Resurrecting the Swastika

Behind the bolted doors of a headquarters in downtown Buenos Aires, 150 youths snapped to attention, clicked their heels and gave a Nazi-style straight-arm salute. At a command, three high school boys entered the room. The neophytes chorused an oath, swearing to defend with their lives "the permanent values of Christianity and country." Then they swelled their chests as a blue and white Maltese Cross was pinned to their lapels. Cried the leader of the meeting, Alberto Ezcurra Uriburu, 26: "We must fight with one hand against capitalism and Zionism, and with the other against Communism!"

Such was the scene last week at a session of Tacuara, a shadowy society of young terrorists who lead a wave of neo-Nazism that is rising in Argentina. Though still minuscule in a nation of 21 million, Tacuara has grown in four years from a handful of fanatics to an estimated 4,000 members. It is chiefly responsible for a growing number of anti-Semitic incidents in a South American nation that has long been troubled by ultranationalism and racial prejudice.

Unlike most other Latin American republics, Argentina is 90% European-descended, heavily colonized by Germans and Italians, who brought many of their old prejudices to the New World with them. When the first Jewish immigrants arrived from Central Europe in 1860, they became targets for the landed aristocracy, which feared the industrious newcomers. Those old resentments were sharpened in the years after the fall of Dictator Juan Peron, whose policies brought ruin to Argentina's wheat-and-beef oligarchy. In the economic chaos, Argentina's Jewish colony, which now numbers 470,000, the largest in Latin America, still seemed affluent; Jews controlled a good share of the country's banking and finance, were even getting elected to Congress.

Most of those who militate in Tacuara (average age: 17) are the fanatic children of families that lost their wealth during and after Peron. Tacuara Leader Ezcurra Uriburu, scion of a once-proud family, works days as a paint sprayer in a motorcycle repair shop and blames the Jews for the country's problems. "We are against a society permeated and dominated by Jews," he says.

In the past two years, Jews have reported no fewer than 200 anti-Semitic attacks. The Argentine government has voiced its "energetic repudiation" of Tacuara. But Buenos Aires police have yet to pin a crime on a Tacuara member. Three weeks ago, three youths were arrested after firing shots into a theater showing a Jewish-theme play. All were subsequently released.

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