Argentina

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In Patagonia (Penguin Classics)

by Bruce Chatwin from Penguin Classics

In Patagonia is Bruce Chatwin's exquisite account of his journey through "the uttermost part of the earth," that stretch of land at the southern tip of South America, where bandits were once made welcome and Charles Darwin formed part of his "survival of the fittest" theory. Chatwin's evocative descriptions, notes on the odd history of the region, and enchanting anecdotes make In Patagonia an exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land. An instant classic upon publication in 1977, In Patagonia remains a masterwork of literature.

Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi

by Neal Bascomb from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Product Description
The first complete narrative of the pursuit and capture of Adolf Eichmann, based on groundbreaking new information and interviews and featuring rare, never-published Mossad surveillance photographs. When the Allies stormed Berlin in the last days of the Third Reich, the operational manager of the mass murder of Europe's Jews shed his SS uniform and vanished.

Bringing Adolf Eichmann to justice would require a harrowing fifteen-year chase stretching from war-ravaged Europe to the shores of Argentina.

Alternating from a criminal on the run to his pursuers closing in on his trail, Hunting Eichmann follows the Nazi as he escapes two American POW camps, hides in the mountains, slips out of Europe on the ratlines, and builds an anonymous life in Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, a persistent search for Eichmann gradually evolves into an international manhunt that includes a bulldog West German prosecutor, a blind Argentinean Jew and his beautiful daughter, and a budding, ragtag spy agency called the Mossad, whose operatives have their own scores to settle. Presented in a pulse-pounding, hour-by-hour account, the capture of Eichmann and the efforts by Israeli agents to secret him out of Argentina and fly him to Israel to stand trial bring the narrative to a stunning conclusion.

Hunting Eichmann is a fully documented, finely nuanced history that offers the intrigue of a detective story and the thrill of great spy fiction.

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A Q&A with Neal Bascomb, Author of Hunting Eichmann

Q: What brought you to write Hunting Eichmann?

A: During my research, people asked me this countless times, and usually they prefaced it with the question of whether or not I was Jewish. When I answered the Jewish question in the negative, the overwhelming response was "Good, then you'll be seen as objective."

About why I wrote the book: that answer is connected to the first one. You do not have to be Jewish to understand the incredible significance of the operation to catch Eichmann. Without it, our knowledge and perception of the Holocaust would be much more limited. Before the Eichmann trial, the Nazi atrocities were largely being swept under the rug, not spoken about.

Only after the capture was there an extensive reexamination of the genocide; only then did it become rooted in our collective consciousness. In this respect, the operation is one of the most important, influential spy missions in history, period. Beyond a documentary over a decade ago, it has been almost fifty years since a journalist has taken a thorough look at what unfolded.

Q: How did you find Eichmann's passport?

A: Definitely one of the highlights of my research, because the document is tangible proof of how Eichmann escaped Europe. In late 2006, I was looking through old Buenos Aires newspapers when I came across a story about a lawsuit filed by Vera Eichmann against the Israelis. Court records are always one of my favorite places to research because they're often overlooked, but courts always keep meticulous records. Through one of my researchers, I petitioned the courts to see the lawsuit files. No response. I tried again. Come back in six weeks, they said, fill out this paperwork and that. Then again. You need a lawyer, they said. Then again. Finally we were given the records, which had never been accessed before.

In the file was a long report about the Argentinean investigation into the capture, which was fascinating. But no passport! A few weeks later, we heard that the judge who approved our seeing the records had gone through the file before agreeing to its release and given the passport to the Holocaust museum in Buenos Aires. Fortunately, the judge credited my researcher with the discovery, and we were given full access to the passport.

Q: What was the great challenge in writing the book?

A: No debate. It was writing the narrative sections on Eichmann during the war, how he escaped, and how he lived while on the run. When I set out to write this history, I thought I would focus almost exclusively on the hunters, not the hunted. But after discovering a memoir by Eichmann on his postwar years, not to mention reading two well-known autobiographies, I really felt that I could accurately portray his actions and mindset.

This got me into his head, so to speak--and this was an extremely uncomfortable place to be. For a while I had a bad case of insomnia, and when sleep did come, I had nightmares about his actions against the Jews. Although I knew I'd be affected by the subject matter, its level of intensity was surprising.

Q: How active is the search for surviving Nazi war criminals today?

A: A significant effect of the Eichmann case was the drive to bring the killers to justice, not only in the early 1960s, but half a century later. Before Eichmann, governments, including those of the United States, Germany, and even Israel, were doing very little. That was also the case with Simon Wiesenthal, who by 1960 had also largely given up his efforts. Today the Wiesenthal Center, led by its intrepid Nazi hunter Ephraim Zuroff, has launched a campaign to catch the last surviving Nazi war criminals.

Beyond the Nazis, sadly, there are recent war criminals from conflicts in Darfur, the Balkans, and elsewhere. I believe that the drive to bring these individuals to account is, at least in part, a legacy of Eichmann, whose trial showed that perpetrators of genocide must pay for their crimes, and their acts must be made known to the world so that they can be prevented in the future.

