Interpreting The AMIA I -- Peronism, Anti-Peronism, and Conspiracy Culture

Or, "Deep Politics" In The Land Of Neurosis

Samir Amin — wit that he was — once provided what I consider to be quite possibly the single most brilliant description of Argentina and its politics:

“Our first visit, which coincided with Juan Perón’s return in 1973, brought home to us what I do not hesitate to describe as a neurotic political culture produced by the inexorable decline afflicting the country. I do not intend this description as an insult. History is replete with similar declines to which para- religious or para-ethnic fundamentalisms are witness. For me, Argentina is the example of a country in the periphery of world capitalism that refuses to acknowledge its status, under the pretext that it feels itself to be ‘European … Unfortunately, Argentine politics only reinforced my judgment that here it was a question of a neurotic polity. Yet, the decline in Argentina’s position in the world resulted in a mass social movement and workers’ struggles that had quite a significant impact and produced one of the first great explosions of modern populism, beginning in the 1940s with Perón. Today, we can smile when presented with images of that time, the adulation of the leader. But Argentina had no monopoly over that kind of thing. And the all-too-quick identification of this populism with fascism is not correct. Perónist populism was anti-imperialist and progressive in its own way. The excesses of language and manners by the general and his wife, Eva, should not take anything away from the positive measures made in favor of workers. We can find the later excursions of the aged leader who did not want to be separated from the armored casket of Eva—“los restos de Eva”—amusing, or macabre. But there is something more serious that is problematic here: at the time, no one seemed to have gone beyond Peronist populism. I was always, then, worried—and sometimes truly irritated—that all the activists and politicians that I met said they were “Peronists.” Peronists of the left, the extreme left, the center, the right, the extreme right, but everyone was always a “Peronist.” I do not believe that such a phenomenon—which I have seen nowhere else—can only be explained by political reasons or by the class struggle” (Amin, 2019: 276-277).

I suppose every country has their national mystery — a shocking and highly mediatized event, usually of mass public violence — that becomes the object of obsessive historical retelling and questioning. In the United States this description is met at the very least by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Both events were not only generationally defining, but particularly outside of the political mainstream are even now regarded as skeleton keys to understanding the real power structure in society. Unanswered questions — both real and perceived — about the possible role of enemies both within and without in these events remain preoccupations of both the left and the right. The fact that both sides can construct incredibly similar versions of them, with some names changed — the wealthy, the security state, the globalists, the Jews, the Saudis — should give pause. It is not so much that the most thoughtful exemplars of the “deep” or “para-political” analysis, particularly Peter Dale Scott, are necessarily wrong. Although the ultimate conclusions reached are almost entirely conjectural, Scott in particular bases those guesses on enough historical research that they are arguably reasonable. But “deep politics” does not actually exist, since what Scott does is to confuse his quibbles over the historiography of particular events for grand insights into structural facets of capitalism and imperialism. And, as Braudel famously said, “events are dust.”

For instance, it is odd to think that the climate of fear created by 9/11 was of any real importance to the United States invading Afghanistan. The pretext for the American invasion of Iraq was largely admitted to be false by the very people who had promoted it soon after the invasion started, and nothing much changed on the ground. The self-justifications of American imperialism are rarely particularly elaborate — and because of the almost total nonexistence of a domestic anti-imperialist movement, don’t need to be. Indeed, I have written previously on how the post-9/11 wars represented a resort to naked violence which lacked Gramscian ideological legitimacy of any kind at all. But if America’s national mysteries are so overdetermined by imperialism so as to not be all that consequential, the same cannot be said for, in particular, semi-peripheral countries. Here, both external and domestic circumstances are constantly changing, and so can more be swayed by something so minor as a particular event. Here, national mystery can easily turn into national neurosis.

In Argentina, the role of national mystery is unquestionably occupied by the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were killed and hundreds more injured. Unlike its American counterparts, even the official culprits are still faceless. The identity of the bomber himself has never been proved conclusively and no planners or accomplices have ever been convicted. What passes for an answer is that the bombing was carried out by Hezbollah (or a front group that might be Hezbollah) and since Hezbollah is an ally of Iran, presumably Iranian state actors as well. Growing up, I implicitly understood the motive to really be Iran’s desire to target Jews wherever we are — though there have been attempts to explain more specifically the seemingly bizarre choice to target Argentina, which I will return to a bit later.

