Fear and conspiracy in Buenos Aires

I first met Damian Pachter at Jerusalem’s Malha Mall. It was just a few weeks after he exiled himself from Argentina, his place of birth, out of fear for his life.

He still seemed a bit harried, as though he had not quite recovered from the trauma of abruptly leaving behind all he had – a job as a journalist, an apartment in Once (pronounced own-say), Buenos Aires’s old Jewish neighborhood, and a mother for whom Pachter was the entire world.

Now, he was convincing me to go to Buenos Aires. In less than a week, a huge silent march through the streets of Argentina’s capital was planned.

“You have to go,” he urged. “You won’t regret it.”

The march, organized by a group of lawyers from the State Attorney’s Office, was to mark the 30th day since special prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead in his bathroom with a single gunshot to the head. On the floor next to Nisman was a .22 caliber pistol with a single cartridge discharged. The doors to his high-rise apartment in the posh Le Parc tower were locked from the inside; Nisman was reportedly slumped against the bathroom door, which was also locked from the inside. It appeared to be suicide.

But many suspected foul play.

Just four days before, Nisman had accused Argentina’s President Cristina de Fernandez Kirchner, her Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and others close to her government of an elaborate crime. Nisman claimed they had made a deal with Iran: In exchange for favorable economic relations, the Kirchner government would drop charges against leading figures in the Iranian government who had been implicated by Nisman in the bombing of the Argentinean Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) – the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

On July 18, 1994, a suicide terrorist drove a Renault Trafic packed with hundreds of kilograms of explosives into the building on Pasteur Street, just a few blocks from Pachter’s apartment. Eighty-five were killed and hundreds wounded in what was the worst terrorist attack in South America in recent history. Since the attack, all Jewish institutions in Buenos Aires – schools, synagogues, cultural centers – are protected by barricades.

Nisman claimed, based on tapped telephone conversations, that Kirchner, Timerman and others had secretly agreed in January 2013 to cover up Iranian involvement in the bombing – as part of a deal that ostensibly involved the creation of a truth commission in conjunction with Iran to bring to justice those responsible for the bombing.

On January 18, just hours before he was slated to present the evidence for his allegations before a group of opposition legislators in Congress, Nisman turned up dead.

Pachter, a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald who was following the AMIA case, was the first to report the Nisman shooting. Based on information provided by a source, Pachter tweeted that Nisman had been found shot in his apartment. He later received confirmation that Nisman was dead, which he proceeded to publicize on his Twitter account.

In the days that followed, Pachter became increasingly convinced his life was in danger. He believed that his early report of the shooting might have disrupted attempts by those who murdered Nisman – if indeed he was murdered – from making the killing look like a suicide.

During an appearance on a TV news show just days after Nisman was found dead, one of the panelists accused Pachter of being a Mossad agent, which was said to somehow explain how he was the first to know. Aware that his connection to Israel would be raised, Pachter had preempted the accusations by announcing on air that he and his mother had moved to Israel from Argentina when he was a boy and that he had served in the IDF, like other Israelis, and that he was not a spy. But the rumors continued.

The next development that aroused Pachter’s suspicion was a strange press announcement. The official government news agency, Télam, attributed a Twitter message to Pachter that he says he did not write – Pachter took this report to be “a kind of coded message.”

Then, less than a week after Nisman’s death, a source warned Pachter that he was being followed and asked to meet him at a location outside Buenos Aires.

Pachter arrived early at the agreed meeting place – an all-night café. After waiting for a few hours, he noticed a strange man walk in wearing sunglasses, even though it was not yet daylight. The man sat behind him.

When his source came in, he told Pachter that the man sitting behind him was an intelligence agent; the source then took a picture of the agent with his smartphone. The suspicious man got up and left, but Pachter understood he had to leave Argentina immediately.

On Friday, January 23, just five days after Nisman was found dead, Pachter got on a flight to Uruguay, proceeding to Spain and then to Israel.

The Argentinean government tweeted the details of Pachter’s flight from the official account of the presidential palace, which proved – at least to Pachter – that his fears were well-founded.

“IF I could, I would go back to cover the march,” Pachter told me as we sat in Malha Mall’s food court. “People in Buenos Aires tell me it is going to be huge.

