictatorship ended. In the era of democracy, citizens used their activism to respond to injustice, for the crimes of the so-called Dirty War, as well as other periods of violence, such as the 1994 AMIA (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, or Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society) bombing. This was considered the deadliest antisemitic attack since the Holocaust, and has remained unsolved for over twenty-five years, sustaining a profound sense of impunity.

Yet when the dictatorship ended in 1983, citizens held out the hope that justice and the rule of law would prevail. Argentina created a historic truth commission, the CONADEP (Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas, or National Commission on the Disappeared), which published its report Nunca Más (Never Again) in 1984. With that, they established important precedents in the history of transitional justice worldwide, as it was one of the very first truth commissions in the world (Hayner 2001). Yet despite the significance of having such a commission and issuing a report that would become a bestseller (Crenzel 2009), it did not herald a transition to justice. Amnesty laws (including the Final Point and Due Obedience Laws) were instated in the late 1980s, essentially ensuring that the vast majority of perpetrators would remain free from prosecution. Because of this, despite the return to democracy, the 1990s became an era of impunity. It is during those years that Argentina also suffered two terrorist attacks—the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy and the 1994 attack on the AMIA, leading to new questions about the rule of law and accountability.

In response to the violence and impunity, social movements turned to memory as they advocated for justice. Many such groups engaged embodied forms of public protest that challenged the state, including the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (which became two groups—Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Línea Fundadora, or Founding Line), the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), the H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio, or Children for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence), and Memoria Activa (Active Memory), which formed after the 1994 AMIA bombing. When amnesty laws related to the dictatorship were finally overturned in 2005, new trials could begin (starting in earnest in 2012), heralding a period of increased accountability and retributive justice.

Over two hundred trials related to crimes of the dictatorship have taken place since the end of the amnesty laws. Yet despite important advances, impunity also persisted in other cases. This characterized the aftermath of the 1990s bombings as well as the unexplained 2015 death of Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor investigating one of those bombings, who was found mysteriously dead in his apartment the night before presenting his evidence in the case, in what remains a controversy as of this writing.¹ The lack of accountability contributes to the uneven terrain of justice in Argentina, which has prompted a continued need for cultural memory and a truth that might transcend juridical understandings.

The call for remembering and never again that animated the streets of Buenos Aires in May 2017 is thus part of a broader landscape—including protests, memorials, and material sites of memory. Through such manifestations of cultural memory, Argentines return to past moments of violence and remember the lives of those who have been disappeared and killed in an effort to mark time and space in ways that reshape the possibilities of citizenship; through that, they also attempt to repair the fractured nature of their citizenship.

This book explores how ordinary people grapple with political violence and impunity in Argentina, a nation that is home to survivors of multiple genocides, situated within complex intersections of political violence. In the 1930s and 1940s, many Jews emigrated from Europe, fleeing the rise of Nazism and the aftermath of the Holocaust; yet along with Holocaust survivors, Nazis, such as Adolf Eichmann, also turned to Argentina as a refuge. Over the years, additional forms of political repression continued, as during the 1976–1983 dictatorship when an estimated 30,000 people were disappeared. Survivors often struggled with these traumas by turning to memory—including testimony and narrative, as well as embodied forms of protest and collective memory. Yet what happens when other forms of justice and accountability become more available? Why does memory continue to play such a profound role in contemporary public life and civil society in Argentina? And what does that tell us about the possibility of recovery and repair?

My ethnography examines these questions through the lived experience of survivors and family members of victims of various periods of genocide and violence in Argentina, specifically the 1994 AMIA bombing, the Holocaust, and the 1976–1983 dictatorship. It explores what their stories tell us about the desire for coherence and repair at the heart of survival, even if such repair may never fully become realized and might always remain on the horizon in a perpetually liminal state.² Through their weekly marches, their narratives, and other acts, Argentines sustain memory in a way that allows them to perform a disruption of temporal order, to resist the idea of time marching on, without accountability or meaning. Building on years of ethnographic research in Buenos Aires, I argue that the stories of these survivors help us understand that even if repair is inevitably liminal, the struggle and desire for that repair can also yield spaces of transformation and agency critical to personal and political recovery in the face of violence and loss.

