In his memoirs, Jacobo Timerman recalled his detention by the Argentine military junta with a touch of gallows humor.

Interrogators, wrote Timerman, were so obsessed with extracting his confession to a bunch of outlandish conspiracy theories that the left-leaning journalist had to hold back his laughter. When the torture began, though, it didn’t seem so funny anymore.

“We’d like to know further details about the Andinia Plan.”

By then, Timerman knew it was useless to deny any knowledge of a supposed Zionist plot to annex the Patagonia region for a second Jewish homeland. Desperate, he appealed to reason: “How can four hundred thousand Argentine Jews seize nearly one million square kilometers in the southern part of the country? What would they do with it? How could they defeat twenty-five million Argentines and the armed forces?”

His interrogator answered plainly: “That’s exactly what I’m asking you.”

The Andinia Plan is, along with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the infamous twentieth-century forgeries offering “textual evidence” of a global Jewish conspiracy. And like the Protocols, born from late nineteenth-century pogroms, it is a product of a unique time and place. From the South American Nazi underground to the rise of creole fascism in the 1960s, the Andinia Plan is a bizarro theory held together by a very real, dark history.

Three decades before the military dictatorship was torturing a Jewish newspaper editor over a crackpot conspiracy theory, Adolf Eichmann was hiding out in Allied-occupied Germany. Escaping in 1950 via one of the Vatican-sponsored “ratlines,” the SS officer made a new home in Argentina, taking up a series of odd jobs (auto mechanic, fruit juice vendor, rabbit breeder) before being reunited with his family near Buenos Aires in 1952.

The Eichmanns maintained a low profile until May 11, 1960, the fateful day the Obersturmbannführer was abducted by Mossad. In Argentina, the fallout from Eichmann’s secret capture and trial was devastating: a wave of antisemitic crimes swept the country, including vicious attacks on Jewish leaders and community and religious centers.

Seemingly incongruous in a country home to one of the world’s largest Jewish populations, the Eichmann scandal drew once marginal formations like the fascist Tacuara Nationalist Movement out of the shadows and into national political life. The movement would commit spectacular acts of violence in the 1960s and eventually lay the foundations for the paramilitary death squads of the 1970s.

The Eichmann episode also shed light on a larger pattern of antisemitism in Argentina: during the 1919 Tragic Week, a strike wave led by anarchists was put down by lynch mobs hunting “Judeo-Bolsheviks”; in the 1930s, ultraconservative Catholics attributed the country’s economic downturn to “Judaizing financial interests”; in 1955, the overthrow of Juan Domingo Perón unleashed an attack on Argentine Jews perceived as beneficiaries of his populist regime.

Unique to the Eichmann crisis, though, Argentina’s rising nationalist temperature had boiled over with Israel’s controversial violation of its territorial sovereignty. The moment was ripe for Tacuara and other right-wing groups to invest “national liberation” with antisemitic overtones.

All the while, Eichmann’s sons had thrown themselves into the defense of their father’s cause. Drawing on Eichmann’s political contacts — a loose network of Latin America–based former SS officers and sympathizers — Klaus and Horst Eichmann lobbied internationally for their father’s release. To advance their cause and sway Argentine public opinion, they formed the Argentine National Socialist Front (FNSA), the country’s first openly neo-Nazi political formation.

The FNSA accomplished precious little in terms of building mainstream opposition to Eichmann’s 1962 execution. But they did open channels with the Tacuara movement. Following Eichmann’s death, Klaus and Horst shifted their attention to Argentine politics and eventually joined the ranks of the Tacuara, lending that formation its distinct neo-Nazi ideology while expanding Tacuara’s wider appeal among right-wing nationalists and ultra-Catholic factions within Peronism.

It was before they merged with the Tacuara movement in 1964 that Klaus and Horst published what is most likely the first iteration of the Andinia Plan. Argentine historian Ernesto Bohoslavsky has traced the first fully formed plan to a 1963 issue of the FNSA’s publication Rebelión, which included the article “Argentina, a Colony of Israel? The Republic of Andinia, or the New Jewish State in Argentina.”

In its basic outline, the unsigned article resembled most antisemitic conspiracy theories: Jews planned to drain the national coffers, encourage usury and speculation, lead the call for wage hikes, then let inflation spiral out of control until a Marxist revolution seemed like the only solution. It imagined a classic scenario in which money speculators and communists (both Jewish, naturally) would publicly denounce one another but secretly conspire — the one triggering inflation and bank runs, the other general strikes and armed insurrection — until all of society was submerged in civil war.

