Tuesday, November 17, 1998 Published at 07:45 GMT
World: Americas
Argentina delves into Nazi past
By BBC South America Correspondent James Reynolds
... Recent studies have argued that Argentina offered widespread support to Nazi Germany during World War II, disregarding its official position of neutrality.
After the war ended, the government of Juan Peron is thought to have helped hundreds of suspected Nazi sympathisers to enter Argentina and escape trial in Europe.
For many years, human rights groups criticised Argentina for not wanting to bring these suspected criminals to trial.
But in 1996, the Argentine government extradited the former SS captain, Erik Priebke and this year, it extradited the Croatian couple, Dinko and Nada Sakic, accused of running a concentration camp during the war ...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/215939.stmArgentina Evades Its Nazi Past
By ANN LOUISE BARDACH
Published: March 22, 1997
... This month President Carlos Saul Menem of the Peronist Party acceded to a request from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to hand over bank records for the accounts of some 334 Nazis and their wives and mistresses who fled to Argentina. But this would not be the first time that Mr. Menem has signaled token cooperation and then proved to be less than sincere.
In 1992 he announced with great fanfare that he was releasing all of Argentina's wartime archives. But Sergio Widder, the Latin American representative at the Wiesenthal Center, insists that the records were ludicrously incomplete. ''Adolf Eichmann was not in the file,'' he said. Nor was there anything on Joseph Schwammberger, the commander of the Mielec concentration camp who was captured in Argentina in 1987, or on Erich Priebke, the SS officer captured in 1994 and now on trial in Italy for the massacre of 335 civilians at the Ardeatine cave outside Rome in 1944.
Nor did the files include anything on Ivo Rojnica, a pro-Nazi Ustashe commander from Croatia who became a Menem supporter and was even nominated as Croatia's Ambassador to Argentina in 1993. (After protests from Argentina's Jewish community, Croatia withdrew his nomination.) ...
A recently declassified 1945 State Department report concluded that ''the personal fortunes of Nazi officials'' were transported by diplomatic pouch to Buenos Aires, and that Hermann Goring had ''more than $20 million,'' as well as a submarine loaded with 40 boxes of treasure ...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E2DD153BF931A15750C0A961958260from the August 23, 2002 edition -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0823/p07s02-woam.htmlRace-hate groups find virtual haven in Argentina
Lax laws and cheap Internet access have helped far-right groups thrive
By Colin Barraclough | Special to The Christian Science Monitor
BUENOS AIRES - ... Aided by inexpensive high-speed Internet access and an outdated antidiscrimination law, race-hate groups from all over the Spanish-speaking world are making Argentina their virtual home base.
"The late 1990s saw the re-birth of neo-Nazi groups in Argentina, both in the real world and on the Internet," says Sergio Widder, Latin America representative for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. "The ultraright in Argentina is using the Internet to help create a neo-Nazi network in Latin America." According to the Wiesenthal Center, the number of sites worldwide it deems "problematic" has grown to 3,000 today from one in 1995. Specific numbers for Argentina were unavailable ...
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0823/p07s02-woam.htm