Jacobo Timerman, Argentina
By Global Journalist Staff Posted Sat, Apr 1 2000
The founder of the defunct liberal daily La Opinión, Jacobo Timerman, defied Argentina’s 1976-83 military regime and drew international attention to the country’s “dirty war.” His famous 1981 book, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, documented Argentina’s institutionalized violence against political dissidents who disappeared in the 1970s and ’80s, at least 100 of whom were journalists. Timerman died of a heart attack at his home in Buenos Aires on Nov. 11, 1999.
Timerman was born in the small Ukrainian town of Bar on Jan. 6, 1923. He emigrated with his family to Argentina at the age of 5. The founder of several publications, he achieved his first great success in 1962 with the news magazine Primera Plana, which was inspired by Time and Newsweek. In 1971 he founded the newspaper La Opinión, which he based on Le Monde, and edited the paper until it was shut down by the military government in 1977. La Opinión was one of the few important newspapers in Argentina to write extensively about government corruption, state-controlled anti-Semitism and repression. The newspaper campaigned tirelessly against the arbitrary arrests and published the habeas corpus presented to the courts by the families of the desaparecidos (disappeared).
The journalist soon attracted enmity from all sides. In his book, Timerman wrote that the newspaper was called “an adversary of the military government for being terrorist, an adversary of mass culture for publishing sophisticated writers, an adversary of Christian morality for publishing leftist writers, an adversary of the left for publishing the work of Soviet dissidents, and an adversary of the family for writing about the sexual habits of young Americans.” The bombing of his offices and home followed anonymous death threats, and the government closed La Opinión on numerous occasions between 1973 and 1976.
Plainclothes military intelligence agents arrested Timerman in April 1977. He underwent grueling interrogations, extended stretches of solitary confinement and systematic torture for almost six months until a military tribunal ruled that no grounds could be established for holding him under arrest. Although he was released from jail the following month, he was placed under house arrest for two more years. Finally, he was stripped of his citizenship and property in 1980 and put aboard a plane to Israel.
Timerman gave a harrowing account of his experiences as a desaparecido at IPI’s 1981 general assembly in Nairobi. In Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, Timerman denounced the country’s military dictatorship and the disappearances, abuses and torture of thousands of Argentinians. The book drew worldwide attention to the atrocious injustices happening in his country.
Timerman returned to Argentina in 1984, one year after democracy was restored, and took over as editor of the daily La Razón. He again ran into trouble in 1998 when Carlos Saúl Menem, then governor of Rioja province and a presidential candidate, sued him for libel and defamation. He was acquitted in two separate trials. When the Supreme Court of Argentina, acting on President Menem’s request, reopened the case, Timerman fled to Uruguay. The charges against him were finally dropped in April 1996 following international pressure.
Timerman is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including works on Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Chile under General Augusto Pinochet and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Although an ardent Zionist, he was outraged by the invasion and what he saw as the unjust treatment of the Palestinians. He was also a founding member of the independent press freedom group Asociación para la Defensa del Periodismo Independiente.
Among his legacies was the large number of brilliant young investigative journalists who, due to Timerman’s influence, went on to found successful newspapers modeled after La Opinión throughout Latin America.