When Argentina settled out of court with expatriate Jose Siderman, 20 years of persistent tyranny that began with his torture under the military junta finally came to an end
ON MARCH 24, 1976, THE night a violently Jew-hating military junta overthrew Argentina's civilian government, masked men snatched a prominent Jewish developer, 65-year-old Jose Siderman, from his home in the poor northern province of Tucuman. After breaking in his door and ransacking his house, they locked his wife, Lea, in a bathroom, draped a hood over Siderman's head, and dragged him off to the region's military governor's headquarters for a week of torture.
His kidnappers - who did not bother to charge him with any crime at the time - extinguished cigarettes on his skin, inserted electric cattle prods into his rectum, forced him to defecate into his pants, broke his ribs and crushed one of his testicles. Apparently hoping to scare Siderman out of the country so they could pillage his property and finances worth more than $ 25 million - a goal they succeeded in - his interrogators also called him a "Jew bastard" and "shitty Jew."
Lea escaped her captivity later that night by breaking the window with a bathroom scale. Barefoot, bleeding and confused, dressed only in her nightgown, she wandered into the rain looking for her son, Carlos, who lived nearby. When she got to his apartment, she stood outside his door wailing. To Carlos, recalls Siderman, now a frail, white-haired man of 85, "it sounded as if a dog were barking."
In August of this year, however, the screams and wails that have haunted Jose and Lea Siderman for over two decades began, finally, to echo in the ears of their tormentors. Not that the governor of Tucuman or any of his henchman ever faced trial. Amnesties declared by Argentinean President Carlos Menem in 1989 and again in 1990 precluded any such outcome. In fact, the general who led the province's seven-year "Dirty War" in Tucuman is now its governor.
But just as people have nightmares, so, too, do countries. Argentina's has come in the form of Siderman's unceasing attempts since 1982 to seek redress in an American federal court for his torture and the expropriation of his property. Under the concept of state doctrine, countries normally enjoy blanket immunity from crimes they committed within their territory. But in 1992, the Ninth Circuit Court of California found that Argentina had inadvertently waved its sovereign immunity in 1980 when it turned to a Los Angeles court to help serve him papers on trumped-up charges of land sale fraud. The technicality provided a rare opening for a victim to seek redress, and Argentina found itself facing the dangerous prospect of an unprecedented public trial in the United States.
Siderman v. Republic of Argentina, which was slated to begin this October 3, would have exposed the junta's murderous anti-Semitism and systematic practice of torture to widespread media scrutiny. It also would have highlighted Argentina's failure to grapple effectively with its own criminal past. But as the fateful date approached, and as further appeal became untenable, the Menem government decided to cut its losses, and took Siderman and his American Civil Liberties Union backers up on a longstanding offer to settle out of court.
The terms of their agreement are secret, but speculation puts the amount Siderman could receive at about $ 6 million. This is only a quarter of what Siderman lost when local officials seized his property - and small compensation for the "Dante's Inferno" he says he and his family have lived through for 20 years. Yet Siderman seems oddly pleased by this outcome, which, according to the Los Angeles Times, may be the largest payout ever made to a victim of Argentina's "Dirty War."
"For me," says Siderman, "this is a great victory. I have always dreamed I would have a judgment of this type. This case is the first of its type in the U.S. for human rights, and the whole world should know about it."
Rodolfo Diaz, chief legal adviser to Argentine President Carlos Menem, told the press that a settlement with Siderman "was in Argentina's best interests." Said Diaz, who along with Menem was imprisoned under the junta: "We understand this viscerally."
Siderman himself is less than impressed with a "new" Argentina. Last month, he says, offering to display his extensive collection of Argentinean newspaper clippings, justice minister Rodolfo Barra was forced to resign after it was learned that he had belonged to a notorious Nazi student group, the Tacuara, in his youth. Barra's personal history, Siderman insists, explains why Argentina dragged its heels in investigations of the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy and the 1994 bombing of the Argentinean Jewish federation headquarters, which resulted in the deaths of 136 people. Israel sent investigators to assist, but according to Siderman, "they were not supported by anyone," and eventually returned home.
