Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America

Estelle Tarica

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781438487946
  9781438487953
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438487960
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: Literature

Examines how community leaders, writers, and political activists facing state repression in Latin America have drawn on and debated the validity of Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries.

This book proposes the existence of a recognizably distinct Holocaust consciousness in Latin America since the 1970s. Community leaders, intellectuals, writers, and political activists facing state repression have seen themselves reflected in Holocaust histories and have used Holocaust terms to describe human rights atrocities in their own countries. In so doing, they have developed a unique, controversial approach to the memory of the Holocaust that is little known outside the region. Estelle Tarica deepens our understanding of Holocaust awareness in a global context by examining diverse Jewish and non-Jewish voices, focusing on Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala. What happens, she asks, when we find the Holocaust invoked in unexpected places and in relation to other events, such as the Argentine "Dirty War" or the Mayan genocide in Guatemala? The book draws on meticulous research in two areas that have rarely been brought into contact-Holocaust Studies and Latin American Studies-and aims to illuminate the topic for readers who may be new to the fields.

Chapter One

The Demands of the Times

Jewish Holocaust Discourse in Dictatorship and
Early-Transition Argentina, 1976–1985

Since the mid-1990s in Argentina, comparisons between the Holocaust and the military dictatorship of 1976–1983 have become common. Recent debates about how to remember the period—about the severity of state violence, the experiences of its victims, and the responsibility of the perpetrators and of civil society—are often couched in language that expressly recalls the Holocaust and in terms that have been influenced by Holocaust discussions on similar topics. This somewhat controversial phenomenon has become the focus of increasing though still fragmentary scholarly attention and will be the subject of my next chapter. But what about during the period of military dictatorship itself, the years 1976–1983?

This chapter examines the use of Holocaust references in Argentina during the military junta’s “Proceso de Re-organización Nacional.” Comparison of the military government to the Nazis and its repression to the Holocaust was a not-infrequent way to express opposition to the regime. This was especially true in the latter years of the dictatorship and after the return to democracy, when the Holocaust became a common reference point, but it was a feature of earlier years as well. These comparisons were wielded primarily but not exclusively by Jews and are found primarily but not exclusively in Jewish writings. My goal here is to identify and examine some of the major lines and features of these comparisons. Structured in roughly chronological order, the chapter starts with a consideration of the dictatorship’s earliest and most harshly repressive years, 1976–1979, drawing on lesser-known sources like clandestine news-service reports, poetry, and unpublished letters to demonstrate that Holocaust comparisons in this climate of censorship intended to sound an alarm about the scale of the violence.

The chapter then turns to examine debates within the Jewish “internal front,” as it was often ironically called, using the Jewish newspaper Nueva Presencia as a key source. Nueva Presencia was a weekly supplement in Spanish of the Yiddish paper Die Presse. It had no official political affiliation but was decidedly progressive in most of its positions—openly left-Zionist in its coverage of Israel and increasingly vocal about its pro–human rights stance against the Argentine dictatorship. Its editor, Herman Schiller, became the cofounder, along with Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer, of the Jewish Movement for Human Rights (Movimiento Judío de Derechos Humanos) in 1983.

Nueva Presencia was inaugurated in July 1977 and published continually during the dictatorship, whereas other progressive Jewish publications, such as the monthlies Fraie Schtime (in Yiddish and Spanish, also known as Voz Libre or La Voz) and Nueva Sión, both of which will also appear here, published only sporadically during this period or were forced to cease publication altogether due to censorship. One of Nueva Presencia’s goals since its inception was to present a venue that included a plurality of Jewish voices, including those from the more conservative end of the community. Thus, although Schiller’s recognizably progressive voice left its stamp on the paper’s editorial line, its contributors represented a broader political spectrum. Nueva Presencia is also a useful source because it provides a vantage point from which to appreciate the development of the Holocaust as a global media phenomenon; the paper covered the spate of Holocaust-related films and telefilms that appeared in the United States, Europe, and Israel during the dictatorship period and published translations, reviews, and analyses of works by Holocaust historians, survivors, and perpetrators, including Yehuda Bauer, Viktor Frankl, Henry Bulawko, Léon Poliakov, and Rudolf Hoess. Nueva Presencia was hardly representative of the Jewish community during the dictatorship, yet even so it serves as a valuable compendium of the range of Jewish discussions during the period.