My mother, at the time pregnant with your author, got out of the subway just late enough on 9/11 to see that a plane had hit her place of work — which allowed, among other things, for you to be reading this (and yes, I am well aware that my ethnic background gives this a humorous aspect). But even Peter Dale Scott’s intellectualized 9/11 conspiracies would be ludicrous to her. My mother did not live in Argentina when the AMIA was blown up, and none of our family living there were or are affiliated with it as an institution (instead grouping around the poles of either total irreligiosity or Chabad). But over twenty years after the AMIA exploded, bombing conspiracies suddenly became a near-obsession in my family, particularly for my older relatives. It is still a very significant aspect of their political universe today, especially for those relatives who live in the United States and so do not feel more mundane Argentine issues like 109% inflation. The impetus for this was the death of the (Jewish) prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who on 18 January 2015 was found dead of a gunshot wound hours before he was due to testify to Congress. When he died, Nisman had been investigating the AMIA for more than a decade and had in that time made no especially significant progress on actually solving the case. He had exclusively pursued the Iran/Hezbollah angle but presented multiple and at times conflicting narratives of how the bombing was actually carried out. However, five days before he died, Nisman had very suddenly announced that he had evidence that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — the towering figure of left politics in contemporary Argentina — had conspired to cover up Iranian guilt in the AMIA case. So you can probably guess how the anti-Peronist right reacted to his death.

But who really was Alberto Nisman, and how did he die? Just like the AMIA case, no one really knows the answers even now. Nisman’s career was not an impressive one — his investigation of the AMIA was marred by inconsistencies, easily disproved assertions, criticism from victims’ families, and false accusations against individuals who ended up exonerated by the courts (Adamovsky, 2015). But in death Nisman became the hero of a story that resembles the plot of a supermarket thriller. Because it’s all just a little too perfect, too coincidental that the crusader for justice dies right before he’s set to blow the lid off the bad guys, right? It actually is, but only because if reality had perfect pacing fiction would be superfluous. And so what initially appeared to be a case of suicide under the influence (El Litoral, 2015) — committed by a man imminently facing career-ending embarrassment before Congress — became a national mystery. Never mind that Nisman’s report about the Kirchner allegations turned out to lack legal substance, and the non-existence of forensic evidence that he was murdered. Following years of political acrimony a court eventually ruled that Nisman was a victim of homicide. By whose hand? No one can say.

In the United States conspiracies, to be blunt, are often consumed as a form of entertainment. Even supposedly serious, left-wing people often pepper their analyses of “deep politics” with outlandish claims concerning mind control, Satanic cults, and the most lurid of true crime stories (McGowan, 2004). This is politics for people of limited attention spans but outsized self-importance, who for whatever reason prefer to get their rocks off under the guise of progressive politics rather than by reading detective novels or watching B-movies. In a word — anti-imperialism as subculture, a way of freaking out the squares in a country where imperialism is either not acknowledged by the majority of fellow citizens or is regarded positively if it is. But in countries where the population is more precarious, the politics higher-stakes — conspiracy culture is a paralytic to politics and a shot in the arm for the right. In Serbia, it has been claimed that the ultra-neoliberal prime minister Zoran Đinđić — an obedient servant of the NATO bloc that had just bombed his country into submission — was actually assassinated because he was going to turn against Western interests. Đinđić was killed in 2003, but the book making this claim — The Third Bullet, by Nikola Vrzić and Milan Veruović — came out well over a decade later. What does this signify? It is a sign of a national politics that chases its own tail, where dissent is very widespread but popular confusion about what to do about is directed down increasingly bizarre streets.

And no country exemplifies that better than Argentina. Argentina is possibly the most neurotic country in the world — with by far the highest per capita volume of psychotherapists and people who see them (CNN, 2013). Indeed, conventional psychiatry is so inadequate when confronted with Argentinians that Lacanian psychoanalysis remains quite popular. I was raised in a family which collectively contains a mind-boggling array of quirks, compulsions, phobias, anxieties, addictions, eccentricities — both diagnosed and not — probably above even the Argentine average, but you get the idea. And the idea that Argentina’s world leader status in neuroticism spills over into politics is what made me first smile at and then see deep truth in the Amin quote with which this essay began. Peronism is by far the most baffling feature of Argentinian political reality to outsiders, since it seems to be an ideology with either no or ever-changing ideological content. And the history of Peronism and anti-Peronism is far beyond the scope of this series, but what needs to be remembered is this. Perón was a near-messianic figure to the Argentinian working-class movement, even in spite of his vague and sometimes reactionary political platform. Indeed, the devotion to Perón was so intense that when he was exiled, much of the Argentine labor movement prioritized his being allowed to return over any other political demand (James, 1988: 80-87). And just as Perón was revered by the Peronists, he became Satan incarnate to the anti-Peronists. What most readers might not know is that during Perón’s lifetime, opposition to his movement consisted of a bizarre alliance between landed elites, Socialists, Communists, and just about every other political tendency you can think of (James, 1988: 66-68). All these were more united by antipathy to the person of Perón than they were divided by vast substantive disagreements.