(Photo © Jillian Mcalley)

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The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina

by Alicia Partnoy from Cleis Press

One of Argentina's 30,000 "disappeared", Alicia Partnoy was abducted from her home by secret police and taken to a concentration camp where she was tortured, and where most of the other prisoners were killed. Smuggled out and published anonymously, THE LITTLE SCHOOL is Partnoy's memoir of her disappearance and imprisonment.

Evita: The Real Life of Eva Peron

by Nicholas Fraser from W. W. Norton & Company

In the colorful, tumultuous setting of postwar Argentina, Eva Peron wielded a power--spiritual and practical--that has few parallels outside of hereditary monarchy. In this "fascinating, frightening, straightforward" (Cleveland Plain Dealer) biography, Fraser and Navarro have produced "a work of great political sophistication. . . . Factual, nuanced, and absorbing" (Kirkus Reviews). Photos.

Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (The Americas)

by Jacobo Timerman from University of Wisconsin Press

The Americas, Ilan Stavans, Series Editor

€ Winner of a 1982 Los Angeles Times Book Prize € Selected by the New York Times for "Books of the Century" With a new introduction by Ilan Stavans and a new foreword by Arthur Miller.

Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976

by Piero Gleijeses from The University of North Carolina Press

This is a compelling and dramatic account of Cuban policy in Africa from 1959 to 1976 and of its escalating clash with U.S. policy toward the continent. Piero Gleijeses's fast-paced narrative takes the reader from Cuba's first steps to assist Algerian rebels fighting France in 1961, to the secret war between Havana and Washington in Zaire in 1964-65--where 100 Cubans led by Che Guevara clashed with 1,000 mercenaries controlled by the CIA--and, finally, to the dramatic dispatch of 30,000 Cubans to Angola in 1975-76, which stopped the South African advance on Luanda and doomed Henry Kissinger's major covert operation there.

Based on unprecedented archival research and firsthand interviews in virtually all of the countries involved--Gleijeses was even able to gain extensive access to closed Cuban archives--this comprehensive and balanced work sheds new light on U.S. foreign policy and CIA covert operations. It revolutionizes our view of Cuba's international role, challenges conventional U.S. beliefs about the influence of the Soviet Union in directing Cuba's actions in Africa, and provides, for the first time ever, a look from the inside at Cuba's foreign policy during the Cold War.

A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford World's Classics)

by Marguerite Feitlowitz from Oxford University Press, USA

Argentina still struggles as a nation with the shame and horror of the so-called "dirty-war" of the decade following Juan Peron's death. During that horrific time, torture and kidnapping were the instruments of choice for the enforcement of political will. Feitlowitz unflinchingly examines life under sadistic military rule with detailed descriptions of the experiences of prisoners in concentration camps. The Argentinean vocabulary now includes words like desaparacido (disappeared person) and chupado (sucked up or kidnapped), vivid reminders of how commonplace kidnapping and murder became. Victims, often guilty only of nothing more than practicing psychology or journalism or being Jewish, have not been forgotten.

Though Feitlowitz touches on the linguistic effects of government terrorism in Argentina, her book's greatest strength lies in the voice it gives the victims. The author spent years talking to survivors of the terror as well as some of the people responsible for instigating it. What A Lexicon of Terror does particularly well is capture the ongoing consequences of the dirty war--victims encountering their tormentors on the streets, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo still marching to remind their government that the fates of thousands of disappeared are still not known, a government held hostage by the fear of army uprisings should any attempt to bring culprits to justice be made. Argentina is the subject of this particular Lexicon, but surely the citizens of other nations such as Chile, Guatemala, and El Salvador might see their own experiences mirrored here.

In A Lexicon of Terror, Marguerite Feitlowitz fully exposes the nightmare of sadism, paranoia, and deception the military dictatorship unleashed on the Argentine people during the Dirty War, a nightmare that would claim over 30,000 civilians from 1976 to 1983. Feitlowitz explores the perversion of language under state terrorism, both as it's used to conceal and confuse and to domesticate torture and murder. Based on six years of research and moving interviews with peasants, intellectuals, activists, and bystanders, A Lexicon of Terror examines the full impact of this catastrophic period from its inception to the present, in which former torturers, having been pardoned and released from prison, live side by side with those they tortured. Passionately written and impossible to put down, A Lexicon of Terror shows us both the horror of the war and the heroism of those who resisted and survived.

And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina

by Paul Blustein from PublicAffairs

It's not often--or maybe ever--that a book steeped in emerging-market economic theory reads like a thriller. But And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) has cliffhangers and plot twists equal to a detective's tale, as Paul Blustein chronicles the spectacular rise and fall of Argentina's economy at the turn of the 21st century. The book has its flaws, of course, including the author's insistence on using goofy metaphors from the overripe Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita (from which the book takes its awkward title). But by and large, Blustein, a staff writer at the Washington Post, tells a cynic's tale of greed run amok on a massive scale.

