A probe of truth and justice.

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: OAS/INTER-AMERICAN SYSTEM

IN AN HISTORIC turnaround, the Argentine government has admitted for the first time that it covered up an eleven-year-old investigation into who was behind the worst terrorist attack in Latin American history.

The long-awaited admission of guilt came during a recent hearing before the OAS Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

At the hearing, representatives of Argentine president Nestor Kirchner presented a proposal aimed at ending a 1998 lawsuit filed by the group Memoria Activa. The petition is in connection with a car-bombing four years earlier that destroyed the Buenos Aires headquarters of AMIA, the country's largest Jewish institution, killing eighty-five people and injuring nearly three hundred.

A report prepared by Claudio Grossman, rapporteur to the IACHR, accuses Argentine officials during and since the administration of former president Carlos Menem of intentionally misleading investigators probing the attack.

"It's very important that the Argentine government has endorsed our conclusions," said Grossman. "That shows the importance Argentina gives to the IACHR." In his report, Grossman praised the three Argentine judges who revealed the irregularities of the AMIA investigation, as well as the decision of President Kirchner to open the files of the secret pohce in Argentina. Dean of American University Washington College of Law and former president of the IACHR, Grossman traveled to Argentina at least eight times over a three-year period to attend the trial of half a dozen Buenos Aires provincial police officers unjustly accused of involvement in the terrorist attack. The policemen were finally acquitted last September for lack of evidence--amid revelations that there had been an intentional cover-up of the investigation by the government itself.

"I recommended that the Commission declare the case admissible, because of the irregularities and also because of the passage of time," said Orossman. "Secondly, I recommended that a special committee be created--composed of both the petitioners and the Argentine government--that would meet once a week to push the investigation forward."

Dina Siegel Vann, director of the American Jewish Committee's Institute of Latino and Latin American Affairs, said Grossman's report was "scathing" in its criticism of the Argentine political leadership.

"It showed that the Argentine government was totally at fault for violating the human rights of the victims by not bringing those...