Portrait of the Dominant Oligarchy

(end of the epilogue to the third edition, 1969)

The following generalizations should not be dismissed as stemming from impatience.

Today, in light of the murders, we can begin to perfect a portrait of the dominant oligarchy, moving in orderly fashion from the smallest to the greatest detail. As opposed to others who staged uprisings before and afterward, the military personnel who were executed in June 1956 were killed for trying to speak in the name of the people: more specifically, in the name of Peronism and the working class. The torture and murders that preceded and followed the 1956 massacre are typical, inevitable incidents, not anecdotal ones about class warfare in Argentina. The Manchego case; the Vallese case; the murder of Méndez, Mussi, and Retamar; the death of Pampillón; the murder of Hilda Guerrero; the daily picana sessions in police precincts throughout the country; the brutal repression of labor and student protests; random raids in slums: these are all links in the same chain.46

It was useless in 1957 to seek justice for the victims of “Operation Massacre,” just as it was useless in 1958 to seek punishment against General Cuaranta for the murder of Satanowsky, just as it is useless in 1968 to call for the prosecution of those who murdered Blajaquis and Zalazar and are being protected by the government.47 Within the system, there is no justice.

Other writers keep refining the picture of this oligarchy that dominates Argentines and is dominated by foreign interests. When considering taking up a fight against this elite class, it is important to remember that they are temperamentally inclined toward murder. This tendency should be kept in mind, not with the thought of doing as they do, but rather the contrary: so as not to be moved by the sacred ideas, the sacred principles, and more generally, the beautiful souls of the executioners.

Footnotes:

46 These are all student or labor activists who were either killed or disappeared under the Argentine dictatorships of the 1960s and ’70s.

47 Marcos Satanowsky was a lawyer who was killed in his Buenos Aires office in 1957. Walsh wrote an entire book about the crime entitled El Caso Satanowsky (1973) (The Satanowsky Case) in which he incriminates General Juan Constantino Cuaranta of the State Intelligence Service. No one was ever brought to justice for Satanowsky’s murder. Domingo Blajaquis and Juan Zalazar were killed in a shootout among members of the Metal Workers Union in Avellaneda, in the Province of Buenos Aires. Walsh recounts this event in great detail in his 1968 nonfiction investigative work, ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (Who Killed Rosendo?).