Murder in Argentina, Silence in South America - AJC: Global Jewish Advocacy

By Dina Siegel Vann, Director of AJC's Arthur and Rochelle Belfer Institute for Latino and Latin American Affairs

Earlier today, Argentine Special Prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita moved to charge President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Foreign Minister Hector Timerman with orchestrating a cover-up of Iran's involvement in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. This recent development only serves to deepen the mystery around the tragic, untimely death of Alberto Nisman, Pollicita's predecessor, who was killed just days after accusing the president and foreign minister. Despite the unprecedented nature of this crisis, Nisman's death has met with a strange silence elsewhere in Latin America.

This has been an unfortunate pattern in the region. The AMIA bombing, which killed 85 people and injured hundreds more, remains, to this day, the worst terrorist attack on Latin American soil, and one of the most vicious anti-Semitic acts anywhere since the Second World War. But with the passage of time and a succession of aborted attempts at identifying the perpetrators, much of the indignation and interest in the case eroded. All the while the culprit—Iran, which was also implicated in the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires—continues to operate freely in the region. (CONTINUED)
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