It is difficult to find words to describe what it feels like to realize that it is 31 years since that tragic March 17, 1992: that day, in Argentina we learned about the barbarism of terrorism and we did not imagine that a painful and dark journey of impunity was beginning. The explosion of a car bomb at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires claimed the lives of 29 human beings and injured more than 240 people. The passage of time has withdrawn this tragic fact from the attention of public opinion, but its consequences will show pain in the victims and their loved ones.
So long after, those of us who lived closely with that tragedy persist in the responsibility and obligation to promote the clarification of what happened: we will not cease, as time passes, our incessant search for truth and Justice so that the material and intellectual authors of the attack appear before Argentine Justice, the soil that his attack sullied.
The attack on the Israeli embassy was the first blow of jihadist terrorism in our country. Its authorship was claimed by Hezbollah, the Lebanese group that two years later attacked Buenos Aires again, killing 85 people in the AMIA/DAIA building.
The biggest pending issue of these thirty-one years is found, precisely, in the persistence of impunity. A debt that grows day by day, that shames us in front of the memory of the victims and that is an insult to the survivors, family members and society as a whole. The non-existence of instances of trial and punishment for criminals is an evil that has become chronic in our country, which feeds and naturalizes injustice. That attack was also the brutal presentation of a terrorism that wreaked havoc globally. Terrorism continued and continues to show signs of its presence and ability to act regardless of gender, age, religion or nationality. Faced with this, awareness of this threat, the only alternative in favor of stimulating the necessary prevention mechanisms, becomes a categorical imperative. This task, we affirm, must be carried out within the margins of international law and respect for democratic values.
Assuming this premise, DAIA, on behalf of the Argentine Jewish community, reaffirms its commitment against all forms of discrimination and warns of the urgent need to deepen the fight against all hate speech, a breeding ground for the germ of terrorist action.
*President of the DAIA.
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