Pedro Graiver, president of the La Plata Kehilla, and his wife, Catalina Guerstein, the uncle and aunt of the presumably dead financier David Gravier, were arrested at Buenos Aires airport Saturday as they were about to leave for Israel. The arrest was not revealed until yesterday.
Several of David Graiver’s relatives have been arrested since the 35-year-old financier was reported to have died in a plane crash in Mexico last August. Graiver’s disappearance caused the failure of his Banque Pour L’Amerique du Sud in Brussels and the American Bank and Trust Company in New York. Newspapers here have alleged that Graiver’s banking group handled funds extorted by the Montonero leftist guerrilla group.
The English language daily Buenos Aires Herald praised Argentine President Jorge Rafael Videla last Sunday for his press conference last week in which he demonstrated that “he is determined not to be knocked off course by the many people who would clearly like to use the Graiver affair as a political weapon.”
The Herald said that “these people want the Graiver business to be the starting point for a thorough purge of all the individuals they dislike: leftists, human rights campaigners, corrupt businessmen, bad fathers, the immoral, Jews and heavens knows who else….One unfortunate effect of the Graiver affairs has been its encouragement of anti-Semitism.”
Francisco Manrique, who was Welfare Minister under President Alejandro Agustin Lenusse, told the national news agency Noticias Argentinas Relayad that when Graiver was his undersecretary he had on “unobjectionable record” and had good relations with the Vatican and was well received in all circles.
ANTI-SEMITIC CARTOON
Meanwhile, the weekly La Semana Y Usted has published an obvious anti-Semitic cartoon showing a rich Jew preparing his suitcase and answering a phone call by saying his situation is “graive, graive (serious)” instead of grave, grave, a play on Graiver’s name.
The government is still holding Jacobo Timerman, editor and publisher of La Opinion, and his deputy editor, Enrique Jara, who were seized in their homes April 16. The government said Timerman was being held in connection with the Graiver affair.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
