The posters which appeared this week on the walls of the Villa Crespo neighbourhood of Argentina’s capital had a chilling message.
“A good Jew is a dead Jew. Nisman was a good Jew,” they read, referring to special prosecutor Alberto Nisman who was found dead in his bathroom last month, the day before he was to testify in Congress about an alleged conspiracy between the Iranian government and President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
For Latin America’s biggest Jewish community, it was an alarming reminder not just of the suspicious death of one of their most prominent members, but also that it had already been targeted in two of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Argentina’s history.
Twenty-nine people were killed in the 1992 suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy; 85 died when a car bomb exploded outside the the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (Amia) community centre in 1994. The two bombings left deep scars, not just because of lives lost, but because of allegations that successive governments have failed to protect Argentina’s Jewish citizens – and may even have conspired to obstruct the search for justice..
Nisman was supposed to change that. His appointment by former president Néstor Kirchner to head a new investigation into the Amia case was welcomed by groups representing families of the victims. But his death appears to have worsened the friction that has built up since Fernández, Kirchner’s widow and successor, signed a memorandum of understanding with oil-rich Iran in 2013.
Fernández has yet to publicly express condolences to Nisman’s family, nor did her government send a representative to his funeral at the Tablada Jewish cemetery, where the prosecutor was buried beside the “martyrs” of the Amia attack.
“While he was alive they acted as if they wanted to kill him, and after he died, as if they had killed him,” tweeted Waldo Wolff, vice-president of Daia, the country’s largest Jewish association. Angry mourners at Nisman’s wake ripped a ribbon from a wreath sent by the attorney general. Others chanted “Justice! Justice!” or held up banners proclaiming Nisman as the 86th victim of the Amia attack.
Such was the anger and distrust the country’s main Jewish organisations boycotted an official ceremony to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
Nisman drafted an arrest warrant for Fernández over the alleged cover-up – but did not, eventually include it in his 300-page report to a judge.
President Fernández has blamed Nisman’s death on rogue intelligence agents working with outside interests (Nisman was a regular visitor to the US and Israeli embassies). In a speech last week, she said Argentina must not become the battleground for a proxy war. “Let’s not bring the drama and tragedy from other remote regions of the world … where they drop missiles and bombs and threaten each other with extermination,” she warned. “Let nobody bring inside all that filth from outside.”
This has prompted scorn among many in the Jewish community. “I don’t know what she meant,” says Wolff. “If she meant the situation in the Middle East, it’s already here, with the two unsolved bombings.”
Despite the posters which appeared this week, overt antisemitism is still relatively uncommon, said Wolff. “You can wear a skull-cap without problems. There is no Le Pen here,” but he said the government’s recent moves to build closer relations with Iran were disturbing.
Dismissing the president’s claims that the CIA and Mossad might be involved in the prosecutor’s death as a “children’s story”, Wolff – who was one of the last people to speak to Nisman – said the case would highlight how the weakness of Argentinian governance posed risks to a wider population.
“For a long time many Argentinians saw the Amia case as a question of Jews v Muslims that was distant from their lives, but the Nisman case has reminded everyone that this is a matter for the entire society. What he revealed was the worst of Argentina: the manipulation of information, corruption, impunity, the use of the state for personal benefit rather than for the interests of the country,” he said.
This assertiveness contrasts with previous generations of Argentinian Jewish leaders who were widely criticised for their meek response to earlier outrages. One is even on trial – alongside former president Carlos Menem and senior officials – for colluding in a plot to divert attention away from a possible Syrian connection in the Amia attack.
Wolff says he represents a new generation that is more willing to speak out. Philosopher Santiago Kovadloff agrees that the community needs a new approach.
“Jewish institutions are trying to recover the representation they lost because of their previous behaviour,” said the 72-year-old who broke down in tears during a radio interview after attending Nisman’s burial last week. “It is essential our leaders put truth before opportunism.”
This assertiveness helped to kill the 2013 memorandum of understanding with Iran, which would have created a bilateral truth commission to look into the Amia bombing. Despite being passed by congress, the accord collapsed after the Daia took the government to court and had it declared unconstitutional.
In his indictment against the president, Nisman stated that the memorandum was an attack on his personal integrity. He believed Iran was behind the 1994 blast – an allegation consistently denied by Tehran.
Supporters of Fernández – including several in the Jewish community – criticised the prosecutor for basing his assumptions on CIA and Mossad reports fed to him by Argentina’s intelligence service, and for relying too heavily on information provided by the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), or People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, a dissident organisation which until 2012 was classified by the US as a terrorist organisation.
“The Nisman document was tainted with political interests due to the conflict between the government and part of the intelligence agency,” said Sergio Burstein, who heads an association of families of victims of the Amia bombing. “I met Nisman many times. We relatives supported him at first, but then we had our differences … The Amia relatives should not be used for political purposes.”
Horacio Verbitsky, a leftwing journalist, also cautioned against over-simplifying the case.
“We see the process now of turning Nisman into a hero. He’s a tragic figure,but he cannot be considered a hero,” he said, noting how close the prosecutor was to the intelligence agency and foreign embassies.
Verbitsky heads the Centre for Legal and Social Studies, a human rights group that helped to secure a 2005 settlement for Amia families in which the government took responsibility for not preventing the bombing and for covering up what happened. He described the move to create a truth commission with Iran as an ingenuous attempt to push forward the quest for justice, though he acknowledges that will now be difficult.
“Twenty years after the blast, it is very difficult to discover who did it,” he noted.
Amid the flurry of accusation and counter-accusation about Nisman’s death, that search for justice and security looks further away than ever for Argentina’s Jewish community.