Congressman Maurice Hinchey
House of Representatives
Washington, DC

Dear Congressman Hinchey,

I write as a member of the International Panel of the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina (CEANA), as a non-Peronist academic and author, and as the brother of Guido Di Tella, who fathered the idea of establishing CEANA during his tenure as Argentina's longest serving foreign minister. My late brother's commitment to the idea of easier access to Argentine official documents, whether on the Nazi period or others, helped countless researchers. Included among those dealing with the consequences of National Socialism in Argentina let me draw your attention to some: from the DAIA, the Argentine Jewish political representation body's Proyecto Testimonio, to BBC journalists. Hence, the accusations being paraded by the Wiesenthal Center against Argentina and CEANA on the strength of poor investigative journalism are certainly untruthful inasmuch as their implication is that my late brother was behind the creation of CEANA in order to withhold access or raise hurdles for those trying to peruse such official papers, which according to some journalists had been on top duly sanitized prior to CEANA coming into being.

Nothing could have strayed further away from the truth. Moreover, it is incumbent on the Wiesenthal Center to submit evidence, long before demanding anything, especially on its 1997 allegation that Nazi Germany laundered looted assets by way of Argentine-Portuguese gold transactions, an accusation that has no basis in evidence, neither in the Argentine and Portuguese historical commissions, nor in the Eizenstat Report II, issued by the U.S. State Department in 1998. Another hitherto unsubstantiated Wiesenthal Center accusation includes the 1998 claim that the Perón government sent to neighbouring Paraguay a truckload of gold with Nazi markings.

Lastly, is it not time for the Wiesenthal Center to provide convincing, if not convicting evidence on its long unsubstantiated accusation of war criminality against Juan (Ivo) Rojnica and Esperanza (Nada) Sakic, two cases that make a mockery of the just cause of hunting down Nazis and collaborationists responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity?

I wonder whether any of this was known to you. I believe it is important to delve as deeply as possible into the activities of Nazis or sympathizers in Argentina, but it is also indispensable to avoid conspiracy theories. In this respect, let me draw your attention to the section dealing with Argentina of the English-language volume compiled by Vienna University historian Oliver Rathkolb, ed., Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy (Vienna: Studien Verlag, 2002), which was presented at Argentina's Council on Foreign Relations (CARI) at a function sponsored by B'nai B'rith Argentina, and also at the Austrian Diplomatic Academy, as well as in the State Department, the latter on 13th instant at a session chaired by Amb. Randolph Bell, the U.S. president of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research. Moreover, let me recommend the special monographic issues of two Argentine academic journals, Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos, vol. 14, n° 43, Dec. 1999, and Ciclos, vol. 10, n°. 19, 2000, as well as to Ignacio Klich's edited volume, Sobre Nazis y nazismo en la cultura argentina (College Pk.: Hispamerica, 2002), all three readily available at the library of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Yours sincerely,

Torcuato Di Tella
Director

c.c. Rafael Bielsa
Argentine Foreign Minister designate