Argentina

Argentina is the novel’s promised refuge and its revealing political landscape: a destination where a clandestine network’s Spanish papers can turn wanted fugitives into legal arrivals, and where state sponsorship gives that passage an official framework. The same country that offers escape to Nazi collaborators becomes home to Manuel Arroyo Benítez, a Spanish Republican agent who arrives on a mission, stays in exile, and eventually confronts danger to his family under a military dictatorship.

A destination built into the escape route

After the victory of Franco, Doctor Guillermo García Medina remains in Madrid under a false identity. His papers came from his closest friend, Manuel Arroyo Benítez, a Republican diplomat whose life Guillermo had saved in 1937. Manuel returns from exile in September 1946 with a dangerous assignment: infiltrate the clandestine escape network Clara Stauffer directs from the Argüelles district. Guillermo allows himself to be recruited into the effort. The scheme points beyond Spain, toward Argentina, where fugitives hope to escape prosecution for wartime crimes.

The route is not just a matter of crossing an ocean. The network is believed to shelter fugitives, supply Spanish documentation, and help move them to Argentina in cooperation with the Perón regime. Its access to birth records supplied by friendly parish priests and to contacts within the Spanish administration gives false identities a veneer of legality. The investigators have a strong Argentina lead, but at first cannot prove the network’s connection to the country or establish the route’s full operation. The gap between suspicion and proof shapes Manuel’s mission: he must enter the system close enough to expose it.

State welcome and organized reception

Argentina’s appeal is political as well as geographical. An intelligence briefing explains that President Perón wants to receive technicians and scientists associated with the Third Reich, civilian or military, in pursuit of making Argentina a great power. He reads the emerging Cold War as a chance for yesterday’s enemies to become tomorrow’s useful allies, and is willing to welcome them. This outlook helps make the country a desired endpoint for people trying to evade international justice.

A group of six visitors to Perón makes the process visible. Five have settled in Buenos Aires with Spanish passports that conceal false identities; all are sought by the justice systems of their home countries for collaboration or crimes against humanity. The sixth, whose passport matches his true identity, has come from far away specifically to attend the meeting. The discussion is too delicate to settle in one audience, so Perón receives the same group again the next day and personally proposes an official, confidential body to manage such arrivals.

That proposal becomes the Argentine European Reception Service, SARE. On June 28, 1948, its steering committee meets at Radu Ghenea’s home to sign its statutes. Pierre Daye, who designed the organization, attends with René Lagrou as a representative of the Belgian exile community; Ghenea represents the Romanians. Other participants speak for fugitives of several nationalities, including German, Austrian, French, Slovak, Italian, and Croatian. Argentina’s director general of migration soon recognizes SARE’s capacity to accept and process residence applications. The novel thus traces an escape from clandestine assistance toward administrative recognition: what begins as a covert route is given a bureaucratic door.

Manuel’s arrival and divided mission

On September 10, 1946, Manuel enters Spain through Gibraltar on his return from exile; Argentina is the later destination of the operation he infiltrates, not the point from which he begins that return. In 1946, he is tasked with posing as a Spanish Nazi war criminal, likely a former member of the Blue Division who continued fighting with the SS and became implicated in a serious crime. His goal is to approach Clara Stauffer through a trusted introduction, avoid exposing the operation, and follow the fugitives’ path toward Buenos Aires. The New York lobby funding the effort will cover his expenses and expects no immediate result; Manuel is told to settle in Madrid, rehearse his assumed role, and be patient.

The mission is connected to Sal Burnstein, a Democratic congressman acting for a powerful New York group of Jewish businesspeople and financiers, many originally from Polish Galicia. Burnstein’s own family was exterminated by the Nazis, and revenge is described as a force behind his involvement. But the operation is presented as more than personal vengeance: it seeks evidence of how the escape network works and where its fugitives go. In Buenos Aires, Manuel’s assumed identity as Adrián Gallardo Ortega places him among the very people he has been sent to investigate.

