Active Memory

Fifteen years ago this week, a bomb ripped into the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) building, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding more than 250.

It was the deadliest attack on Jews outside Israel since World War II. But judging by the world’s inclination to forget the lessons of July 18, 1994, you’d never know it.

Many different groups were formed in response to the attack, but the one that has always moved me the most is called Memoria Activa, or Active Memory.

Started by the friends and families of those killed and run by two steadfast women, Adriana Reisfeld and Diana Malamud, the group has consistently focused on honoring the victims by pursuing justice.

That simple and obvious task has not been easy, as those familiar with the case will tell you.

Argentina is not just the land of rare beef, hot gauchos and intense Malbecs; it is also intensely complicated. Politics and hidden agendas lurk beneath every conversation. Buenos Aires has as many psychotherapists as New York City. Fittingly, then, the logo of Memoria Activa is an image of a maze with the slogan: “Always trapped in the same labyrinth. All our days are the 18th of July.”

A labyrinth symbolizes perfectly the torturous and unending course of justice since the bombing.

Argentine investigators wrecked the first and most crucial investigation into the AMIA bombing. A tribunal impeached the initial federal judge overseeing the case, Juan José Galeano, after a tape emerged showing him bribing a witness to implicate local police officers in the crime. 

In October 2006, new prosecutors, Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martínez Burgos, uncovered evidence that the Iranian Special Affairs Committee had planned the attack at a meeting in the city of Mashad on Aug. 14, 1993, and funded its execution through Hezbollah operatives.

Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian agents operating in Buenos Aires and Foz do Iguaçu region — the triple border area between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina — transmitted money, recruited the suicide bomber, a Lebanese citizen, and gathered materials for the bombing.

Some skeptics, like Gareth Porter, an American historian and investigative journalist writing in The Nation, challenged Nisman’s conclusion, saying the Bush administration had drummed up the Iranian guilt on weak evidence.  Nevertheless, Nisman’s 90-page detailed report (read it at jewishjournal.com) provided enough evidence to convince Interpol to issue arrest warrants for six of nine suspects, a fact Porter brushes off a bit too easily.

“No one doubts Iranian involvement in the least,” said Dina Siegel Vann, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Latino and Latin American Institute in Washington, D.C.

At the same time, Vann said, no sane person expects Iran to extradite the suspects.

Memoria Activa’s focus, instead, is on the cover-up undertaken by Argentine officials. Then-President Carlos Menem, now a senator, has yet to give testimony under oath, though many suspect his link to Syria — his family is from there — is worth investigating.

“We still ignore how the explosives were brought into the country,” journalist and Jewish community activist Diego Melamed e-mailed me. “Where the truck bomb was put together, who was the driver, how the driver escaped and who protected him from the security forces.”

Melamed said the bombing has had a deep but contradictory impact on his community — a pervasive sense of insecurity on the one hand, and on the other a growth in the profile of Jewish communal institutions among Argentines. Casual anti-Semitism is no longer politically correct, especially among the younger generation.

Fifteen years after the attack, “Jewish leaders have a more influential role in Argentine life,” Melamed wrote, “and still nobody is paying for the crime.”

Memoria Activa has held itself above the politics and intrigue. Most movingly, for the past 10 years its members have stood vigil every Monday outside the tribunal investigating the attack, each time reading aloud the names of all the victims.

For those of us outside Argentina, what should concern us, as much as the call for justice, is vigilance. It is astonishing how few of the lessons of July 18, 1994, the world seems to have taken to heart.

Since 1994, the Iranian presence in South America has only grown. One security analyst told me that Iranians flying into and out of Caracas, Venezuela, on the packed weekly flight often leave with citizenship papers courtesy of Venezeula’s sympathetic regime. Hezbollah operatives continue to operate freely in the triangle of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

“The AMIA bombing set the stage for 9/11,” Vann said. “People didn’t take it seriously. But if the Iranian presence in Argentina is illustrative of what can happen, then it is of great concern. Fifteen years later, no one seems to care.”