By Juan Melamed
BUENOS AIRES — If the phrase Argentina’s Jewish community has adopted to mark the 32nd anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history sounds familiar to their compatriots, it’s intentional: “Today we cannot lose . . . our memory” echoes the soccer-mad nation’s World Cup slogan.
Fans chanting “Today we cannot lose” were ubiquitous throughout the 39-day tournament, which culminated with Argentina coming in second place to Spain.
Now the Jewish community hopes its spin on the chant will help force a reckoning with the 1994 bombing attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people the day after that year’s World Cup final.
“It is difficult to understand why the process toward a trial in absentia has been allowed to move forward so slowly,” Osvaldo Armoza, the president of the JCC, known as AMIA, said July 17.
He spoke at an event marking the attack.
The country’s Jewish leaders hope a new law allowing trial in absentia will bring some measure of justice for a community that has faced decades of frustrations and obstacles to bring accountability to the Iranian and Hezbollah officials alleged to be behind the attack.
Senator Patricia Bullrich, a political ally of President Javier Milei’s government, acknowledged to reporters at the event that the process has been slow.
She is optimistic it will move forward.
Last month, Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas used a new law to order a trial for the current chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ahmad Vahidi, and nine others accused by the late prosecutor Alberto Nisman:
Alí Fallahijan, Alí Akbar Velayati, Mohsen Rezai, Hadi Soleimanpour, Mohsen Rabbani, Ahmad Reza Asghari, Salman Raouf Salman, Abdallah Salman and Hussein Mounir Mouzannar.
Osvaldo Armoza, the JCC president, said the trial in absentia should not keep the international community from pursuing the arrests of the accused.
Iran has refused to cooperate with the red notices, Interpol’s request to member nations to arrest wanted persons and to advance their extradition.
“We call on the Argentine government to take every necessary step to ensure that Interpol maintains these Red Notices in force, and to urge countries around the world not to provide safe haven to the fugitives” he said.
Milei, who has warmed his country’s ties with Israel, attended the event in the front row. He did not speak.
Also in attendance were US Ambassador Peter Lamela and Yair Horn, an Argentine-Israeli who was held hostage in Gaza during the recent war by Hamas, which, like Hezbollah, is an Iran-backed terrorist group.
The stage was illuminated in Argentina’s national colors — sky blue and white — and a video was screened with a song traditionally chanted in support of the national soccer team.
The tribute highlighted the major football moments that the victims’ loved ones never had the chance to witness.
To date, no one has been convicted for the attack.
Argentine courts have classified the bombing as a “crime against humanity,” basing their conclusion in part on Nisman’s findings.
There is no statute of limitations for a crime against humanity.
Nisman, who was Jewish, was killed in his apartment in 2015 a day before he was to report on his findings in his wide-ranging investigation into the attack, including incriminating then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in a plot to cover up Iraninvolvement in the attack.
Nisman’s killing remains unsolved.
Courts eventually convicted Kirchner on unrelated corruption charges.
A memorial ceremony was scheduled ti be held on July 24 at Argentina’s largest Jewish cemetery — La Tablada Cemetery — marking the anniversary according to the Hebrew calendar, on the 10th of Av.
The ceremony will include a tribute to the victims and the recitation of the Kaddish in their memory.
