State terror · Argentina · 1976–1983

Jewish detainees faced particular abuse within a wider system of disappearance and torture.

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1976–1983

State terror · The dictatorship adds an antisemitic accusation

Jewish detainees faced particular abuse within a wider system of disappearance and torture.

Repression reaches many groups

Argentina’s military dictatorship abducted, tortured and disappeared people it deemed subversive. The state terror targeted many political and social groups. Jewish victims belonged within that wider repression, while also facing additional antisemitic treatment in detention.

The torturer’s conspiracy

Declassified records document antisemitic abuse and Nazi references directed at Jewish prisoners. Some interrogators imagined a wider Jewish conspiracy behind political opposition. The accusation added ancestry and religion to the regime’s construction of an internal enemy. It did not describe the prisoners’ actual diverse commitments.

Institutions make the violence possible

The repression depended on security organizations, detention sites and people carrying out orders. Antisemitism was one part of how some perpetrators selected and abused victims. Naming those mechanisms explains more than depicting the entire period as a single anonymous hatred.