For the purposes of this survey, South America includes all of those states in South America proper. The major historical development accounting for awareness of the Holocaust in this region appears to be significant Jewish immigration to the region, which has historically been concentrated in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia, for example, could have just as easily been grouped with Central America and Mexico. Those states, however, have usually seen their interests more closely tied to the larger states to the south than to those across the Isthmus of Panama. Still, it is useful to think of South America as two sub-regions. One comprises the southern cone, where Jewish immigration dating from the end of the 19th century and continuing after World War II has allowed for a more direct relationship between citizens of these states and the Holocaust. The other sub-region includes the Northern Andes region, where those states that have engaged with the Holocaust have done so mostly as a result of human rights concerns.
URUGUAY’s Jewish population, concentrated almost exclusively in Montevideo, is about 17,000, but as a percentage of the country’s population of three million constitutes a larger proportion than in Argentina. Uruguay’s delegation to the Stockholm Forum has also pointed out that the country has had a long history of support for Israel, advocating for the partition of Palestine in 1948 and repudiating the 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution equating Zionism to racism. read more
The delegation also emphasized that Uruguay was the first country in Latin America to devote a site to Holocaust remembrance and issue a commemorative stamp. Though the nation does not mandate Holocaust education, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2010, the Uruguayan legislature recommended that the country join the IHRA, and two years later, a senator “suggested the desirability” of mandating Holocaust education in Uruguay.
RESOURCES
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES ON HOLOCAUST EDUCATION: Trends, Patterns, and Practices, a publication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Salzburg Global Seminar, 2013
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