And the neurosis of Peronism and anti-Peronism intersecting with the neurosis of conspiracy is the true significance of Nisman and the AMIA. Today, Peronism is more clearly associated with the political left thanks to its Pink Tide reinvention by the Kirchners. But what has not changed is the intense personification of politics, giving rise to the interplay of hysterical demonization and hysterical devotion that under the Kirchners was so significant as to acquire a name of its own — la grieta (the rift). Rage at CFK and her supporters drives to the mainstream of the political right outlandish accusations of her complicity (or active responsibility) in terror bombing and assassination. And the wedding of all progressive possibility to her person drives CFK’s supporters to find alternate killers for Nisman, like the American CIA. But wait? Wasn’t Nisman a hack, who made his career on the AMIA investigation without digging up anything at all of substance? Is there any evidence for anyone having killed him? La grieta is the same force that pushed just enough working-class Argentines to vote for Mauricio Macri and his vicious neoliberal agenda, out of exhaustion with the ambient climate of fear and hysteria (López Levy, 2017). And with the tarring of CFK — the supposed eminence grise of any center-left government — for Argentina’s inflation woes, and the appearance of Javier Milei on the national scene, la grieta’s most sinister product may still be waiting in the wings.

More specifically, the AMIA and its aftermath has had profound consequences for the self-understanding of Argentine Jewry. Obviously, the fact that such an event actually happened creates a sense of threat, of the kind dreamed of by Zionist ideologues and the Israeli state as an opportunity to drive diaspora Jews into their arms. In the Argentine context, the success of turning Iranian responsibility and Kirchner complicity into conventional wisdom literally makes Jewish identity into a property of Israel, the political right, and the United States. If Iran and the Peronist left actively conspired to kill Jews in Argentina, then how can we be anything but implacably hostile towards them? The appearance of the new set of Jewish victims was convenient in terms of erasing memory of the previous ones — the disproportionately Jewish left-wing and Peronist desaparecidos. The military rulers took seriously a bizarre anti-Semitic conspiracy theory called la plan andinia — a supposed Communist-Zionist plot to create a second Jewish state in Patagonia (Porter, 2020). So Jews, although not as much as Communists and Peronists, were regarded as threats to the nation. But today, to speak of the dictatorship is to implicitly place oneself on the political left given the support given to memory groups like Las Madres De La Plaza De Mayo by the Kirchners. So to embrace Milei’s junta-nostalgia can be perfectly Jewish, but to embrace Kirchnerismo cannot, because of the latter’s supposed, incredibly convoluted links to the AMIA bombing. And of course, the fact that Israel armed the dictatorship throughout its existence is never talked about much at all.

I’ve made a lot of assertions here about the problematic theory of Iranian involvement in the AMIA bombing that I’d like to back up further. So the rest of this series will focus on the possibilities for what exactly happened, who was responsible, and whose interests it served. But don’t think of this as a conspiratorial or “para-political” reframing of the AMIA. If the case was never actually solved, there isn’t much of an official story to question. And in Argentina, endless questioning of supposed AMIA cover-ups has already taken place — by the Zionist right.

References:

“In Therapy? In Argentina, It’s the Norm | CNN.” Accessed May 19, 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2013/04/28/health/argentina-psychology-therapists/index.html.

Adamovsky, Ezequiel. “Alberto Nisman’s Death and AMIA: Who Cares About the Truth?,” February 4, 2015. https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/alberto-nismans-death-and-amia-who-cares-about-the-truth/.

Amin, Samir. The long revolution of the global south: toward a new anti-imperialist international. Monthly Review Press, 2019.

Ellitoral.com. “Nisman tenía 1,73 gramos de alcohol en sangre y una botella de vodka.” Accessed May 19, 2023. https://www.ellitoral.com/politica/nisman-1-73-gramos-alcohol-sangre-botella-vodka_0_sk3tivIX2a.html.

James, Daniel. Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946-1976. 1st pbk. ed. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

López Levy, Marcela. Argentina Under the Kirchners: The Legacy of Left Populism. Rugby, Warwickshire, UK: Practical Action Publishing, 2017.

McGowan, David. programmed to kill: The politics of Serial Murder. iUniverse, 2004.

Porter, Gareth. “How a Police Spy’s Stunning Testimony Threatens the Official US-Israeli AMIA Bombing Narrative.” The Grayzone, July 27, 2020. http://thegrayzone.com/2020/07/26/police-spys-testimony-official-us-israeli-amia-bombing/.