Argentine police continued their hunt Wednesday for a 18th-century Italian portrait believed to have been looted 80 years ago from a Jewish collector by a fugitive Nazi officer who settled in Argentina after World War II.

A raid on a villa Tuesday in a seaside resort south of Buenos Aires reopened a shadowy chapter in the history of this South American nation, which sheltered scores of Nazis who fled Europe to avoid prosecution for war crimes, including high-ranking party members and notorious architects of the Holocaust like Adolf Eichmann.

Under the government of Argentine General Juan Perón, whose first tenure lasted from 1946 until his overthrow in 1955, fugitive German fascists brought plundered Jewish property with them, including gold, bank deposits, paintings, sculptures and furnishings.