The story is so good that it sounds like fiction: someone has survived an execution that no one even knew had taken place.
A writer who is passionate about detective novels and mysteries finds out about the survivor. The writer is also a journalist and finds a way to talk to the survivor. He learns from the survivor that policemen arrested him and a bunch of other men without telling them why, drove them out to a garbage dump, lined them up, and opened fire.
But there’s more. There were more survivors. In fact, more men survived the execution than were killed.
The writer thinks he’s found the scoop of his life.
In 1955, Juán Perón was halfway into his second elected term as President of Argentina. The country was divided: Perón had received great support from the labor movement, but developed enemies within the military, the Navy, and the Catholic Church. Those perceived as dissenters were increasingly persecuted, and a creeping fascism overtook the streets. Like many other intellectuals of his time, the twenty-eight-year-old Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh was ready for a change. He lived with his wife and two young daughters in the city of La Plata, an hour southwest of Buenos Aires, and was considered by the literary community to have exceptional talent and promise. Two years earlier, his first book of short stories had received the Buenos Aires Municipal Literature Prize, chosen by the already well-known and highly respected Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Walsh also worked as a journalist, and as a translator and editor for the same small publisher that had put out his first book. Though he had been involved in an anti-imperialist, anti-Communist nationalist group as a teenager, he had drifted away from politics. Walsh was troubled by Perón’s investment in foreign interests and the limitations imposed on the freedom of expression in Argentina, but he was far from being an activist.
On June 16, 1955, Navy jets bombed a rally in support of Perón that left hundreds dead. Perón remained in power for another three months until he was effectively ousted by a coup on September 21, 1955. The new regime called itself the Liberating Revolution, and Walsh was not alone in hoping and even believing that its prophetic name would prove true. He grew discouraged, though, as the new government began to take the shape of a dictatorship: less than six months after the coup, the Liberating Revolution enacted a decree that outlawed calling oneself a Peronist, sympathizing with Peronism in any way, mentioning the name of Perón or his late wife Evita, or reproducing any images of them.
While Perón was in exile, his supporters inside the military and on the streets began to organize. On June 9, 1956, Peronist loyalists in the army and their civilian supporters staged an uprising throughout the country. The Liberating Revolution crushed them at every turn in bloody skirmishes and decided to make an example of those who had rebelled. Martial law was instated at 12:32 a.m. on June 10, 1956, and a communiqué was released over State Radio at dawn announcing that eighteen civilian rebels had been executed in Lanús, a district in the southern part of the Province of Buenos Aires.
On the night of that Peronist uprising, Walsh was sitting at his usual café in La Plata playing chess. He had a deep voice and his eyes seemed small behind black-rimmed glasses. The game was suddenly interrupted by the sound of gunshots nearby. The military had taken over the streets in La Plata, too, not just Lanús. Walsh left the café and started to head home, thinking he should take the bus to avoid passing through a live fire zone. But the “irrepressible will” of his legs (“la incoercible autonomía de mis piernas”) compelled him to keep walking. When he reached his house, he was met with soldiers in the bedrooms and on the roof who were using it as a base. From inside, standing by the window blinds, he heard a wounded soldier calling out from the street to his brothers in arms: “Don’t leave me here alone, you sons of bitches.”
That is the moment when I understood what a revolution was . . . . And I hated that revolution with all my might. As a reflex, I also hated all the previous ones, however just they may have been. I came to a deeper understanding of it in the tense hours that followed, seeing undisguised fear all around me in the almost childlike faces of the soldiers who didn’t know if they were “loyalists” or “rebels,” but knew that they had to shoot at other soldiers identical to themselves, who also didn’t know if they were loyalists or rebels.
When Walsh bears witness to this young man who is convinced that he has been abandoned and is dying in the street, something in him shifts.
Still, after the uprising, Walsh’s life goes on as before. It is only six months later, in December 1956, that he hears the phrase that would change his life: “Hay un fusilado que vive”—“One of the executed men is alive.” It is the paradoxical beginning of a story that is too good to resist. He starts asking questions and finds out that the survivor was not from the failed coup in La Plata or the execution in Lanús, but from a separate, unannounced, secret execution that took place on the night of June 9 in a different district altogether. Years of writing detective fiction and obsessively reading through daily newspapers made him the perfect person to pursue the story, which only grew darker and more stirring the more he uncovered.
What Walsh finds out over the course of a year’s worth of investigation is that the men who were taken out to be killed were a motley, civilian, working-class group. They ranged between twenty-one and fifty years old, and were all from the same neighborhood. Most of them lived with their families—they worked on the railroad or sold shoes or fixed refrigerators. Some of them had served in the military or worked on the docks. Two of them had six children each.