While policy wonks at the International Monetary Fund had much to do with Argentina's implosion, Blustein also holds the country's own government responsible. Conventional wisdom says that the influence of the world's investors keeps everyone in line--a key tenet of the pro-globalization argument--but in practice, Blustein writes, "foreign funds numbed Argentine policymakers into minimizing the perils of their policies. The effect was similar to a dose of steroids, giving the economy a short-term boost while insidiously increasing the risk of a breakdown in the long run." From that point on, only devastation lay ahead for many average Argentineans, who could no longer remove savings from their banks, and for international investors, who saw their returns vanish in a flash. Blustein effectively makes the case that Argentina wasn't a rare example or a perfect storm of problems, but--bearing "striking parallels" to Enron and other financial scandals of the era--a preview of more meltdowns to come. It's a compelling cautionary tale well worth telling. --Jennifer Buckendorff

A dramatic account of one of the most spectacular economic melt-downs of modern times; "an extraordinary tale of bad policy and financial gluttony." (Wall Street Journal) In 2001 Argentina suffered one of the most sensational crashes in modern history. With it came appalling social and political chaos, a collapse of the peso, and a wrenching downturn that threw millions into poverty and left nearly one-quarter of the workforce unemployed.

Paul Blustein shows how the IMF turned a blind eye to the vulnerabilities of its star pupil, and exposes the conduct of global financial market players in Argentina as redolent of the scandals-like those at Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing-that rocked Wall Street in recent years. By going behind the scenes of Argentina's rise and fall, Blustein shows with unmistakable clarity how sadly elusive the path of hope and progress remains to the great bulk of humanity still mired in poverty and underdevelopment.

Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Latin American Silhouettes)

by Marguerite Guzman Bouvard from SR Books

The 1976 Argentine junta that overthrew the ragged Peronista government launched a campaign of terror to crush dissent. "Ford Falcons without license plates would slide through the streets like sharks," says one witness, remembering nights when security forces "disappeared" hordes of people. Though many were tortured and executed in detention centers, junta leaders denied any knowledge of this. Determined to learn the fates of their sons and daughters, a group of middle-aged women who called themselves Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo braved beatings, threats, and abductions to spotlight the flagrant violations of human rights. This scholarly, somewhat dry book tells of their radicalization and activism, which helped galvanize world pressure against the junta and slow the tide of disappearances. Though stiff writing sometimes undermines their affecting, painful stories, this is an amazing and rewarding blueprint for cooperative struggle against abuses of power.

Revolutionizing Motherhood examines one of the most astonishing human rights movements of recent years. During the Argentine junta's Dirty War against subversives, as tens of thousands were abducted, tortured , and disappeared, a group of women forged the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and changed Argentine politics forever. In this volume, Marguerite Guzmn Bouvard traces the history of the Mothers and examines how they have transformed maternity from a passive, domestic role to one of public strength. Using traditional symbols of motherhood as the vehicles for social protest, they have provided a model of activism in the struggle for human rights.

The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Latin America in Translation)

from Duke University Press

Excessively European, refreshingly European, not as European as it looks, struggling to overcome a delusion that it is European. Argentina—in all its complexity—has often been obscured by variations of the "like Europe and not like the rest of Latin America" cliché. The Argentina Reader deliberately breaks from that viewpoint. This essential introduction to Argentina’s history, culture, and society provides a richer, more comprehensive look at one of the most paradoxical of Latin American nations: a nation that used to be among the richest in the world, with the largest middle class in Latin America, yet one that entered the twenty-first century with its economy in shambles and its citizenry seething with frustration.

This diverse collection brings together songs, articles, comic strips, scholarly essays, poems, and short stories. Most pieces are by Argentines. More than forty of the texts have never before appeared in English. The Argentina Reader contains photographs from Argentina’s National Archives and images of artwork by some of the country’s most talented painters and sculptors. Many selections deal with the history of indigenous Argentines, workers, women, blacks, and other groups often ignored in descriptions of the country. At the same time, the book includes excerpts by or about such major political figures as José de San Martín and Juan Perón. Pieces from literary and social figures virtually unknown in the United States appear alongside those by more well-known writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Ricardo Piglia, and Julio Cortázar.

The Argentina Reader covers the Spanish colonial regime; the years of nation building following Argentina’s independence from Spain in 1810; and the sweeping progress of economic growth and cultural change that made Argentina, by the turn of the twentieth century, the most modern country in Latin America. The bulk of the collection focuses on the twentieth century: on the popular movements that enabled Peronism and the revolutionary dreams of the 1960s and 1970s; on the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 and the accompanying culture of terror and resistance; and, finally, on the contradictory and disconcerting tendencies unleashed by the principles of neoliberalism and the new global economy. The book also includes a list of suggestions for further reading.

The Argentina Reader is an invaluable resource for those interested in learning about Argentine history and culture, whether in the classroom or in preparation for travel in Argentina.