Control and surveillance in Eastern European immigration in Argentina in the postwar period (1940-1970)

MARÍA VALERIA GALVÁN; VICTOR LAFUENTE

Viena

Conferencia; Remaking the World in the Shadow of the Cold War. Migrants, Workers, Soldiers, Spies in Post-1945 Reconstruction; 2023

In the 20th century, European wars triggered successive arrivals of migrants to Argentina, which served as a refuge far away from the battlefronts. Specifically after World War II, political exiles came to the country from Central and Eastern Europe, fleeing from the Allied justice system and the Red Army. Thus, at the dawn of the Cold War, the South American country had to deal with the political consequences of this new demographic influx, both in terms of international relations and domestic policy.While some of the recent Eastern European immigrants had connections with Soviet propaganda and, for this reason, were locally surveilled and persecuted, others were active agents of transnational anticommunist front organizations.The coming of Eastern European immigrants during the post-war period defined concrete local policies in terms of inner security that contributed to an early definition of the "internal enemy" which would later be enriched by the broader influence of the National Security Doctrine in Latin America. Furthermore, the interaction of these political exiles with wether transnational anticommunist organizations or communist intelligence services exposed local political and social life to the global bipolarised agenda. For these reasons, we aim to reconstruct here the presence and interactions of postwar immigrants in Argentina, –mainly Slovaks, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians and Byelorussians– and its political consequences, both in relation to the Argentine governments and to the of the German, Soviet and Czechoslovakian intelligence policy abroad.