Peron's Nazi Ties
How the European fascist sensibility found new roots and new life in the South Atlantic region
By MARK FALCOFF

Since the 1930s, the political culture of Argentina has been afflicted by periodic spasms of covert violence, secrecy and denial. As in the case of Vichy France, memory can be an inconvenience or an embarrassment; faced with incidents that require explanation, too many Argentines instinctively reach for the words borron y cuenta nueva (Let's forget it all and start over with a clean slate). As a result, even today nobody knows exactly how many people disappeared during the "dirty war" against subversion (1976-83), nor the number of victims in the left-wing guerrilla violence that preceded it. The 1992 and 1994 bombings of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the city's Jewish center, causing the loss of 115 lives, remain unsolved. Even events far more remote have had to wait decades for elucidation.

One of the most important of those events is Argentina's vaunted neutrality in World War II, a posture it maintained long after other American republics broke off relations with the Axis. Only since the country's return to democracy in 1983 has the real story of Argentina's covert alignment with the Axis finally begun to emerge. A commission to investigate the activities of Nazism in Argentina, appointed by President Carlos Menem and assisted by an international team of scholars, started work last July. A preliminary report is expected in mid-November, when the scholars meet in Buenos Aires, and a final report a year later.

At issue here is not merely a matter of diplomatic taste. Throughout the war, Argentina was regarded by U.S. diplomats and the U.S. media as the regional headquarters for Nazi espionage. After 1945, reports kept cropping up in the U.S. press that Argentina was the final redoubt of important Nazis and their European collaborators, a point dramatically brought home as late as 1960 by the capture and forcible removal to Israeli justice of Adolf Eichmann, principal director of the "final solution."

Over the years, these allegations seemed at least superficially credible in light of the emergence in 1946 of Colonel Juan Peron as the leader of a defiant, nationalist Argentina. Though in practice the Peron regime resembled hardly at all the defeated European fascist dictatorships, Peron made no secret of his sympathy for the defeated Axis powers.

Argentina's and Peron's apparent preference for the Axis, and particularly for Nazi Germany, has muddied the country's relations with the Anglo-Saxon powers and poisoned its domestic politics. Anti-Peronists have often used the term Nazi (or Pero-Nazi) a bit too freely in attempting to discredit their opponents--not just Peron but also the administration of President Ramon S. Castillo (1940-43), who preceded him. Indeed, Argentina's 1946 elections, the first of three in which Peron was elected to the presidency, were, as much as anything else, a plebiscite on the credibility of such accusations. In recent years, the Canadian scholar Ronald Newton, in his masterly The "Nazi Menace" in Argentina, 1931-47 (Stanford), has suggested that much of the Nazi-fascist menace in Argentina was an invention of British intelligence, fearful of the loss of historic markets in that country to the U.S. after the war, and therefore desirous of straining relations between Buenos Aires and Washington.

Far in advance of the final report of President Menem's commission (of which Newton is a member), that theory has now been refuted in an extraordinary piece of investigative reporting--also a major breakthrough in historical scholarship--by Uki Goni, whose Peron and the Germans has just been published in Buenos Aires. In this book the author, who also works as a local correspondent for TIME, establishes that, for all the hyperbole, Washington's darkest suspicions were if anything greatly understated. For one thing, Goni demonstrates that the Castillo administration, and particularly the Argentine Foreign Ministry, was honeycombed with Nazi sympathizers as early as 1942--so much so that it is difficult to see why any of the most anxious partisans of neutrality, such as found in the secret lodges of the Argentine army, felt the need to overthrow the government at all!

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