ARGENTINA:
Overcoming Past Antisemitic Injustices
Maricel Drazer

BUENOS AIRES, (IPS) - "A state secret that became a family secret...and is no longer a secret" was how Argentine journalist Uki Goñi described a confidential order issued by the Argentine government to deny visas to European Jews before and during World War II, which he helped bring to light.

The "state secret" was an internal directive signed in 1938 by then foreign minister José María Cantilo, ordering embassies and consulates in Europe not to extend visas to "undesirables and the expelled" - an allusion to Jews fleeing the Nazis.

"In that period, in Europe, the denial of entry visas was equivalent to a death sentence for many Jews at the hands of the Nazis," Goñi told IPS.

"This circular formed part of a government policy," he said. "Argentina saw itself at that time as a Hispanic, Catholic country, and felt that an influx of a large number of Jews would somehow hurt Argentine Hispanic Catholic racial purity."

Goñi, the grandson and son of diplomats, was aware of the existence of the secret directive: "From information passed down in my family, I knew there had been a secret order that banned the entry of Jews into Argentina."

He had also learned that it was not "convenient" to talk about this "family secret." In fact, his own grandfather was among the many Argentine diplomats who enforced the order.

Over half a century later, Argentine researcher Beatriz Gurevich, alerted by Goñi to the existence of "Directive 11", unearthed a copy that had been left in the files by the Argentine consul to Sweden, apparently inadvertently.

"I found it in the Argentine Embassy in Stockholm in 1998, and since these kinds of secret circulars are accompanied by an order to destroy them, especially in this case, all I found was a copy on onion skin paper, which I'm sure was simply forgotten there," Gurevich told IPS.

"It was an oversight that allowed us to clarify a practice of the Argentine Foreign Ministry," she added.

Gurevich had gone to Europe in search of documentation that would shed light on the issue, as a member of the Foreign Ministry's Commission to Clarify Nazi Activities in Argentina (CEANA), which was set up in the late 1990s.

Argentina was notorious as a haven for Nazi war criminals, around 150 of whom who were welcomed when President Juan Perón was in power between 1945 and 1955. In 2001, then president Fernando de la Rúa apologised for his country's role in providing sanctuary to Nazis after WWII.

Along with many of the other original members of CEANA, Gurevich left the commission because of discrepancies with the way it has carried out its work.

To her disappointment, the finding of what is apparently the only surviving copy of the directive seemed to merely make government officials uncomfortable.

In the meantime, Goñi revealed the secret directive to the world in his book "The Real Odessa", published in 2002 in London.

The secret was out of the bag, which gave rise to a series of historic reparations. After years of demands and pressure from a group of academics, from people who had taken refuge from the Nazis in Argentina, and from the journalist himself, the centre-left government of Néstor Kirchner agreed on Jun. 8, 2005 to formally repeal the controversial directive, which was still on the books although it had fallen into oblivion and was no longer applied.

"The important thing was not the repeal of the directive in itself, but the fact that the government made the circular public," Diana Wang, president of 'Generations of the Shoah', an organisation of Holocaust survivors and their children, remarked to IPS. "It was a case of "one government exposing what another government.had done 67 years earlier."

"This amounts to an admission of the error, and an apology. It also implies acknowledging the existence of an antisemitic government policy," said Wang.

When the directive was struck down, then foreign minister Rafael Bielsa said "This is far from a mere administrative act, and clearly symbolises a decision by the state to redress a great injustice and a historic error."

"An absurd vision of what it means to be Argentine was aimed at getting immigration currents to adhere to a narrow ethnic, religious and cultural identity, in order to preserve a falsely homogenised society," Bielsa, who is now a legislator, added at the time.

In Goñi's view, the important thing is to "shed light on the secrets, in order to look at ourselves in the mirror and understand ourselves."

"The repeal of the directive amounted to pulling aside the curtain and admitting, accepting, what the mirror shows us, because there is a myth that Argentina is a country that receives everyone with open arms, and this makes it clear that, at least in the case of Jews, this was not true," he said.

Argentina did actually take in more Jews than any other country in Latin America during the Nazi regime, and is currently home to the largest Jewish community in the region, and one of the largest in the world: around 300,000 people out of a total population of 37 million.

But the thousands of Jews entered the country despite the best efforts of government officials to keep them out. Many did so by taking advantage of existing corruption between migration authorities and diplomats, while many others posed as Catholics on arrival to the country.

Wang, who was born in Poland, was just a toddler when she came to Buenos Aires with her family in 1947. "We came to Argentina, and since my parents knew that they didn't admit Jews here, my mother came equipped with a mother-of-pearl rosary and a shawl, which formed part of my parents' stereotype of a Catholic woman," she said.

Nearly six decades later, thanks to the repeal of "Directive 11", Wang has had her immigration record officially corrected. In the national migration department record, to which IPS had access, the word "Catholic" had been changed to "Jewish religion".

Under the reparations policy, when Jewish Argentines apply to have the correction made, the fee that would normally be charged for such procedures is waived.

"Acknowledgement of the damages caused provides some comfort to the victim. The repeal of the directive and the act of rectification has to do with that. The Argentine (Jewish) community has been hurt many times, but official admission of that allows for wounds to be healed, in a small way," she said. (