"What else can you expect from a country whose president took his first state visit ever to Syria?" he asserts mistakenly. "Argentina is a beautiful country, but it is also a terrible place. I used to tell my father that going to America was a great idea. The problem was, he chose the wrong America. He should have come here."
"Here" is an elegant beachfront apartment in Santa Monica, a few steps away from a breezy walkway overlooking the Santa Monica pier whose charming Ferris wheel perches precariously over the Pacific. But the shadow of the torturers has a long reach, and the Sidermans have had little rest or respite. It was bad enough, he says, that he has had to rely on his three children, one of whom has been an American citizen since 1976, for sustenance since he fled Argentina.
"I was deeply ashamed," he recalls, "but we had no choice. And " keneinehora," he says, lapsing from Spanish into Yiddish, "they have all done beautifully here." But Siderman says that whenever his wife hears a passing siren, she comes unglued. She even tried to commit suicide since coming to California. "The 911 people saved her," he confides.
"She was a good person from a good family in Smyrna," he says. "From that day, though, she has been so sad. We left Argentina, she and I, in pieces, both physically and emotionally."
What is harder to remember, or at least to recall feeling in now brittle and badly abused bones, is that the Sidermans once sat astride an entire world. From humble Lithuanian origins - his father began a business installing parquet floors when the family emigrated to Argentina - Jose Siderman became the toast of Tucuman. This was no mean feat, he says, in a country that gave a 50-percent handicap to anyone born Jewish. In school, he says, teachers and students alike would refer to him and fellow refugees from czarist oppression as "Russian shit."
"I was just so wonderful at what I did," he exclaims about his business success. "There were hundreds whom they persecuted, but I was the first of the group, simply because I was Jewish and they were envious."
What Siderman did was build the region's most successful hotel, the Gran Corona, which has since become a mecca for American guests, to the vast benefit of Siderman's looters. He also developed a number of neighborhoods in Tucuman, providing work, he says, for hundreds of people in an otherwise poor, underdeveloped province.
A staunch Zionist, he counts himself among the first to contribute money to Israel at the outbreak of the Six-Day War, and later flew the entire Israeli Philharmonic to Buenos Aires at his personal expense, where they appeared in a hall he fitted out for their appearance.
There was, of course, a downside to his successes. In 1974, Siderman was kidnapped for ransom by leftist guerrillas, and held in a cave for a cool million-dollar ransom. But that, he implies, could have happened to anyone. And save for a radical weight loss that persists to this day, he was, he recalls, treated reasonably.
Before his military arrest, he says, he was poised to build a new complex of some 300 apartments. After his release, though, the best he could do was leave his property in the hands of a chartered accountant. The accountant, according to court documents, was later killed by the junta for trying to protect Siderman's interests. In April 1977, the military seized the property and put it into receivership.
WITHIN A WEEK OF HIS RElease, and after selling part of his interest in 127,000 acres of land at a steep discount, the Sidermans fled for Uruguay, and later to the United States. But escape from Argentina did not bring solace. Siderman says he and his wife traveled frequently, in an attempt to escape the demons that pursued them. While in northern Italy five years later attending a nephew's wedding, he was arrested when an Interpol search of hotel listings matched his name to an extradition request from the Argentinean government, which claimed he'd fraudulently obtained his travel documents when he fled Argentina in 1976. Siderman spent another 27 days in what he describes as a characteristically nasty Italian jail with eight other prisoners in his cell, and maintained his "virginity," he says, only because he might have been a tad past his prime. After six months, an Italian court found that the fraud charges against him were fabricated, and let him return to the United States.
Even after his settlement, Siderman has no kind words for his former home. Argentina is a profoundly anti-Semitic country, he says, and despite advances in education, there is no reason to believe it or its rulers, including those who were harmed by the junta, are less so than before.
But what, The Jerusalem Report asked, can one make of the fact that Argentina can now boast a Jewish chief aide to the president, a Jewish minister of the interior and a Jewish replacement for disgraced justice minister Barra? Was the Argentinean consul general in Los Angeles mistaken when he told a Los Angeles Jewish newspaper that anti-Semitism was a problem that had already been solved?
"Oh, please," he says, waving a steady, if disparaging hand. "These Jews in government are there as a cover against world opinion. They (the ruling class) never changed. And if they ever do, it will be because I put them against the wall."