The welcome he encounters is materially concrete. A contact provides him with a thousand pesos in cash, five times the monthly minimum wage Perón had set two years earlier. Four hundred pesos come from a SARE subsidy, available monthly for up to six months to new arrivals; the balance comes from a solidarity fund supported by refugees who are already employed. State assistance and mutual aid thus combine to sustain the newcomers. Another intermediary, Walter Kutschmann, offers new arrivals temporary accommodation and a guided tour of Buenos Aires, as well as a paid position at the Argentine branch of the German lighting company Osram. His comfortable life in Recoleta underscores how fully some former Nazis have settled into the city.

For Manuel, this welcome is also a measure of impunity. The sociable face of his assumed identity reveals an Argentina where former Nazis can enjoy a sense of security even more complete than the one they experienced in Franco’s Spain. Clara’s request that he accompany her to a Sunday asado at Rodolfo Freude’s country house in Olivos brings him closer to the network’s powerful protectors, but he has already begun to distance himself from the people around him wherever he can. Access makes the investigation possible; intimacy with the system makes its dangers harder to escape.

Exile, work, and the cost of silence

Argentina becomes Manuel’s home by a process that is neither freely chosen nor easily reversed. A later account states that he came as an agent of the Spanish Republic in exile to carry out a diplomatic mission that failed, and that he remained trapped in the country. In 1949, after two months in Argentina, he looks for work on his own. He wants a job that keeps him in a central, middle-class neighborhood, away from Recoleta, Barrio Norte, and the residential districts where the Nazis live. He considers a position at the La Europea language academy for the 1949–50 academic year because its location matters more to him than the terms of employment.

His earlier exile in Geneva had already taught him what distance costs. In the summer of 1939, he returned to the city where he had once been happy with Meg Williams, now gone. He missed her in the landscape and routines they had shared, and solitude became the defining feature of his new life there. His later Argentine exile repeats the separation in another form: successive locations are not interchangeable safe havens, but stages in a life shaped by political defeat, lost attachments, and constrained choices.

In Buenos Aires, Manuel understands that publishing what he knows would be easy, but that doing so could bring death at the hands of former anti-fascist allies, yesterday’s Nazi enemies, or their present Argentine protectors. He refuses to risk his life for so little. The intelligence operation has given him knowledge of the escape system, but knowledge alone cannot undo the protection surrounding it. Argentina is therefore both the scene of his work and the place where he measures the danger of making that work public.

A second dictatorship

The novel’s Argentine setting extends beyond the postwar reception of European fugitives. On March 24, 1976, a group of generals stages a coup in Buenos Aires. The dictatorship begins its terror that same night with hundreds of illegal arrests; thousands of Argentines immediately seek ways to leave the country. The political situation has been prepared by repression under María Estela Martínez de Perón: a decree issued on February 5, 1975, formally authorizes the campaign known as Operation Independence, which divides the country into five military zones and gives their commanders sweeping power to repress people designated subversive.

From the spring of 1976 to the autumn of 1982, the dictatorship is responsible for the forced disappearance of thousands. Because many bodies are never found and estimates vary, the novel gives an approximate total of thirty thousand victims. The regime’s violence also includes the theft of children and their placement with military or civilian families aligned with the dictatorship. In the death flights, living prisoners are tied, drugged, flown out over the sea, and thrown from aircraft at great height. These are not simply killings concealed after the fact: the disappearance of bodies and identities makes the machinery of violence harder to trace and leaves families searching for the missing.

A Buenos Aires scene dated November 30, 1976, brings that renewed danger into Manuel’s personal life. He explains that he came to Argentina in the service of the Spanish Republic in exile, not of his own will, and remained trapped there; now his family is in danger and he believes he has the right to return. The statement turns Argentina’s meaning once more. The country that had represented a route out of Europe and a place to settle has become a threatened home from which a family may need to flee. Across the decades, its contrasting roles—official refuge for wanted Europeans, exile for a Republican agent, and a site of state terror against its own people—make it central to the novel’s account of who receives protection, whose identity is recognized, and who is left at the mercy of power.