What was novel and distinctive about the Eichmann brothers’ theory was the goal: amid the chaos, Jews planned to physically seize the Argentine patria and erect a second Israel in its place. The plan, they wrote, dated to the turn of the century, conveniently around the same time that Argentina began to see a huge influx of Jewish migration. In his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State, Zionist leader Theodor Herzl had even written in passing about the possibility of establishing a Judenstaat in the Southern Cone region of South America — only to endorse the colonization of historic Palestine instead. The Andinia Plan cherry-picked Herzl’s thought experiment and recast it as the intention to establish two Jewish homelands.

Two years later, a book surfaced titled The Andinia Plan or the New Jewish State. The anonymous author repeated many of the claims made by the Eichmann brothers, but by then, the theory had already taken on a life of its own. Among a growing right-wing audience, rumors swirled that there was an actual text written by Argentine Jews that laid out the plan in detail. Some claimed the scheme involved infiltrating the leadership ranks of Peronism to, variously, assassinate the movement’s right-wing political and military figures, seize command of the state-controlled labor unions, or simply dissolve Peron’s Justicialist Party. It was as if the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had entered the fun house of Latin American populism.

Later, Israel’s annexation of Arab territories in the Six-Day War gave the plan an added cover of credibility — despite the fact that many left-wing Jews in Argentina had vocally opposed the war. For another five years, until 1972, the theory continued to circulate amid a general climate of antisemitism under military dictatorship.

In November 1972, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires penned an open letter to the secretary-general of the Peronist-controlled General Confederation of Labor (CGT). In his public statement, the economist Walter Beveraggi Allende called on the bureaucratic CGT leader José Ignacio Rucci to act fast because mounting labor unrest was actually the secret workings of the Andinia Plan. Beveraggi Allende went one step further and made available a pamphlet claiming, for the first time, to be a bona fide copy of the Andinia Plan.

In the recorded minutes from a “secret meeting” held in a Buenos Aires synagogue, one “Rabbi Gordon” gave precise instructions on how to lead the country to the brink of moral and social collapse — a plan that included infiltrating Peronism. The Janus-faced political formation should be steered away from conservative populism toward socialism — a claim also raised by many militants on the Peronist left — even if it unleashed a wave of violent repression. Amid the chaos, the armed forces would lose all social legitimacy, and Argentine Jews would be able to seize the oil-rich Patagonia region with little opposition. When the army did finally move against the newly declared Jewish state, the pro-Zionist international community would rush to its defense.

It was little coincidence that by 1972 Peronism had begun to figure prominently in newer iterations of the plan. Beveraggi Allende was equal parts antisemite and visceral anti-Peronist bent on destroying the regime that had sent him into exile years ago. Moreover, decades-long tensions between left-wing and right-wing Peronism had spilled over into open political violence not unlike the kind foreshadowed in the Andinia Plan.

Leonardo Senkman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem argues that, by associating only left-wing Peronism with the conspiracy, Beveraggi Allende intended to use the Andinia Plan as a cordon sanitaire that could section off erstwhile right-wing adversaries — Peronists and anti-Peronists — and isolate leftists both within and outside Peronism. By a sleight of conspiratorial hand, the political field would be scrubbed of Peronist tensions and cleanly divided into nationalists (i.e., Argentines) on one side and a broad leftist camp, now associated with Jews and foreigners, on the other.

Reality was obviously much messier. There are no systematic studies of how deeply the Andinia Plan penetrated the Argentine right during the 1970s and ’80s — even if Beveraggi Allende distributed his pamphlets among the top brass of the military junta and Timerman was famously questioned about the plan. Likewise, one can only speculate about the real-world success of the theory to bridge an increasingly right-wing faction of Peronism with the overtly anti-Peronist dictatorship of 1976 — although the numerous through lines connecting the Tacuara movement and the Peronist-sponsored Argentine Anticommunist Alliance to the military dictatorship make the question a tantalizing one.

What is certain is that the Andinia Plan enjoyed an afterlife in post-dictatorial political life: Israeli backpackers in Patagonia are routinely taken for Mossad agents, and Mauricio Macri’s minister of justice, a Jew, allegedly urged the former president to settle Argentina’s IMF debt by mortgaging the country’s southern region. The list goes on, as does the relevance of antisemitism among Argentina’s increasingly vigorous far right.

But the scapegoats have largely shifted. If the National Reorganization Process could racialize Marxists, Peronists, and other subversives through the figure of the Jew, that function has now passed on to other ciphers. Increasingly, the Mapuche inhabitants of Patagonia are the object of right-wing ire. Recalling the otherness previously concentrated in the figure of the Jew, that of the Mapuche — associated with everything from “Hezbollah sleeper cells” to Trotskyist agitation — is a reminder that, absent a systemic critique of capitalism, there will always be forces on hand to project the ills of society onto its victims.