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BUENOS AIRES: Argentine authorities raided and closed a bookstore selling publications with Nazi and antisemitic content online, following a two-year investigation promoted by a Jewish group.
Law enforcement officers seized around 230 books during raids in the town of San Isidro, north of Buenos Aires, in which officials said they seized the largest number of texts praising Nazi ideology in recent years.
“We’re still astonished by the amount of material from what is truly a printing press for the dissemination and sale of Nazi symbolism, books and indoctrination,” Police Commissioner General Carlos Alejandro Ñamandú said. He went on to characterize it as a “historic seizure” of Nazi documents in Argentina.
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The Libreria Argentina establishment sold books with images of swastikas, iron crosses and the imperial eagle of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, commonly known as the Nazi party, as well as Nazi propaganda texts.
“We are shocked by how profuse the material is,” said Marcos Cohen from the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations, the Jewish group acting as plaintiff in the process. “I don’t remember anything like this being found before.”
Displaying Nazi symbols is a crime under Argentine law. Police arrested one person during the raids in the San Isidro district, located in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
Argentina has the largest Jewish population in Latin America, with many immigrating after the expulsion from Spain and pogroms in Eastern Europe and ahead of the Second World War, during which the Nazis killed six million European Jews.
After the war, many Nazi officials including death camp supervisor Adolf Eichmann also emigrated to Argentina to avoid trials for war crimes.
Several anti-Semitic groups emerged in the following decades and in 1994 the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 85 people and wounding hundreds.