THE DIRTY WAR

The significance of memory extends in and through the period of dictatorship, also known as the Dirty War and sometimes called a genocide.³ From 1976 to 1983, Argentines lived under a military dictatorship, with the state engaged in what it called a dirty war against terrorism and subversion of what the military rulers viewed as a Western and Christian order. They called this time the proceso, or Process of National Reorganization.

The Argentine military came into power through a coup on March 24, 1976, a takeover that followed a period of extreme political and economic upheaval. To the outside world, Argentina’s military junta framed this as a war against radical left-wing terrorism, denying any gross human rights violations and affirming that they had to do what was necessary to restore order and combat subversion. Yet it was in that very category of subversive in which the entire proceso was rooted—a category with an entrenched history in the U.S. anti-communist National Security Doctrine for the Western hemisphere. As a result, in addition to targeting those actively involved in the left-wing guerrilla groups, the military also pursued anything and anyone it deemed to be subversive or potentially subversive to the national order and to what those in power viewed as Argentine civilization.⁴

To accomplish their goal of order, the state employed clandestine, extralegal tactics of disappearance, torture, and killing that resulted in an estimated 30,000 people who were systematically tortured, disappeared, and killed under the leadership of the military junta. Some of these disappearances and abductions had begun before the March 1976 coup—indeed, right-wing death squads had been operating in Argentina since the early 1970s. But once the military took power in the 1976 coup, they expanded these repressive tactics in systematic and clandestine ways, sowing terror in the population as they sought to eradicate any perceived subversion and, in the process, violating human rights and ruling through terror. Indeed, as anthropologist Antonius Robben argues, the fundamental betrayal and disruption of trust has left lasting legacies in Argentina (Robben 2018).

The military began with disappearing those individuals they found to be a threat, including students, priests, historians, and those associated with anyone they considered to be subversive (also to be found on their lists were journalists, lawyers, trade unionists, and anyone who was discovered in those persons’ address books). The repression began with abduction, illegally detaining people at home, in public streets, and at their places of work and study (at least 8,960 of them not having reappeared) (CONADEP 2003[1984], 11). These sudden abductions took place late at night or during early morning hours, at times in the presence of other adults and children, and with complete impunity due to the fear and terror that pervaded society at the time. After abducting people, the captors would then bring them to a clandestine center for torture. Even as they were detaining and torturing people, officials denied the detentions and their responsibility, effectively attempting to disappear victims through that denial.

Altogether, it has now been established that there have been over 600 detention centers and concentration camps located throughout the nation, including large cities and regions such as Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, Córdoba, and Tucumán.⁵ Officially, the military denied the existence of these centers, which were confirmed by the CONADEP through multiple witness statements and forensic investigations. Some of the spaces used had already been detention centers, while other centers included the offices of police and military facilities, such as the ESMA (Escuela Mecánica de la Armada, or School of Naval Mechanics) in Buenos Aires. Once victims were transferred to a detention center, the perpetrators initiated the process of dehumanization, severing victims’ ties with the world outside those centers. But the process began with their own bodies; they were hooded and unable to see anything as they were brought in—a form of psychological torture (CONADEP 2003[1984], 55–57).

The extent of state repression was severe—young women who were disappeared while they were pregnant and gave birth while detained would have their children taken from them. Those children were then adopted by military families.⁶ In addition to torture, the Nunca Más report concluded that death was used as a political tool, which included the mass execution of prisoners. Many of those detained were killed and thrown into the River Plate from planes, as documented in the groundbreaking text El Vuelo (The Flight), written by journalist Horacio Verbitsky (1996) and based on the confession of Adolfo Scilingo, one of the pilots of these death flights. Euphemistically, these murders and executions were referred to as transfers.⁷