But I can’t go back; I don’t know if I can ever go back.

“But you should go if you can. Stay in my apartment.”

As someone born and raised in America, and as a Jew living in Israel who takes the protection of basic human rights as a given, it was not immediately obvious to me that staying in Pachter’s Buenos Aires apartment could be risky. It just seemed like a cheap, convenient option.

I was under the impression that Pachter was exaggerating about the dangers he faced. Perhaps his source, concerned that Pachter might panic and reveal him, scared him into leaving the country.

And even if the journalist was in danger, this did not mean I would be in danger simply by staying in his apartment.

Besides, I had long desired to learn more about the Jewish community in Argentina, said to number between 200,000 and 250,000, one of the largest in the world. Those eligible for automatic citizenship under the Law of Return probably come in at twice that number.

The AMIA case, of course, involved the Jewish community. Nisman was Jewish. But it also involved a murky underworld of intelligence agents, terrorists, corrupt politicians and justices. At stake potentially was the October election in Argentina, relations between Israel and Argentina and between Argentina and its Jewish community, and the uncovering of Tehran’s global terrorist connections. If it was not true, the story could easily make for a spy novel.

But in the days before my flight, which was scheduled to land in Buenos Aires on February 16, two days before the march in Nisman’s honor, I had temporary bouts of uncertainty. When a friend who had grown up in neighboring Brazil heard about my plans, he warned me to be careful.

“South America is a bit crazy. People there have a different understanding of law, order and justice,” he said.

The AMIA investigation was a case in point.

Lasting over two decades and spanning more than three presidential administrations, inquiries into the bombing have dragged on – yet not a single person has been brought to justice.

Corruption, complicated clandestine political interests and mind-numbing ineptitude have marred the investigations.

The original investigating judge, the former head of the Argentinean intelligence s e r v i c e s , some of the prosecutors, police officers and the former head of an AMIA-affiliated organization have all been charged with wrongdoing.

In 2004, an investigation that had been going for several years and had amassed enormous amounts of incriminating evidence on both local police and intelligence officers and Iranian and Hezbollah-affiliated officials was thrown out of court after it emerged that a judge in the case had paid a bribe to a key witness for the prosecution. The money for the bribe came from the Intelligence Secretariat (SI).

We do not even know for certain that Ibrahim Hussein Berro, a Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist, was the one who drove the Renault Trafic into the AMIA building.

No proper autopsies or DNA tests were done on human remains at the site. In one of the most shocking incidents, police simply dumped in a bin a head found near the scene thought to have been that of the bomber.

In 2004, president Nestor Kirchner, the husband of today’s president, called the botched investigation a “national disgrace.” That same year, he appointed Nisman to head an investigation team tasked with the sole goal of solving the AMIA bombing.

Nisman had been one of the state prosecutors involved in the previous investigation, but had never been directly implicated in the impropriety. In 2015 the annual budget for Nisman’s team, which numbered 45 persons, was 31 million pesos, about $3.1 million, according to the Argentinean Anfibia magazine. Nisman received a monthly salary of about $10,000, around $4,000 more than the average salary paid to his peers.

In 2006, Nisman’s team provided extensive evidence that the highest- ranking Iranian officials – including then-president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and current Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi, were involved in the planning of the bombing of the AMIA center.

Over the years, Nisman continued to pursue the Iranian connection. But there are allegations that Nisman was being fed CIA and Mossad information by the former head of the SI, Antonio “Jaime” Stiuso. Though few doubt that Hezbollah and Iran were involved in the bombing, there was also a local connection that seemingly was not being pursued by Nisman.

These points were made to me by Santiago O’Donnell, an Argentinean journalist.

“After 10 years of inquiries, advantageous press coverage and a lavishly financed investigative unit,” stressed O’Donnell, “Nisman had little to show in the way of proof that Tehran and Hezbollah were involved, and he had made no real investigation into the local connection.”

ARGENTINA HAS a long history of horrific crimes that have gone unsolved.

