ABSTRACT
Our focus on Argentina is not arbitrary. Attempts to incorporate a post-Holocaust sensitivity within a concrete local context exist outside of Europe and resonate with European developments. Such attempts were especially manifest in the 1980s in Latin America and particularly in Argentina. Argentina can therefore serve as a paradigmatic case study; it is a non-European country that orients itself through the lens of its European origins but has developed its own political and cultural structures of rule and ways of dealing with the consequences of these structures. 2 The large presence of Jews of European origin (approximately 250,000 Jews live in Argentina, most of them in the capital Buenos Aires) constitutes a transnational link to Europe and to the memory of the Holocaust. The military dictatorship, which lasted in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, built concentration camps as a manifestation of its rule, which is perhaps the clearest indicator of a fascist or totalitarian state (Calveiro 2008; Finchelstein 2014). The number of this regime’s victims cannot, of course, compare with its role model, Nazi Germany. But Nazi crimes became an important source of the images, symbols, and representational models that were used to shape and understand state terror in Argentina in the 1970s. Human rights activists, writers, artists, fi lmmakers, scholars and victims themselves portrayed the crimes of the Juntas as analogous to the crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis. Similarities and equivalencies were drawn between the comparable characteristics of the two historical periods of terror: the notion of an internal enemy and the process of separating victims from the political body by means of a consecutive process of segregation, exclusion and destruction. Victims in Argentina and the “Diaspora” became “Jews of the South” as our opening quotation indicates. Even the term “ Holocausto ” came to symbolize an Argentine national catastrophe (Goldberg 2001; Senkman 2011). The Holocaust served as a model and affected testimony, art and public memorials, as well as
scholarly production – including the case for genocide in Argentina – pertaining to the period of state terror.