A handful of these men were known to be Peronists and some, not all, of them were aware of the Peronist uprising that was meant to take place that night. But when the police and armed guards barged into the two apartments in Florida, they didn’t say why the men were being taken away or where they were going. The officers were following orders to arrest them from the Chief of Police of the Province of Buenos Aires. They loaded the men onto a bus, stopped at the local police department where they were submitted to interrogation for several hours, drove them out to a garbage dump, and tried, but failed, to execute them all. What distinguishes this execution from the Lanús execution is that it took place before martial law was instated. “And that is not execution,” Walsh tells the reader. “It is murder.”
After talking to the first survivor, Walsh writes up the story immediately and rushes to get it off to the press:
I walk around all of Buenos Aires with it and hardly anyone wants to know about it, let alone publish it. You begin to believe in the crime novels you’ve read or written, and think that a story like this, with a talking dead man, is going to be fought over by the presses. You think you’re running a race against time, that at any given moment a big newspaper is going to send out a dozen reporters and photographers, just like in the movies. But instead you find that no one wants anything to do with it.
Eventually he finds an underground publisher, “a man who’s willing to take the risk. He is trembling and sweating because he’s no movie hero either, just a man who’s willing to take the risk, and that’s worth more than a movie hero.” What captivates Walsh is the courage of this man to publish potentially slanderous material about the Chief of Police of the Province of Buenos Aires. In the series of articles that would become Operation Massacre, Walsh gives accounts of the lives of the victims on the night of the uprising. In 1957, a small press called Ediciones Sigla published the articles as a book. It was met with critical acclaim, but Walsh was growing less interested in critical acclaim than he was in justice for the victims and their families.
Walsh became so consumed by what had happened to these men that he could not return to the life before; he carried the weight of their murder with him. He shares this weight with the reader through details. We know what the victims said to their wives before they left the house—“Till tomorrow,” “I just have to run an errand and then I’ll be back”—and whether they turned left or right when walking out the door. We know exactly how one man escaped the raid, what color cardigan the other was wearing that made him more visible to the guards under the headlights of the police van. We know the exact minute that the establishment of martial law was broadcast over State Radio, know what the victims were carrying in their pockets. We know what position their corpses were in when they arrived at the morgue. The book is built on detail upon detail.
As Ricardo Piglia notes in the Afterword to this book, Walsh “elevates the raw truth of the facts.” He describes the lives of ordinary men with such considered and caring language that our sense of them is anything but ordinary. Here is Walsh’s description of one man’s youngest child and only daughter who is nine years old: “Dark-haired, with bangs and smiling eyes, her father melts when he sees her. There is a photo in a glass cabinet of her in a school uniform of white overalls standing next to a chalkboard.” The details not only bring these people closer to the reader, they also offer the shape of the life that was lost.
Over the next twenty years, with the governing power of the country changing hands multiple times and with a personal need for justice spurring him on, Walsh became an activist. He supported the Cuban revolution and aided that government by cracking telex codes leading up to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. He sympathized with and joined different Peronist groups, though he usually had his disagreements with them. He wrote more articles and books about true crimes in his own country—The Satanowsky Case (1958), Who Killed Rosendo? (1969)—and Operation Massacre was reprinted three times, each time with additions and revisions, a new introduction, or a provisional epilogue.
The stages of Walsh’s personal journey are laid out most clearly in these texts and in the changes he made to the main text over the years. This journey is what differentiates Walsh and Operation Massacre most from Truman Capote and In Cold Blood, which appeared nearly a decade later and is often noted as a point of reference for understanding Walsh’s work. Both books were considered groundbreaking in their literary treatment of true crimes that the writers had personally investigated and rendered in minute detail. But when Walsh wrote the articles that would become Operation Massacre, the men he incriminates—some of them wielding a great deal of discretionary power—had not been brought to justice, and never would be. His need to set the record straight is what makes him risk his life to tell the story, and what inspires him to keep going back to the original text year after year.
At the end of the introduction to the first, 1957 edition, Walsh writes: “I happen to believe, with complete earnestness and conviction, in the right of every citizen to share any truth that he comes to know, however dangerous that truth may be. And I believe in this book, in the impact it can have.” As the years passed and the Chief of Police was not convicted, Walsh began to lose heart. Neither the victims of “Operation Massacre” nor their families were compensated. In the epilogue to the 1964 edition, Walsh’s tone has changed:
I wanted one of the multiple governments of this country to acknowledge that its justice system was wrong to kill those men, that they were killed for no good reason, out of stupidity and blindness. I know it doesn’t matter to the dead. But there was a question of decency at hand, I don’t know how else to say it.
[…]
In 1957 I boasted: “This case is in process, and will continue to be for as long as is necessary, months or even years.” I would like to retract that flawed statement. This case is no longer in process, it is barely a piece of history; this case is dead.
[…]
I am rereading the story that you all have read. There are entire sentences that bother me, I get annoyed thinking about how much better it would be if I wrote it now.
Would I write it now?