Under the rule of a military junta, between 1976 and 1983 thousands of Argentineans disappeared, never to resurface, as part of a witch-hunt against mostly left-wing political opponents; they are known as the desaparecidos, or “the disappeared.” Many of the culprits have gone unpunished, and the fate of many of the victims is unknown to this day. Large numbers were drugged, stripped naked and pushed off airplanes into the Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic; these were known vuelos de la muerte (death flights).

Due in part to their tendency to get involved in radical politics and in part to deeply ingrained anti-Semitism heavily influenced by a dominant Catholic Church, disproportionately high number of desaparecidos were Jews. And these Jews often suffered more brutal punishment.

Argentina is no longer a country in which political opponents of the government are “disappeared” – but they might be “suicided.” And that was precisely the Argentina to which I was headed.

During my stay in Buenos Aires, there were many reminders that I was not in a normal Western country. On the day of the big march, President Kirchner essentially commandeered all of the major radio and TV stations. In an apparent attempt to eclipse media coverage of the march, which had been dominating the news, Kirchner used her powers to force all of the state-run stations to carry her speech from the Atucha II nuclear power plant.

Argentinieans must not allow their country to be dragged into “conflicts that are not ours,” Kirchner declared before a crowd of thousands while sitting on a stage surrounded by members of her government. Both the crowd and the government officials regularly clapped and shook their heads in agreement.

“In reality, they prefer an Argentina without a nuclear plant, an Argentina that does not develop scientifically, an Argentina with low salaries and cheap labor,” she added in her typically populist style.

During both terms of her presidency, Kirchner tapped into the deep-seated distrust (even, perhaps, hatred) of “Western imperialism,” particularly of the American variety, as a populist ploy to appeal to large swathes of Argentinean society. Argentineans, like other South Americans, were bitter about the US’s support of various dictators during the 1970s. Recently released classified document show, for instance, that former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger supported the coup launched by Jorge Rafael Videla, the first of three military dictators during the years of Argentina’s Dirty War.

Argentineans also resented the neo-liberal economic meddling of the US, which they believe led to Argentina’s 2001 debt crisis. And because of the unique alliance between Israel and the US, the Jewish state is often lumped together with other “Western imperialists.”

HORACIO VERBITSKY, today a columnist with the daily Pagina 12 and head of Argentina’s leading human rights organization, is a Jew with a terrorist past (he was a senior member of the anti- junta Montoneros in the 1970s and early ’80s).

He is considered the intellectual force behind Kirchner’s government. As such, Verbitsky is a particularly influential purveyor of conspiracy theories, which are taken seriously in Argentina because they so often turn out to be true.

Verbitsky said in response to an emailed question from me about Jerusalem- Buenos Aires relations that Israel had trouble dealing with Kirchner’s government because it was too independent – which apparently meant Kirchner refused to give in to pressures from Israel.

Verbitsky wondered why Israel was relatively silent with regard to the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, which left 29 dead, while it was so vocal about the AMIA bombing.

Though his claim was not true (Israel has continued to demand that Argentina bring to justice those who perpetrated the crime and sends a delegation to the site of the bombing every year on March 17), he seemed to be reviving an old conspiracy theory that Israel was itself responsible for the embassy bombing.

He also mentioned a comment by Israeli ambassador Itzhak Aviran in January 2014 in which he said, “The vast majority of those responsible [for the bombings] are no longer of this world, and we did that ourselves.” Verbitsky seemed to be arguing that if Israel had indeed executed those responsible for the bombing, why were the Israelis continuing to put pressure on Argentina to bring them to justice? Eerily, after my correspondence with Verbitsky, Kirchner repeated these exact same claims against Israel in a fourhour- long speech she made shortly after I left Argentina; it seemed to be proof of Verbitsky’s influence on Kirchner.

She also suggested that Nisman’s death had somehow benefited Israel in its opposition to nuclear talks between the US and Iran.

“The US is currently negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran, with strong opposition from the Republican Party and Israel,” Kirchner said in a speech to Congress, referring to Nisman’s death as part of a Middle Eastern conspiracy unfolding on Argentinean soil.

“Doesn’t anybody link these things?” During the time I was there, at least three public figures – with very different political affiliations – accused Pachter of being a Mossad agent.

