The Jan. 19 death of Jewish Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman, a short time after he predicted that he would pay with his life for accusing President Cristina Kirchner of a cover-up in the bombing of the Jewish community center Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) in Buenos Aires, reminded me of an important Spanish word I learned while covering the attack in the Argentine capital in 1994: “impunidad,” meaning impunity.
A local Jewish journalist I met there, next to what was once Buenos Aires' large Jewish community’s center of cultural life, proposed to me a wager that no one would pay for the deaths of 85 people in the terror attack and for the wounding of dozens of passers-by. He told me then that in the two years since the explosion of a booby-trapped car at the entrance to the Israeli Embassy in the Argentine capital — an attack in which 29 Israelis and Argentinians were killed and more than 200 were injured — police investigations had gotten nowhere.
