Jacobo Timerman Biography

Jacobo Timerman

progressive Argentine journalist who endured two-and-a-half years of imprisonment and torture in the late 1970s for his outspoken condemnation of the military dictatorship's human-rights violations, authoritarian government, and anti-Jewish sentiment. He chronicled his ordeal in the 1981 bestseller Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number. After being released in 1979, Timerman lived in exile in Israel, New York, and Spain. He returned to Argentina in 1983, when a democratically elected government replaced the oppressive military dictatorship. He testified against his captors, who were found guilty of torture. Timerman died of a heart attack.