One of the most significant controversies within the Jewish community during the dictatorship revolved around the case of Jacobo Timerman, a well-known journalist and newspaper publisher detained and tortured by the military. In various public statements as well as in his testimony, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, published in 1981 less than two years after his release, he not only compares the regime to the Nazis and the violence it perpetrated to the Holocaust but also Argentine Jewish leaders to the Jewish Councils of the Nazi period, a feature of his discourse to be extensively analyzed here. The Jewish Councils of the 1930s and 1940s, “Judenrat” or “Judenräte” in German, were composed of Jewish leaders appointed by the Nazis for administrative purposes in Nazi-controlled territories, especially the ghettos. The Judenrat was responsible for organizing Jewish labor production and, most controversially, for delivering Jews to the Nazis for “resettlement” transports—that is, extermination.¹ Timerman’s charged accusations comparing Argentine Jewish leaders to the Judenrat provoked a fierce debate that revealed the deep ideological fissures dividing the community. These divisions have been the subject of a respectable body of scholarship already.² The extent and impact of Timerman’s polemical use of Holocaust references, however, have not. As will be shown below, these Holocaust references, though strongly resisted, ended up framing how Jews experienced the ethical dilemmas of complicity and resistance under dictatorship.

The chapter then examines how Jewish authorities, particularly the Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas, commonly known by its acronym DAIA, responded to Timerman’s accusations. They sought to appropriate the Holocaust for their own ends to advance a view of the “normalcy” of Jewish life during that period and of their own continued effectiveness. Curiously, the American television miniseries Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss, broadcast in December 1981 after years of having been banned by the government, had a role to play in this effort. The chapter also examines progressive Jewish voices in these debates about anti-Semitism, especially Nueva Presencia’s editor Herman Schiller and Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer, and explores their attempts to link specifically Jewish concerns to the broader current of human rights advocacy. It then turns to the use of Holocaust references in the last years of the dictatorship and the early years of the return to democracy, 1982–1985, when Holocaust metaphors became commonplace and were taken up even by those who had earlier resisted them. The chapter concludes in an evaluative mode by assessing the aptness of these various Holocaust invocations. In analyzing their power as rhetorical tools, much can be learned about the legacy of the Holocaust for Argentine Jews. To have carried the Holocaust over, like a metaphor, to the Jews’ own situation in Argentina; to have been unable to restrict the Holocaust to its own historical time and place; to have it burst beyond those bounds or to not be certain exactly where those bounds lie—these are both inescapable features of its legacy and a matter that has received insufficient critical attention. Here I give special consideration to the influence of post-Holocaust reflections on Jewish complicity and victimization in framing the demands of the times.

The presence of fugitive Nazis in Argentina raises its own set of questions. Like Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Brazil but to a far greater degree, Argentina welcomed the perpetrators of the Holocaust to its territory and often shielded them from prosecution.³ Holocaust comparisons might then be inevitable for those for whom, like the post-WWII generation of Argentine Jews, Nazis and Nazi ideology were a real and living presence wielding some not inconsiderable, if perhaps ultimately immeasurable, degree of influence on national politics and culture—especially among the armed forces.⁴ The literal presence of Holocaust perpetrators in Argentina leads to the question of whether we are in the presence of truly metaphoric uses of the Holocaust or rather in a blurry zone where literal and metaphoric uses cannot be distinguished from one another.

The issue of Holocaust instrumentalization in Argentina is further complicated by the fact that this question became itself a bone of contention among prominent Jews during the dictatorship, who argued over whether or not the Argentina of that time could properly be compared to a Holocaust situation. These arguments were not just about the Holocaust; rather, they became a way to rehearse debates among Jews—or “the Jewish community,” in scare quotes, given that whether such a unified body could be said to exist and how best to characterize and represent it were questions that these debates tended to inflame—about how to respond to the demands of the times. The question of instrumentality was thus already folded into Holocaust representation during the Argentine dictatorship and became, as it were, instrumentalized itself, placed in the service of other pressing debates about the contemporary moment. These disagreements about the legitimacy of comparisons between the Holocaust and Argentina under dictatorship were a symptom—not the only one—of the fissures within the Jewish community, which lacked consensus on the most important issues of the day: the political legitimacy of state repression, its magnitude and scale, the moral status of its victims, and the role of individual Jews and of the Jewish communal leadership in responding to it. Notably, the debate was directed entirely inward and became a forum for accusation and recrimination among various Jewish voices. It was thus difficult to assess whether or not Holocaust comparisons were justified without entering into a discussion about other, often unresolved or unresolvable issues and ideas with which the Holocaust became inextricably entwined in dictatorship Argentina and to which it lent a particular flavor and frame.

