JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

Latin America and the Middle East:
The Political Background
Julián Schvindlerman*
Latin America does not have a geostrategic weight hitting strongly globally.
With the exception of Brazil, it can leave its mark in the international
community through votes. In the Western hemisphere, however,
Latin America strives to expand its ideologies, to receive problematic
countries and questioned groupings, and to affect the political climate and
regional security. Latin America contains very different ideologies, and
its destiny will depend much on the direction that, collectively, their
inhabitants permit their leaders to give.
Key Words: Latin America, Antisemitism, Hizbullah, Jews, Arabs, Iran
Throughout Latin America, the flood of participation in oriental subjects
was recently in evidence with the several expressions of formal support
granted by all South America, minus Colombia, to a possible unilateral
declaration of a Palestinian state. Brazil, by surprise, started up the response
to a Palestinian key interest in obtaining formal recognition to a hypothetical
reality that arose like fruit out of the bilateral negotiations. “I always
have the hope of having the best form to solve the problems between the
negotiating countries,” said the Argentine chancellor, Héctor Timerman,
when explaining his justification for taking an action—facilitating the
attainment of a political objective for the Palestine Authority but eluding
the dialogue with the government of Israel—that in fact caused the
opposite.
Although the diverse official notices varied in some degree in their
content—essentially about the stipulation of the final borders of the
future—the certain thing is that altogether they constituted an important
Latin American endorsement of the Palestine diplomacy. For February initially,
soon delayed until March or April, and finally postponed indefinitely
due to the massive protests in the Arab world, the Summit of Government
and Chiefs of State was due to be held in Lima III of the America Forum of
the Arab South-Countries (ASPA), where it was considered a collective
expression of recognition of the Palestinian state. By the end of March, a
meeting under the auspices of the UN “in support of La Paz Palestinian-
Israeli,” attended by delegates of Latin America and the Caribbean,
occurred in Montevideo, in which Palestinian representatives announced
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