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Uncover the Blood in Buenos Aires

Argentina must remove the piles of deceit and do justice to the memory of the dead

by
Avi Weiss
July 18, 2024

Carol Smiljan/NurPhoto via Getty Images

“O earth,” Job pleaded, “do not cover my blood, and let there be no resting place for my cry.”

Today is the 30th painful anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people and injured 300. The blood still seeps up out of the ground, and the cries remain unstilled. The AMIA bombing was the greatest attack against the Jewish community in the diaspora since the Holocaust.

In those 30 years, one Argentine leader after another has tried to bury that blood, and has tried to still those cries. But that blood will continue seeping out of the ground, and those cries will remain unstilled, until the earth those leaders have heaped on the dead to cover up the truth of what happened—the truth of who did the killing and who in the government abetted it—is swept away.

A day after the attack, I flew to Argentina. It was as if something—someone, a congregation of holy souls and their bereaved families—was calling me. While there, I met privately with then-President of Argentina Carlos Menem.

My first words to him were, “Mr. President, why Buenos Aires a second time?” Here I was referring to a similar attack against the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires two years earlier, which killed 29 people. My message was clear: If terrorists are not quickly apprehended, prosecuted and punished, they are emboldened to strike again. Sensing that I was charging him with a cover-up, Menem pushed back, insisting that Argentina would find the truth. But over the years he did all he could to try to bury the blood and the screams with ever more earth.

And, during a trip back to Buenos Aires a year later, as I was trying to console the victims’ families in their undying grief, and trying to unearth the truth, Menem’s underlings attempted to shut me up. During that visit, Juan Jose Galeano, the person appointed as special prosecutor for the AMIA case, in effect arrested me, hauling me into his office where he held me for six hours. All this, I believe, was meant as a warning that I would be well-advised to stop accusing Menem of covering up. In time, Galeano was dismissed from his post and found guilty of concealing and violating evidence.

Nor did it end there. With the blood still seeping out of the ground, and the cries still reaching out from the earth, another Argentine president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, tried once again to bury history by signing a 2013 memorandum of understanding with Iran to jointly investigate the bombing—an idea as absurd as asking al-Qaida to investigate the pilots who flew into the World Trade Center or asking Hamas to investigate the barbaric Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Indeed, Alberto Nisman, the courageous federal prosecutor who replaced Galeano, railed against the memorandum’s architects—identifying eight high-ranking Iranian officials including the former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as being involved in the AMIA attack, and added a Hezbollah operative, Imad Mughniyeh, then the head of the terrorist group’s “external security” branch.

In January 2015, Nisman was about to present evidence proving Kirchner’s role in the cover-up and revealing the bloody hand of Hezbollah backed by Iran. A day before his scheduled appearance, he was assassinated. He had become AMIA’s 86th victim.

At this year’s commemoration ceremony in Buenos Aires, as in previous years, each victim’s name will be read aloud, with the crowd respectfully but firmly responding “presente.” The dead are present—in our hearts, in our souls. They continue to inspire. They still count. They continue to cry out from the ground the biblical imperative, “justice, justice, you shall pursue.”

All eyes will be on Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, wondering if he will make good on his warm relations with the Jewish community in Argentina and Israel, and see to it that justice be done. Milei recently announced that Argentina is designating Hamas as a terrorist organization (as Argentina did with Hezbollah in 2019). While this is a good symbolic starting point, if Milei really means business, he must sever diplomatic relations with Iran, which arms, trains, finances and exerts control over its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies.

We won’t know the answer to this and many other questions until the earth that has been shoveled atop the dead, by now a mountain of deceit, is pushed away. It will only be at that point that Argentina will be able to do justice to the memory of the dead. It will only be at that point that their blood will stop seeping up to the surface. Only then will their cries be stilled.

Nothing will bring the dead back to life. But with a thorough investigation that yields concrete results, the arc of justice will finally be complete. The dead will be able to rest in peace, and a measure of comfort will gently embrace their still-grieving survivors.

Avi Weiss is founding rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat rabbinical schools. A longtime activist for Jewish causes and human rights, he wrote the extensive article “The Shameful Cover-Up Of The Worst Attack On Diaspora Jews Since The Holocaust“ published by Mosaic Magazine in 2019.