Yet the purpose of these executions, and this entire system of repression, was not just to kill these people but also to terrorize the public through the disappearance of neighbors, family members, friends, and children. Along with the physical abduction, the concealment of documentation related to that disappearance only served to sustain uncertainty for the victims’ relatives, causing many to fear protest in order to preserve the possibility of return. Some relatives filed writs of habeas corpus in attempts to locate their relatives, and organized to demand appearance with life. This would become one of the foremost demands of the human rights group the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a powerful force of dissent during the dictatorship and in the years that followed.⁸

Terror pervaded Argentine society during those years, blanketing much of the nation in silence, with important disruptions to that silence, including the work of the Madres and other human rights groups, such as CELS (Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, or Center of Legal and Social Studies). Yet during those years, only a select number of high-profile cases benefited from interventions to some degree, including that of the journalist Jacobo Timerman, editor of La Opinión, who was kidnapped in 1977 and subjected to torture (including electric shocks) and interrogation; ultimately, after being recognized, he was placed under house arrest and then went into exile in Israel in 1979. He was also one of the first to break the silence—publishing Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (1981) after his release in what would become a pivotal account, raising awareness of the repression in ways that helped advance the human rights movement.

The systematic nature of the military’s practices would be affirmed through the CONADEP truth commission, which was established after the dictatorship and whose work was then published in its 1984 Nunca Más (Never Again) report based on gathered testimony and evidence. The commission documented that the incidents of torture and repression (approximately 9,000 cases, although it acknowledged that the numbers of victims is estimated to be closer to 30,000) were not isolated incidents or representative of moments of excess, but rather a concerted plan of repression that included murder, rape, torture, extortion, looting and other serious crimes (CONADEP 1984, 10)—all in a state of impunity.

INTERSECTING HISTORIES OF GENOCIDES AND VIOLENCE

Although what transpired in Argentina under military dictatorship clearly constitutes terrorism and political repression, the term genocide has recently been applied to describe the political violence of that time, given the military’s intention to annihilate a group of people it had labeled subversive.⁹ Indeed, the very concept of genocide is a relatively new way of understanding a particular form of violence. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish jurist, created the term genocide in order to have a legal framework for conceptualizing, prosecuting, and hopefully preventing, the crime of trying to destroy another group of human beings (whether you define that group by culture, race, ethnicity, or political affiliation). He coined the term in 1944, while the horrors of the Holocaust were underway in Europe, to juridically define what was happening in Europe and in past genocides, such as the Armenian case (Lemkin 1946).

Lemkin was central to the efforts to create the Genocide Convention, ratified by the UN in 1948, shortly after the end of World War II. Though Lemkin had originally proposed that genocide be defined as any intent to destroy in part or whole a group based on ethnic, religious, national, or political reasons, the final version of the Genocide Convention excised the category of political from the legal definition. This in turn shaped the evolving social understandings of genocide as linked primarily to race or ethnicity (as evidenced during the genocides in Rwanda and during the Holocaust). However, in critical genocide studies, many contemporary scholars and activists argue that we should expand the definition of genocide.¹⁰ Indeed, if we understand genocide as the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, this is certainly what took place in Argentina.¹¹

Yet the dictatorship was not the first instance of genocide that left a mark on Argentina. Indeed, it is of note that Adolf Eichmann, along with other Nazis, took refuge in Argentina, living under assumed names and contributing to the impunity and silence in Argentina. Eichmann’s capture in 1960, and subsequent trial, as chronicled by philosopher Hannah Arendt (1994 [1963]), ultimately played an influential role in prompting new questions related to perpetrators of genocide, including the capacity of seemingly ordinary bureaucrats to participate in the systematic extermination of a people, and what Arendt described as the banality of evil.

The Eichmann trial also heralded a newfound recognition for the voices of survivors of genocide, situating them as central to understanding that history in a way that continues to inform genocide studies (Wieviorka 2006). In the first decades after World War II, there was a pervasive silence regarding the Holocaust. Of course, such silence also existed in many nations, but it took on a different valence in Argentina, which in many cases appeared to welcome the immigration of Nazis. Living under assumed names, the Nazis essentially became public secrets that created a profound sense of impunity, especially for the Jewish community in Argentina.

