An antisemitic slogan with a long history in Argentina was discovered graffitied onto a monument in a Buenos Aires park on Wednesday, unnerving local Jews.
The graffiti, reading “Serve the nation, kill a Jew,” was inked onto a column of a monument to Simon Bolivar, historically considered “the Liberator” of South America, in Parque Rivadavia in the Argentine capital. A Jewish star stood in for the final word of the slogan.
Argentina’s leading Jewish organization, known as DAIA, filed an official complaint, and the municipality swiftly cleaned up the graffiti in the afternoon, shortly after it was discovered. DAIA condemned the “serious anti-Semitic graffiti” and said it was one of more than 500 antisemitic incidents the organization had recorded this year, amid a spike following Oct. 7, 2023.
Argentina has a Jewish population of nearly 200,000, the largest in Latin America. The vast majority live in the Buenos Aires area.
“Today Parque Rivadavia woke up like this,” Federico Ballan, the president of the district that includes the park, wrote on social media as he shared a picture of the graffiti. “We are already working to clean it up. The complaint has already been filed and we are going to do everything in our power to identify these criminals.”
A close variant of the phrase has a long history on the country’s far right. The Nationalist Liberation Alliance, a World War II-era Argentine movement affiliated with the Nazis, used the phrase, and it was later employed by Tacura, a fascist movement that was active in Argentina in the decades following the war.
It has appeared more recently as well. A decade ago, residents in the town of General Paz received tax bills with the phrase written on them. The city official responsible for the printing was ultimately sentenced to a suspended jail term and was ordered to apologize and learn about the Holocaust.
The graffiti was discovered the same week that Jews in Buenos Aires marked the first anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. An event organized by the country’s largest Jewish organizations drew 15,000 attendees, according to the country’s Israeli embassy. There was a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the city the same day.
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