The Presence and Absence of Anti-Semitism in Bolivia in the 1940s

On the eve of World War II approximately 20,000 European Jews fleeing the Nazis entered Bolivia, one of the few countries in the world still open to them. This was the highest per capita number of Jewish refugees taken in at the onset of World War II by any nation in the Americas. The years following their arrival witnessed anti-Semitic violence and an alleged Nazi-fascist conspiracy to overthrow the Bolivian government. Focusing on the reflections of international refugee aid workers as well as those of Bolivian journalists and politicians, this paper will discuss how and why these observers did and did not link anti-Semitism with a political phenomenon they labeled Nazi-fascism. It will compare the visibility of anti-Semitism in such texts during the years of the war, with the striking absence of anti-Semitism in texts produced after the war ended.