JEWISH LIFE IN ARGENTINA: A TENUOUS BELONGING

Argentina is largely considered a nation of immigrants, primarily from Italy and Spain, although the government initially sought immigrants from northern Europe.¹² At that time, the state considered the purpose of immigrants was to civilize—populating lands in an effort to conquer and dominate them (Shumway 1991). Even though they were not originally desired, Jews did migrate to Argentina, first as refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia, and later during the Nazi years (Avni 1991). However, over time, while Italian and Spanish immigrants became an accepted foundation for the new nation, the role of Jews remained ambivalent.

During the first major period of Jewish immigration to Argentina (1889–1914), an estimated 110,000 European Jews settled in Argentina (Elkin 2014, 78), the majority of Ashkenazi descent from Russia and Eastern Europe. The earliest periods of migration benefited from the economic support of Baron Hirsch, who helped establish Jewish agricultural colonies in Argentina. While many Jews settled in the colonies, others stayed in Buenos Aires, building a range of community institutions, including mutual aid societies, community organizations like the Fundación IWO (Instituto Judío por Investigaciones or Jewish Research Institute, also known as YIVO in other nations), a large network of Jewish schools, and places of worship. As a whole, the first immigrants and refugees (who worked primarily as agricultural colonists and laborers in the cities) were able to provide their children with an education that enabled them to join the middle class and become professionals—a path similar to that of other immigrants in Argentina.¹³ A thriving Yiddish press and theater reflected the strength of the community and the ability of its members to freely associate.¹⁴

Yet unlike other immigrants that effectively became part of the national fabric, Jews experienced a tenuous belonging. Some of this related to the elite in Argentina, who accepted the labor of European immigrants (Italian, Spanish, and Jewish) and benefited from the economic prosperity their work produced. That elite, however, was less prepared for the rise of labor movements and radicalism in the early 1900s among this new immigrant population, which in turn led to an increase in nationalism and antisemitism in the early twentieth century.¹⁵ Strikes abounded during the early 1900s as new immigrants struggled against the native elite for improved labor rights. During that time, the question of immigration was the most pressing issue for Argentina as a nation, and immigrants became known as dangerous, polluting others who brought foreign ideas—such as Marxism and communism—that presented a threat to the landed elite protecting their vision of Argentina. While other immigrants also participated in these movements, Jews in particular became singled out because of their provenance from Russia (they were called rusos, meaning Russian) and their religion, which further marked their difference in the predominantly Catholic nation.¹⁶

Many European Jewish immigrants who actively participated in labor movements and other movements for workers’ rights were also the targets of what is considered the first anti-Jewish pogrom in Argentine history, the 1919 Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) in Buenos Aires. This first began as labor unrest, ultimately leading to a series of extremely violent acts directed against Jews in the city.¹⁷

Such violence, though, was not the only form of antisemitism. Throughout the twentieth century, many state policies would also prove to be unfavorable toward Jews, if not overtly antisemitic, further underscoring the ambivalence of their national belonging. During the years of Juan Perón’s presidency, for instance, Catholic religious instruction became a mandatory element of education in public schools, and Jews were asked to leave the classroom during those sessions. During the 1940s and 1950s, Catholic religious education was provided in state schools, leading to incidents of Jewish students being effectively excluded from one part of the public sphere (Rein 2005b).

In addition, official state policies toward Jewish immigration further affirmed their tenuous place in the nation. Many European Jews looking for refuge after World War II were forced to enter Argentina using false names and papers, unable to enter legally as Jews.¹⁸ This related to Perón’s affinity for the ideologies of fascism and Nazism in Europe, especially Italo-fascism.¹⁹ During World War II, Jewish Argentines received news of what was happening to their family members in Europe, some of whom emigrated successfully during the war years. However, Argentina remained neutral during this time and later allowed Nazis to enter after the end of the war.²⁰ While Perón facilitated the entry of Nazis to Argentina, most Jews attempting to migrate were denied legal entry during the immediate postwar years. From 1945 to 1949, an estimated maximum of 1,500 Jews entered Argentina legally (Avni 1991, 192). Many more Jews who attempted to enter Argentina as refugees after having survived the Holocaust were blocked through legal channels, even if they were close relatives of Argentines (181). As a result, they were compelled to enter illegally (through bordering nations) or under assumed names and religious identities (188–192). Perón later pardoned any immigrants who entered illegally, and an estimated 3,300 Jews legalized their status by 1949 (193).²¹

