what’s the real story with argentina being a nazi haven, overblown stereotype or lib fabrication? or more an annoying rhetorical distraction from the fact that the real nazi haven was germany and that denazification simply did not happen?
I mean there *were* cases of nazis being smuggled into brazil, argentina, chile, and paraguay through illegal escape routes colloquially referred to as ratlines. That is a thing that did happen.
However, the way americans in particular seem to latch onto this fact to dismiss any latin american that pisses them off, either in a "well whatever your country gave refuge to nazis" sense, or in a "I'm directly implying your family were escaped nazis" sense (another example I remember seeing once was a post about US imperialism in latin america where a yankee replied that OP had no business bitching about imperialism because she was probably "a white brazilian called Helga or something") is a bit ironic to me, considering that:
The vast majority of german immigrants to these countries in the 20th century were jewish refugees fleeing the nazis
The US took in thousands more nazis after ww2 than the entirety of Latin America combined
A lot of the nazis that *did* escape to latin america did so with the direct help of US intelligence agencies
Nazis that escaped to the US were treated as valuable anti-soviet assets, and many of them were given cushy jobs by the US government. Most of the nazis who escaped to latin america spent their entire lives hiding from the authorities under false identities, and those who were discovered were extradited or jailed
So americans in particular thinking they have any right to reduce latin american countries to "nazi havens" when talking about them is just plain xenophobic jingoism
the specific thing with argentina was started by spruille braden, then usa embassador to argentina, as opposition to the perón candidacy, accusing him of being an axis collaborator because a perón government would hinder usa interests in the region. braden later went on to be involved in the 1954 guatemalan coup amongst other things