It would be dishonest of me to claim that I was not apprehensive when I returned to Pachter’s apartment at night.

My concern was amplified by the reaction of others in Buenos Aires to my choice of lodging. The Argentinean Jews with whom I prayed at the local Litvak shul were shocked when I told them where I was living. One older man was convinced I was a Mossad agent.

I began to wonder about a phone call I had received one day while I was in the apartment. The woman on the line asked for Pachter. In broken Spanish I explained that he was in Israel. She then asked me who I was and I told her I was visiting from Israel. She hung up.

Though I was not in Buenos Aires to conduct any serious investigative reporting (I was there for only a week and I barely speak Spanish), I questioned my own integrity. Even if I could, would I have the courage to engage in serious muckraking in the face of intimidation, whether explicit or implicit? I’d like to think so.

Natasha Niebieskikwait is the diplomatic correspondent for Clarin, Argentina’s largest daily, which happens to be anti-Kirchner. She said that when the Kirchner government was at the zenith of its influence a few years ago, Clarin reporters felt as though they were lepers.

“No one in the government would talk to us. We had trouble reporting the news.”

But, she said, there has been a marked improvement in recent years as the Kirchner government has weakened.

The first sign of decline was when Kirchner’s party registered a poor showing in the 2012 midterm elections, which prevented the president from changing the constitution so that she could run for a third term in October. Bad economic policies that hurt Argentina’s strong agricultural sector have also weakened the government, as has the controversy surrounding the deal with Tehran and Nisman’s death.

Niebieskikwiat, whom I met at Clarin’s offices, told me she has been attacked on social media in the past because she is Jewish. But she rejected the idea that journalists in Argentina had to fear for their lives or that foreign correspondents could be expelled for reporting a story potentially damaging to the government.

“This isn’t the 1970s.”

In the hours leading up to the march on Wednesday, February 18, I sat with Pachter’s mother, Monica, in her apartment.

Kirchner was on TV rambling about international interference in internal Argentinean affairs.

I asked her if she would take part in the march.

“People told me it would be better if I didn’t,” she replied. “Too many people know who I am.”

The march was an impressive show of force. In pouring rain, about 400,000 took to the streets of Buenos Aires, according to police estimates. A sea of umbrellas stretched from the Congress building to Plaza del Mayo, where Nisman’s office was located.

It was mostly a silent march. People held signs that read, “Yo soy Nisman [I am Nisman]” or “Justicia [Justice],” with occasional clapping or calls of “Alberto Nisman?” that were answered by a hearty, “Presente [Present].”

They also recited the refrain from Argentina’s national anthem: “Let us live crowned with glory or swear to die gloriously.”

Will the march change anything? Argentineans are pessimistic, though judging from the size of the demonstration, many have not given up hope.

In recent weeks, there have been new revelations. An independent forensic report ordered by Nisman’s ex-wife, Sandra Arroyo Salgado, a senior judge who has taken on high-profile cases against intelligence agents, found that Nisman did not commit suicide, but was murdered.

Salgado represents their two daughters as well as Nisman’s mother and sister.

At a press conference, she said that no traces of gunpowder were found on Nisman’s hand, indicating he did not fire the shot which killed him. The forensic report also indicated that Nisman’s body was moved after his death and that there were only minimal traces of alcohol and tranquilizers in his stomach, which were not enough to contribute to a rash decision to commit suicide.

Still, Vivian Fein, the state prosecutor in charge of investigating Nisman’s death who has long upheld that Nisman killed himself, has not finished her investigation.

And even if it is determined that Nisman was murdered, there is little hope that those responsible will be brought to justice.

There is even less hope that those who perpetrated the AMIA bombing will be tried.

As long as these crimes and others remain unsolved, they serve as a testament to a much deeper ailment in Argentinean society – whose symptoms are wild conspiracy theories, a murky underworld of corrupt politicians, scheming intelligence agents and ineptitude.

This Argentina will remain an unwelcoming place, not just for those unaccustomed to its ways but those born and bred there, particularly if they are Jewish.

Fear and conspiracy in Buenos Aires

Since 1994 corruption, murky politics and mind-numbing ineptitude have marred investigations of the bombing of the Jewish community center.