Yet many who sought those pardons for entering Argentina illegally were also Nazis or Nazi collaborators. The tensions surrounding the presence of Nazis for the Jewish community only intensified in 1960, when the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who had been living in a northern suburb of Buenos Aires under an alias, was kidnapped by Israeli agents and taken to Israel to stand trial for the crimes he committed during the Holocaust. This abduction challenged Argentina’s sovereignty as a nation, which then led to a spike in antisemitic sentiments, especially among neo-Nazi groups (Rein 2003).²² The most significant case was that of a Jewish woman, a student on her way to the University of Buenos Aires, who was kidnapped and tortured by such a group.²³

Indeed, this kidnapping heightened the tension surrounding Jewish belonging in Argentina. The very presence of Nazis in Argentina—and the support given by Perón—underscored the precarious position of Jews. While they did become part of the Argentine national fabric in many ways—rising into the middle class and establishing community organizations, religious institutions, and schools—they also remained vulnerable to surges in antisemitism throughout their history, antisemitism stemming from other members of Argentine society and from the state.²⁴

Perhaps the most extreme instances of antisemitism occurred during the political repression of the dictatorship (1976–1983).²⁵ Although the military did not necessarily target Jews as such, a disproportionately large number of Jews were disappeared, an estimated twelve percent, much greater than their proportion of the population (Elkin 1998, 258). It was not official state policy to target Jews, and the large proportion of Jews among the disappeared can be attributed to other factors (Kahan 2019), such as their increased participation in activities that were considered subversive by the military junta (this included psychoanalysts, teachers, and students, among many other categories).²⁶ However, even though it was not an official state policy, the CONADEP report affirms a pervasive antisemitism in the political repression and torture that took place during that period. Further, former disappeared who survived the political repression, such as Jacobo Timerman, Nora Strejilevich, and Alicia Partnoy, also attest to the treatment they received as Jews, revealing yet another layer of violence marking this community.²⁷

In this way, violence conditioned the immigration of Jews to Argentina and persisted throughout their history there. Of course, it was not the only defining factor of their experience. The Jewish community of Argentina would become the largest in Latin America, numbering between 200,000 to 300,000 (Elkin 2014, 185) and the seventh-largest in the world, with a dynamic set of community institutions and a vibrant press, theater, and social network. In addition to developing their own cultural spaces, like Yiddish theater (Skura 2019), they also engaged in Argentine national practices, like soccer, as a way to establish belonging (Rein 2014). Their experience in Argentina has been unsettled, however, often resulting in periods when their Jewish difference would become salient, and often in violent ways, such as during the dictatorship and in the time of the 1990s bombings.

In recent history, these attacks would fundamentally alter the public nature of Jewish life and the relationship of Jews to their state and nation. On March 17, 1992, a bomb exploded in front of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing twenty-nine people and wounding over two hundred. This was the first terrorist attack of this kind in Argentina, yet the Argentine government was not perceived as being primarily responsible for pursuing justice because the target was the foreign representation of the state of Israel. Only two years later, another terrorist attack took place that would take on a different meaning for Argentine citizens.

On Monday morning, July 18, 1994, a truck bomb exploded in front of the AMIA building, home to the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society.²⁸ This attack killed eighty-five people, wounded over three hundred, and destroyed a principal institution for Jewish life in Argentina. The AMIA was a community space that began as a burial society and then developed into a cultural center where community members turned for everything from jobs to music. The building also housed the DAIA (Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas, or Delegation of Jewish Argentine Associations, an umbrella group for Jewish organizations located in the same building as the AMIA) and the IWO, the Yiddish-language archive of Jewish history in Argentina.

This bombing profoundly impacted Jewish life in Argentina and throughout Latin America.²⁹ In Argentina, it represented a turning point for their sense of being Jewish and being Argentine—with many