Particularly contentious was the role of the DAIA. A federation of Jewish institutions formed in the 1930s, its role was to serve as a spokesperson for the Jewish community on a national scale in defending against anti-Semitism; its elected leaders met directly with government authorities to that end. The DAIA was considered an “official” representative of the Jewish community, and along with the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), originally a chevra kadisha—a Jewish benevolent burial society—that had grown into a multipurpose communal organization, it provided Jews with an organized leadership. The DAIA was widely respected as an important bulwark against anti-Semitic extremism, but by the 1960s both it and the AMIA had come to be associated with conservative political tendencies, and the ability of these groups to represent a pluralist Jewish community was often called into question, especially by younger Jews.⁵ Indeed, ever since the 1940s, from within a few years of its inception, the DAIA’s mandate to represent the Jewish community had been contested during times of heated political debate over Zionism and Peronism within the Jewish “internal front.”⁶ This state of affairs extends to the present day, sharpened most recently in the wake of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA, the Buenos Aires kehilla—Jewish community center—when the DAIA leadership’s unsavory links to the government of President Carlos Menem created a conflict of interest that hindered a full investigation of the attack and provoked a storm of criticism from the Jewish community. Since the days of the first Peronist regime, the DAIA has negotiated an at times self-contradictory stance regarding its relationship to Argentine politics—professing its autonomy from the government and seeking to remain as “detached” as possible from national politics, as Lawrence Bell describes, yet at the same time involved in highly politicized engagements with both Peronist and anti-Peronist governments.⁷ In reality, its legitimacy, effectiveness, and survival have always rested on a measure of both apolitical detachment and political engagement. Bell has written of Peronism that it “highlighted the long-standing ambivalence within the Jewish community concerning its proper place within Argentine national politics.”⁸ The same can be said of the DAIA during the military dictatorship of 1976–1983, which brought these contradictions once again to the fore. Existing fractures between the leadership and other Jews were deepened during the dictatorship when critics accused the DAIA of not advocating for Jewish detainees and for the Jewish families of the disappeared, a situation that will be amply discussed below.

Returning to the question of Holocaust comparison, the story I seek to recount here must grapple with the substance of the ideas with which the Holocaust becomes entwined during the dictatorship and with the ethical dilemmas that Holocaust references reveal and perhaps seek to negotiate—dilemmas that Holocaust memory sometimes serves to illuminate, and sometimes not. If the Holocaust might seem insubstantial or merely expedient in this context, the matters to which it becomes rhetorically connected are not. These matters concern the situation of Argentine military dictatorship and state terror: the physical elimination and silencing of political opposition through kidnapping, disappearance, torture, exile, and censorship, and the imposition by force of a new social contract and new economic policies.

It must be noted that although anti-Semitic actions and ideologies circulated throughout this period, with varying degrees of intensity, Jews were not the principal targets of Argentine state terror during the Proceso de Re-organización Nacional. Unlike the Nazis, the military junta was not centrally concerned with Jews, did not systematically persecute them, and did not view the destruction of the Jews as an end in itself. Rather, Jews were caught up, like so many others, in the “war against subversion” that the government waged against its own citizens. Although it is undeniable that there were some commonalities between Argentine state security forces and the Nazis in terms of their methods of repression—including the infamous “Nacht und Nebel” technique, originating in Occupied France, which made the victims totally disappear—Argentina’s military rulers shared no goals in common with the Nazis when it came to the Jews.

Even so, Holocaust images resonate deeply, both in Argentina and abroad, to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The “Latin Americanization” of the Holocaust
• Chapter One The Demands of the Times: Jewish Holocaust Discourse in Dictatorship and Early-Transition Argentina, 1976–1985
• Chapter Two Holocaust Consciousness as Critical Consciousness in Post-dictatorship Argentina, 1995–2005
• Chapter Three José Emilio Pacheco, Tununa Mercado, and Holocaust Testimony at the Mexico-Argentina Crossroads
• Chapter Four Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil’s “Maya Holocaust”: Victims and Vanquished in Post-genocide Guatemala
• Chapter Five Holocaust Testimony and Maya Testimony between the U.S. and Guatemala
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover