In 1992 our country, like the rest of the continent, was not prepared to face international terrorism.
Our region was off the radar of those groups.
Therefore, there was no training in any area of the state or legal structure to combat it.
It was the attacks against the Israeli embassy and the AMIA that motivated the mechanisms at the hemispheric and local level to deal with this scourge.
The first of them was in 1996 within the framework of the First Inter-American Specialized Conference on Terrorism where a Declaration and Plan of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eliminate Terrorism was proposed.
Generic efforts that did not yet allow awareness of this phenomenon.
In 1998, the Mar del Plata Commitment was signed, when the Second Specialized Conference was being held and the Inter-American Committee against Terrorism (CICTE) was founded, which had meager results and minimal concrete progress in the searches that were proposed.
It was only with the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001 that the issue really gained prominence on the hemispheric agenda.
In 2002, the inconsequential CICTE became an Executive Secretariat with a work agenda, programs and assistance to member countries.
This allowed the approval of the Convention against Terrorism, which considers it “a serious threat to democratic values and to international peace and security and is a cause of deep concern for all Member States.”
It is the diverse visions and ideological positions due to our history regarding armed movements and the Arab-Israeli conflict that lead the countries in our area to not be able to reach a common definition of what is understood by terrorism despite having an agreement. specific in the matter for more than twenty years.
The downtrodden Mercosur could not have a forceful position on the matter either.
At the internal level, a clear difference must be made between two stages of the investigation carried out by the Supreme Court of Justice for the blowing up of the diplomatic headquarters.
In the first five years, the investigation foundered among the inadequacies and deficiencies of a body that did not know about the fact to be investigated.
Until 1992, the most significant thing as an original criminal jurisdiction procedure that it had dealt with was the theft of a warm blanket that Queen Sofia of Spain had suffered.
The second part of the investigation precisely determined the material authors and instigators of the attack.
However, those first inconclusive years, added to the fact that there were no convictions for the murder of 29 people, have led public opinion to consider the entire investigation a failure and the feeling that impunity finally triumphed.
However, we must highlight that part of the investigation of the international leg of the attack on the embassy served as input in the judicial case for the blowing up of the AMIA;
In fact, some of the names with arrest warrants and the ideological matrix coincide.
The 32 years that have passed since the attack on the embassy and in the context of the recent Hamas attack with Argentine victims included, should call us to reflect to know where we are as a society regarding the fight against terrorism.
Agustín Romero is a Doctor in Political Science and director of the postgraduate course in Argentine Affairs, Faculty of Law, UBA