Timerman, Jacobo

(1923–1999)

   Argentine journalist. Born in Ukraine, he fled with his family to Argentina in 1928 to escape persecution against Jews. In his twenties Timerman began work as a journalist in Buenos Aires for publications such as El Mundo and La Nación. Censured during the regime of Juan Perón, he worked then for the Agence France Press. He first achieved professional success in 1962 with the publication of Primera Plana, a weekly news magazine inspired by U.S. models. In 1971 he founded La Opinión, a newspaper in the style of the French Le Monde. During the period of the “dirty war,” La Opinión became one of the strongest critics of the military dictatorship. It campaigned against arrests and disappearances, publishing in its pages the habeas corpus brought to the courts by the families of the missing (desaparecidos). After numerous anonymous death threats to Timerman and the bombing of his house and the editorial offices of the newspaper, he was arrested in 1977 by military intelligence agents under the command of General Ramón Juan Alberto Camps. While in military custody, Timerman was repeatedly tortured and held incommunicado. Upon his release, he was held under house arrest for two years. Soon after, he was stripped of his citizenship and property and put aboard a plane to Israel. Timerman returned to Argentina in 1984 and became editor of the newspaper La Razón. In 1988, then presidential candidate Carlos Saúl Menem sued Timerman for libel and defamation. He was acquitted following two separate trials, but the charges were not finally dropped until 1996, following Timerman’s flight to Uruguay and an international outcry. An outspoken and at times controversial figure in Latin American journalism, Timerman was a founding member of the press freedom group Asociación para la Defensa del Periodismo Independiente. In 1981 he received the Maria Moors Cabot journalism award by Columbia University in New York.

   His best-known work is Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number (1980), an account of his imprisonment and the abuses of the military dictatorship. A controversial screen version of this work—the screenwriter asked that his name be removed from the credits—was filmed in 1983 by the director Linda Yellen as Jacobo Timerman: Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number. Timerman is also the author of Chile: Death in the South (1987), where he provides testimony from prisoners of the regime of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte in Chile.

   See also Anti-semitism.