The Plan Its Accusers Wrote

The canard

“Jews are quietly buying up Patagonia to found a second Jewish state — “Andinia” — across southern Argentina and Chile. The Israeli backpackers touring the region are soldiers on reconnaissance, the forest fires are set deliberately to drive land prices down, and the whole operation is a bolt-hole for the next world war.”

The receipts

The “Plan Andinia” is a conspiracy theory invented in Argentina in the 1960s by neo-Nazi circles around the sons of Adolf Eichmann, popularised in 1971 by a pamphlet its own author, Walter Beveraggi Allende, circulated anonymously among military officers, and extended to Chile in 1987 by Miguel Serrano, a Chilean writer and proponent of esoteric Hitlerism. No such plan has ever been produced. Under Argentina's 1976–83 dictatorship, Jewish detainees — including the journalist Jacobo Timerman — were interrogated about it under torture. Its modern “evidence” consists of a real but accidental 2011 wildfire, land purchases that fact-checkers traced to nothing, and an AI-generated Mel Gibson audio.

1. 1

   The ADL traces the Andinia Plan to “the small nationalist party Frente Nacional Socialista Argentino (Argentine National Socialist Front), created by the sons of the infamous Nazi Adolf Eichmann following his 1960 capture and subsequent trial.” The historian Ernesto Bohoslavsky, in a 2008 study for the University of Chile's Centre for Jewish Studies, reaches the same conclusion and dates it precisely: contrary to most of the literature, the invention belongs not to the 1970s but to the aftermath of Eichmann's capture in Buenos Aires. The theory that Jews are secretly seizing territory was put into circulation by a party the sons of Adolf Eichmann founded.

   [1][2]
2. 2

   The document has an author. Bohoslavsky's account is specific: in early 1971 the Argentine economist Walter Beveraggi Allende anonymously circulated a ten-page pamphlet among officers and NCOs of the armed forces, denouncing Jewish designs on national territory. In January 1972 he published the same text under the pseudonym Aurelio Sallairai, titled Protocolos de los Sabios de Sion y la subversión mundial — the Andinia story bound in as a local chapter of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Tsarist forgery the USHMM calls “the most widely distributed antisemitic publication of modern times.” Copies went out to unions, the armed forces, Catholic circles, and the Patagonian provinces of Río Negro and Neuquén.

   The man who revealed the secret plan wrote the secret plan, filed it under the world's most famous forgery, and handed it to soldiers without signing it.

   [2][1][3]
3. 3

   Chile was not in the original. It was added, by one man, in 1987. The Chilean writer and former diplomat Miguel Serrano — whom the ADL describes as holding “strong antisemitic and Holocaust-denying views” — published Estrategia sionista para apoderarse de la Patagonia Argentina y Chilena, and as Bohoslavsky notes, its innovation was precisely that the alleged plot now reached across the border: Beveraggi's version had been about Argentina only. Serrano's documentary annex, offered as proof the plan was under way, was a folder of press clippings from the Argentine newspaper Río Negro.

   The same author published Los protocolos de los sabios de Sión y su aplicación en Chile (1981), wrote that Hitlerism maintained bases on Mars and Venus, and held that the Mapuche people are descended from Germanic tribes. That is the body of work Chile's version of the story comes out of.

   [1][2]
4. 4

   Under the Argentine dictatorship of 1976–83, the pamphlet became a question asked in a torture room. Jewish detainees were interrogated about the Andinia Plan and about supposed Israeli military preparations to invade Patagonia — most famously the newspaper publisher Jacobo Timerman, arrested in April 1977, whose 1981 memoir Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number records his interrogators' demand:

   We'd like to know further details about the Andinia Plan.

   As Fighting Online Antisemitism summarises it, the myth was “weaponized to justify surveillance, torture, and intimidation of Jewish citizens.” Every recycling of this theory carries that history, whether or not the person sharing it knows it.

   [4][5][6]
5. 5

   The fire is real. On 27 December 2011 an Israeli backpacker, Rotem Singer, lit toilet paper in a prohibited area of Torres del Paine National Park; the blaze burned until 24 February 2012 and destroyed some 17,600 hectares. The prosecution eventually dropped its charges, but the claim for damages did not go away: in August 2015 the Third Chamber of Chile's Supreme Court held him responsible for an “imprudent” act and ordered him to compensate the Chilean state, on top of the reforestation work and roughly 4.85 million pesos he had already given the parks service.

   None of that evidences a plan, and the same park shows why. In 1985 a Japanese tourist's badly extinguished cigarette burned about 14,000 hectares. In 2005 a Czech tourist knocked over a camp stove and burned more than 15,000, after which the Czech government donated 30,000 trees for replanting. Nobody has ever proposed a Japanese land grab or a Czech settlement plan. The nationality only becomes a motive when the nationality is Israeli.

   [7][8]
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   The purchases and the star witness fare no better. Argentina's fact-checking outlet Chequeado ran down the recurring “the Jewish community bought Patagonia to found a second Israel” story and rated it false: the same claim had already circulated in 2013, 2014 and 2017, the property company named in it stated that “such a purchase never existed,” and the businessman cast as the ringleader turned out to be a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress rather than the head of the invented body he was credited to. As for the celebrity endorsement — the viral clip of Mel Gibson blaming Israelis for the Patagonia fires — Chequeado checked it in January 2026: the footage comes from a 9 January 2025 podcast interview in which he says nothing whatsoever about Patagonia, and the audio scores a 99.9% probability of being AI-generated. The theory's most-shared proof of the decade is a deepfake of an actor who never said it.

   [9][10]
7. 7

   On 1 January 2024 the demographer Sergio DellaPergola put Argentina's core Jewish population at 170,000 and Chile's at 15,500 — the entire Jewish population of Chile would not fill a decent football stadium, which is a modest staffing level for annexing a subcontinent. And the “last safe place in a nuclear war” layer is borrowed from real research that says something else: the standard study of refuges from nuclear winter ranks Australia first, New Zealand second and Iceland third, mentions Argentina only in passing among mainland countries that “may escape the worst climate impacts,” and is about soot blocking sunlight and crops failing. Range was never the question: ballistic-missile submarines put everywhere within reach.

   There is a real history of Jews buying farmland in Argentina, and it is nothing like the story. In August 1889 a group of families fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire landed from the SS Weser and were left stranded at Palacios Station, where a typhus epidemic killed 64 of their children. On 23 October 1889 the survivors founded Moisés Ville in Santa Fe province — later nicknamed the Jerusalem of Argentina. It was that ordeal, reported back to Paris, that moved Baron Maurice de Hirsch to create the Jewish Colonisation Association in 1891; by his death in 1896 some 6,757 colonists were farming in Argentina, and they became known as los gauchos judíos after Alberto Gerchunoff's 1910 book of that name. The colonies were in Santa Fe, Entre Ríos and Buenos Aires province. Not one of them was in Patagonia.

   The conspiracy theory took a story about refugees burying their children and then planting wheat, and rewrote it as an invasion plan.

   [11][12][13][14]

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