Ivo Rojnica

Ivo Rojnica was born on 20 August 1915 in the village of Cista, near Imotski, in what was then Austria-Hungary and is now Croatia. He was the fourth of eleven children born to Stipan and Anđa Rojnica (). In his youth, he relocated to the coastal town of Dubrovnik, where he completed his secondary education and subsequently opened a textile business. In 1939, he joined Ante Pavelić's fascist, Croatian nationalist Ustaše movement. ==World War II==

In the years leading up to the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, Rojnica served as an agent of the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service, where he received the code name "Ante". Following the invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia, the Axis created a puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which was placed under Ustaše rule, and which consisted of most of modern-day Croatia, all of modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, and parts of modern-day Serbia. On 18 May 1941, Italy and the NDH signed the Treaty of Rome, whereby the latter was given control of Dubrovnik in exchange for the cession of the rest of Dalmatia, which was integrated into the Italian state as the Governorate of Dalmatia. On 23 May 1941, Rojnica was appointed as the commissioner () of Dubrovnik. The same day, local Ustaše launched a campaign of arrests, killings and expulsions targeting the movement's ideological opponents, such as members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Serbs and Jews were also singled out for persecution, with the latter being forced to wear a yellow star around their arm, and to mark their properties with the Star of David. Between 4 and 5 June 1941, the Dubrovnik Ustaše arrested the bank clerk Nikola Mašanović, the municipal treasurer Branko Hope, the merchant Branko Radonić and the journalist Jaša Miloslavić. The four men were then killed and their bodies were thrown into a river. The historian Nikola Anić argues that Rojnica was among those most responsible for these murders, given that he was Dubrovnik's most senior Ustaše official. Afterwards, Rojnica received the expropriated property of Blagoje Čorolija, the owner of a Dubrovnik delicatessen. On 25 June, Rojnica issued a decree ordering the confiscation of all radios in Dubrovnik and restricting the movement of the city's Jews and Serbs. It read as follows: Over the course of several months, many of the Serbs and Jews who were not able to escape Dubrovnik were killed or deported to concentration camps such as Jasenovac. He was succeeded by Vlado Herceg, who had previously served as a warrant officer in the Poglavnik's Bodyguard Brigade (), which was tasked with guarding Pavelić. For the rest of the war, Rojnica took part in intelligence gathering activities. In 1943, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant () in the Ustaše Militia. In the war's final months, Rojnica extorted refugees passing through Dubrovnik, forcing them to pay him exorbitant sums in return for safe passage. ==Exile==

In May 1945, with the Yugoslav Partisans approaching Zagreb, Rojnica retreated to Austria with elements of the Croatian Armed Forces. In August, his family was reunited with him, also disembarking from the Maria C. The family settled in Vicente López, a suburb of Buenos Aires, where Rojnica opened a textile factory called Pulloverfin. On 31 August 1951, he was granted Argentine citizenship under the false name he had used to enter the country, and on 20 December 1954, he successfully petitioned the government to legally change his name to Juan Rojnica. In 1969, he published the first volume of his three-volume memoir Meetings and Experiences (). In his memoirs, he attempted to minimize the actions of the NDH by asserting that the Ustaše had no intention of exterminating the puppet state's Serb population, that no more than 250,000 Serbs had been expelled and that no more than 450 Serbs had been forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism. Most historians agree that around 300,000 Serbs were killed by the Ustaše between 1941 and 1945, or about 17 percent of the NDH's Serb population. According to the scholar Sabrina P. Ramet, by 1943, 120,000 Serbs were deported to German-occupied Serbia and a further 300,000 were forced to flee the NDH. Additionally, from 1941 to 1942, between 97,000 and 300,000 Serbs were subjected to forced conversion. Referring to anti-Semitic atrocities, Rojnica stated that "Croats are not guilty for the fate of the Jews," and maintained that the Germans were solely responsible for The Holocaust in Croatia. Rojnica was suspected of financing several Croatian nationalist aircraft hijackings that took place in the United States and Europe in the early to mid-1970s. His wife was kidnapped on 23 November 1973. She was released eight days later after Rojnica paid her captors 70 million Argentine pesos. Neither the perpetrators nor their motives were ever publicly identified. In 1974, Rojnica attended the inaugural meeting of the Croatian National Council (), a body representing various Croatian émigré organizations, in Toronto. In 1977, he and Vjekoslav Vrančić, another former high-ranking Ustaše official, were detained in New Zealand on a layover to Australia, where they were to attend a meeting of Croatian nationalists. Yugoslavia requested their extradition but the two were released at the intervention of the Argentine embassy and returned to Buenos Aires. ==Breakup of Yugoslavia and ambassadorship controversy==

Franjo Tuđman In 1991, Rojnica was appointed as the Authorized Representative of the President of Croatia to Argentina and Latin America. United Nations Security Council Resolution 713, passed on 25 September 1991, had imposed an international arms embargo on Yugoslavia and its constituent republics. In late 1991, Menem signed two secret presidential decrees, authorizing the sale of of weapons to Panama, which were then diverted to Croatia. In early 1992, Menem signed another secret presidential decree, authorizing the sale of thousands of automatic rifles, handguns, hand grenades, howitzers, mortars and landmines to Bolivia, which with Menem's knowledge, were again diverted to Croatia. Rojnica also established a paramilitary camp on Argentine soil to recruit and train Croatian mercenaries. Several weeks later, a representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center met with Argentine officials demanding Rojnica's arrest, noting that his name figured prominently in a list of eighteen war crimes suspects alleged to be hiding in Argentina that the organization had given to the country's Minister of the Interior, José Luis Manzano. Despite the request, the Argentine authorities failed to investigate Rojnica, and he continued to be photographed attending events alongside President Menem. On 3 February 1993, the Government of Croatia announced its intention to appoint Rojnica as the country's ambassador to Argentina. Rojnica himself was unapologetic, telling the Feral Tribune, "everything I did in 1941 I would do again." In 1996, he was granted an audience with the mayor of Dubrovnik, Ivo Obuljen. ==Later years and death==

In March 1997, Menem acceded to a request from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to hand over the bank records of 334 Nazi officials and their wives and mistresses who had fled to Argentina after the war; Rojnica's name was absent from the files. In 1998, the Simon Wiesenthal Center requested that he be indicted, extradited and tried, but received no response from the Argentine authorities. The Argentine press attributed Rojnica's apparent immunity to the sizeable financial contributions former Ustaše members had made to Menem's electoral campaigns. In 2001, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Jerusalem office, Efraim Zuroff, listed Rojnica among eight "major Nazi war criminals" still at large. The following year, Rojnica published a book titled Witness to Truth and Justice (). The following year, he criticized the Serbian authorities for failing to issue arrest warrants for Rojnica and two other Axis war crimes suspects—the Croatian Milivoj Ašner and the Hungarian Sándor Képíró. Rojnica died in Buenos Aires on 1 December 2007, at the age of 92. The following day, he was buried at a local cemetery, El Jardin de la Paz. In response to the news, Alen Budaj, a representative of a Croatian Jewish organization, expressed indignation that Rojnica had never been indicted or stood trial. Rojnica's grandson, Ivo Esteban Rojnica, was one of Argentina's most successful black market currency traders until his arrest by the Argentine authorities in October 2023 on suspicion of laundering drug money for the Sinaloa Cartel. ==Footnotes==