Argentina’s 200,000-strong Jewish community — Latin America’s largest — is as profoundly divided as the country is following a left-wing victory in last Sunday’s national elections that saw Cristina Fernández de Kirchner return as Vice President.
Alberto Fernández, the populist opposition leader who is no relation of Cristina, won 48.1 per cent of the vote against the incumbent President Mauricio Macri’s 40.4 per cent.
Mr Fernández will take office on December 10.
It might be assumed, on the surface, that the majority of Argentinian Jews oppose any government that includes Ms Fernández.
After all, it was during her presidency that her Jewish Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman signed a controversial memorandum of understanding with Iran to investigate a car bombing at the Amia Jewish centre in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded more than 300 in 1994.
Alberto Nisman, a special prosecutor, claimed to have evidence proving the 2013 agreement was designed to allow Tehran deliver oil to Argentina in exchange for food, weapons and a promise to convince Interpol to drop its arrest warrants for nine Iranian suspects in the Amia attack.
But he was found dead the day before he was due to present this information to the Argentine Congress, after he was drugged, beaten and murdered, possibly by more than one person.
Ms Fernández, who initially claimed Mr Nisman had committed suicide, lost an election 2015 amid a wave of corruption claims.
She was indicted in 2018 on charges that she had accepted bribes from construction companies. Investigations into her case continue to this day.
“Cristina [Fernández] pursues an ideology of the left of the 1970s, which is not necessarily conducive to close relations with Israel,” said Gabriela Goldberg, who worked at the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires during Ms Fernández’s second term as President.
But as sociologist and journalist Jorge Elbaum pointed out, there is a strong Jewish presence in circles close to Ms Fernández.
They include Axel Kiciloff, her one-time finance minister, who was elected governor of the Province of Buenos Aires in last Sunday’s elections.
Moreover, Argentinian Jews have been as severely affected by the country’s grave economic crisis as the rest of the population.
Mr Macri initially acted to alleviate poverty and kickstart the economy, but his term saw an enormous rise in inflation and a devaluation of the peso. More than 35 per cent of the county is now classed as poor.
But Mr Macri also cancelled his predecessor’s accord with Iran. In 2018, Argentina and the United States agreed to work together to cut off the funding and money laundering networks connected to Iran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, which they said was financing terrorism across Latin America.
Earlier this year, he organised an event to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Amia attack.
Furthermore, Mr Macri incorporated leading members of the Jewish community in his government: Rabbi Sergio Bergman, a vehement critic of the 2013 agreement with Iran, became his Environment Minister, while Claudio Avruj, the former executive director of Daia — the umbrella organisation of Argentinian Jewish communities — was made his undersecretary for human rights and cultural pluralism.
And earlier this year, he became the first Argentinian head of state to host an official visit from an Israeli prime minister.
Jewish themes and relations with Israel did not play a prominent part in the electoral campaign.
“Argentina is not like the United States, where the majority of the Jewish community votes for a political party,” said Ariel Krengel, head of the Federation of Argentinian Maccabi Community Centres, a consortium of more than 40 Jewish sports and cultural centres. “That’s why you can’t talk about a Jewish vote.”
Mr Krengel added: “Fortunately, antisemitism is not a problem in Argentina at the moment.”
But that view is not borne out by the latest Daia report, which stated that the number of antisemitic incidents had increased by 107 per cent in 2018 compared with the previous year.
