Timerman, Jacobo (1923–1999)

Jacobo Timerman was an Argentine political journalist, editor, and vocal critic of oppressive regimes and practices in Argentina and worldwide. Timerman, who was born in Ukraine, immigrated with his family to Argentina in 1928. Timerman writes that his background as an immigrant and Jew were formative influences in his activism and resistance to injustice. In the 1960s, Timerman was a well-known journalist and news commentator on Argentine radio and television.

He founded the popular newspaper La Opinión in 1971, serving as its publisher and editor until he was arrested in April 1977 and the paper was confiscated by the government. Timerman describes in his writings the controversies he faced as an editor and journalist, including government corruption, anti-Semitism, and censorship laws. He also describes bomb threats and having to decide whether and what to publish about the increasing number of desaparecidos (the disappeared, the missing). Against the backdrop of increasing armed violence between various leftist revolutionary groups, including the Montoneros, and military and other rightist groups, Timerman briefly supported the 1976 military coup in the hope that it would end the spiraling violence and restore economic stability.

However, within a short time, Timerman was a target of the guerra sucia (dirty war, a term adapted from Charles de Gaulle's earlier description of la sale de guerre that the French Army waged in Algeria). The dirty war was directed by Argentine military governments from 1976 to 1983, with roots in earlier violence during the Peronist eras. As many as 30,000 people disappeared, thousands of others were tortured and killed, and children were abducted and trafficked. Timerman was kidnapped and tortured; he became a cause célèbre as President Jimmy Carter and others petitioned for his release. Timerman was eventually placed under house arrest, and the Argentine Supreme Court ordered he be set free in 1979; the military junta deported him, stripped him of his Argentine citizenship, and he was flown to Israel.

In Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (1981), Timerman wrote what became a classic, widely read exposé of the dirty war and the brutal practices being carried out in Argentina as he experienced them. He describes how one morning in April 1977, about 20 civilians besieged his apartment in Buenos Aires and kidnapped him. He recounts the brutality and terror of being tortured by electric shock, beatings, and ongoing anti-Semitic taunts. His account describes the sadism of the torturers and the sufferings of victims as well as taking to task the Great Silence, that is, the majority who go along without protesting. His powerful descriptions convey the horror and trauma characteristic of testimonies of survivors of life in extremis.

Along with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, founded in 1977, Timerman became an important voice, one of the few who survived to tell his story and was able to break the silence and publicize these mass atrocities to an international audience.

His account emphasizes the anti-Semitic character of the extremist sector of the army he felt was responsible for his kidnapping and torture, downplaying the role of the generals in his case. He traces the brutal processes of interrogation, degradation, and terror. While Timerman was persecuted as a Jew and Zionist in Argentina, after living in Israel a short time, he found himself at odds with the Israeli government and wrote The Longest War, which was critical of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In 1984, after living in Madrid and New York, he returned to Buenos Aires following the fall of the military after their defeat in the Falklands (Malvinas) war.

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