Horacio Neuah was there by chance. Picking up an order from a fabric shop in the busy Buenos Aires neighborhood of Once and loading it into his car. He was driving away when suddenly everything went black.
“I didn’t understand why my car was creaking so much and the windows were shattering,” Horacio remembers, 30 years later. “I soon realized that the car wasn’t moving along the ground: it was being propelled through the air.”
It was 9.53 a.m., July 18, 1994. Just 30 meters behind him, a bomb had gone off in front of the AMIA Jewish community center. The explosion was so strong that it made Horacio’s car fly almost half a block before landing on the corner. He stepped out, confused but miraculously unharmed, to find himself in the midst of a nightmare.
“It was like hell. An incredible blast. Everything went pitch-dark,” he recalls. In the near distance, the entire front of the building was gone and the street was covered in debris. “Wall fragments and steel beams were falling from the sky. And there was a terrible smell, like ammonia.”
Horacio’s words carry the weight of a freshly imprinted memory. Like something that happened yesterday instead of the three decades that have passed since the AMIA bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history.
The bomb killed 85 people and left hundreds injured. The attack took place just two years after a similar attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, two notorious tragedies for Argentine society during the Carlos Menem presidency, an administration plagued with unexplained events, including the death of his own son during a plane crash.
While the judiciary investigated allegations that Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah and the Iranian government were behind the attack, this has never been proven in court. The investigation has been marred by accusations of corruption and cover-ups, and the case has never been resolved: no one has ever been convicted for the attack itself and justice for the families and survivors still seems far away.
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For Horacio, now 79, the what-ifs prompted by the sheer randomness of the violence are something that he struggles with to........