An Argentine Jew Runs for Office -- and Smack Into a Christian Proviso

Jose Alperovich has the credentials to become the next governor of the province of Tucuman. He is a federal senator, a rising star in the ruling Peronist party and a protege of the current governor.

He is also Jewish. And that, a number of prominent voices here say, disqualifies him from becoming Tucuman’s chief executive under Article 80 of the provincial constitution, which requires the governor to take a Christian oath.

“I never thought, in the 21st century, we’d see something like this,” said Alperovich, who leads most polls here ahead of elections expected in March or April. He is challenging Article 80 in the provincial Supreme Court. “It doesn’t make any sense that I can be president, that I’m already a senator, but that I can’t be governor.”

Article 80 says the governor must swear fealty to “God, the Fatherland and the Christian saints.” Msgr. Luis Villalba, Tucuman’s Roman Catholic archbishop, launched the controversy just before Christmas when he said the constitutional provision means that the governor must be Catholic.

“We have to start respecting the law,” Villalba said on a local television program. “We must follow the constitution to the last detail. Our country is falling apart because no one follows or respects the law.”

Article 80 is no relic of a distant, dark era in Argentine history. It was written in 1990, when the provincial government was dominated by retired army Gen. Antonio Bussi, a right-wing politician and key figure in Argentina’s “dirty war” against government opponents in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Bussi was de facto governor of Tucuman during Argentina’s dictatorship. He was elected governor by popular vote in 1995 and continued to mold the province to his Catholic vision. He redesigned the provincial flag -- it became a large white crucifix on a blue field. Then he drafted a law that obliged all public and private schools -- including this city’s Jewish school -- to raise the new flag each day.

Since 1999, Bussi has faced an international arrest warrant issued by Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon -- who previously went after former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet -- on charges of “terrorism, genocide and torture” during the Argentine dictatorship.

Bussi has not commented on the current controversy. But the men and women who wrote the constitution with him more than a decade ago have stepped forward to defend Villalba’s statements.

“We put in the requirement that the executive must take this oath because no one can deny that Tucuman is made up of a Catholic majority of 99.5%,” said Julio Cesar Alvarez Suriani, president of the 1990 provincial Constitutional Convention.

“The same thing happens in Israel, where a Catholic could never be president, no matter how many votes he wins,” Suriani said. (In actuality, there is no such provision in Israeli law.) “We should follow the old Roman aphorism: Dura lex, sed lex. The law is harsh, but it is the law.”

For many in Argentina’s 200,000-member Jewish community, the controversy is just another in a long line of incidents with anti-Semitic overtones in a traditionally Catholic country where many people are uncomfortable with the cosmopolitan society growing up around them.

“In Argentina, people don’t take these kinds of statements seriously yet,” said Sergio Widder, Buenos Aires representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “They don’t realize that intolerance is incompatible with living in a democracy.”

One newspaper columnist accused Alperovich of “wanting to tear down [Tucuman’s] cathedral and replace it with a synagogue.”

Pablo Calvetti, leader of Bussi’s Republican Force party, said of the court challenge to Article 80: “If we keep going this way, we’ll allow even the insane to become governor.”

Alperovich, 47, is the grandson of Lithuanian immigrants who fled the violence of World War II. A successful businessman, he went into politics in the mid-1990s and was economy minister in the provincial government before becoming a senator.

He practices his religion but says he is not especially devout. “I go to synagogue once a year -- I celebrate Yom Kippur -- but I don’t deny my religion.”

Some commentators here, including Roberto Delgado of the daily newspaper La Gaceta, have suggested that the controversy is helping Alperovich’s candidacy by distracting attention from scandals surrounding his career, including charges that he diverted government funds to foundations run by his relatives.

Alperovich sees political motives behind the controversy, part of the same infighting among Peronist party leaders that has led to uncertainty over the date of the election itself.

“This isn’t helping my candidacy at all,” Alperovich retorted. “It’s hurting me.”