By the 1960s, Walsh was consumed by writing and activism. He had separated from his wife and, in 1967, he met Lilia Fereyra, the woman he would be with for the next decade. With civil protest in Argentina quashed again and again, Walsh became more politically active and gradually moved away from fiction as a genre. He believed he needed to write about true events and expose injustice occurring at this particular historical moment in this particular country. Even when he followed this course, however, there was no guarantee that any social good would come of his work. Walsh strikes a resigned note in the epilogue to the 1969 edition:
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. Within the system, there is no justice.
In his excellent 2006 biography of Walsh, Eduardo Jozami writes that when writing Operation Massacre, Walsh used every journalistic means at his disposal to abandon literary fiction and to make the writing more accessible to working-class readers: the language is direct, there are very few abstract concepts, and the book is full of suspense.4 These, of course, are means used in fiction as well. Still, Walsh insisted on the ideological premium that came with testimonial writing, writing based on true events. He retreated from fiction during the years of his heaviest political immersion, not producing one work of fiction between 1967 and 1972.
In 1970, the Montoneros, a militant Peronist group, kidnapped and murdered General Pedro Aramburu, who had been the de facto president during the June 9, 1956, failed Peronist uprising. The Montoneros cited the events of June 9, 1956—which they only knew about in such great detail thanks to Operation Massacre—as part of the justification for their actions. Walsh revised the fourth and final edition of the book, published in 1972, to reflect his opinions on Aramburu’s murder—see Chapter 37 of this translation. Though he had his disagreements with the Montoneros, Walsh kept collaborating with them and eventually joined them in 1973. For him, they represented the most effective popular struggle for social justice at the time. His own true crime writings as well as his increased involvement in the armed Peronist resistance now made him a clear target in the eyes of the State.
Walsh began writing for Noticias, a Peronist newspaper, and had established his own network of people whom he used as intelligence sources for his writings. After a Peronist victory in the national elections, Perón was invited back to Argentina. His many supporters, including Walsh, believed the change they had been hoping for was coming. But in the latter half of 1973, Perón’s health began to fail him, and he died on July 2, 1974. Another military junta came into power and began to persecute Peronists once more, this time with a vengeance. The Noticias office was forced to close. Walsh started his own underground news agency called ANCLA (“Agencia de Noticias Clandestinas” or “Clandestine News Agency”).
In 1957, a writer like Walsh could write a book like Operation Massacre and have it published and widely read, as controversial as it may have been. By 1977, there was no freedom of the press in Argentina, and the rule of law had been practically abolished. What was to be the most savage military junta in Argentina’s history had been in power for a year. In his introduction to this book, Michael Greenberg describes the way in which more individuals suspected of subversive activities would disappear from the streets of Buenos Aires without a trace. Walsh walked around the city incognito, not acknowledging anyone he knew for fear of being caught. The final, chilling appendix to this book is Walsh’s “Open Letter to the Military Junta,” dated March 24, 1977. After listing pages of grievances against his oppressors, he concludes:
These are the thoughts I wanted to pass on to the members of this Junta on the first anniversary of your ill-fated government, with no hope of being heard, with the certainty of being persecuted, but faithful to the commitment I made a long time ago to bear witness during difficult times.
The following day, after dropping the letter in the mail to mainstream newspapers in Buenos Aires, Walsh was on his way to a meeting with a fellow Montonero. The person he was supposed to meet was tortured until he surrendered the details of the meeting. Walsh was stopped in the street by one of the State’s armed gangs and managed to get one shot off with the .22 caliber gun he carried for protection before they gunned him down. He was fifty years old, and to this day his body has not been found.
Walsh’s effort to tell the story became a fight for human decency. The story became one of life and death and the physical reality of ordinary people being treated horrifically and dying in a shameful way, leaving entire families bereft. Exactly how much is lost in the arbitrary execution of a group of men? Walsh was able to contain his rage and disappointment and convey what happened on the night of June 9, 1956, with ferocious precision and a forensic attention to detail. This, to me, is heroic: write so well about everyday people being murdered under a cruel regime that everyday readers sixty-six years later will know what it felt like and maybe also give a damn.
Translating this book was an enormous honor and a great challenge for me. The book came to me by chance, as a gift from my friend Dante in Buenos Aires. The prologue is what really caught my attention and made me think I could possibly do this text justice in English: Walsh’s sentences were notably short and direct, not circuitous and ambiguous in the way that often makes Spanish deceivingly difficult to translate well. It made sense to me that he had read the English-language crime writers, that he himself had translated from English and came from a family of Irish immigrants. There was something familiarly English about his Spanish. Walsh does, however, change his tense all the time, which can be disorienting in English, but is less so in Spanish. I tried to preserve these changes inasmuch as they reflected the urgency that was present in the Spanish: a sudden switch to the present tense brings the reader swiftly to the present of the text itself. Suddenly she is there, bearing witness to the events of the night of the crime. I had also to acknowledge the frequent changes of register in Walsh’s language: there is certainly a colloquial nature to much of Walsh’s prose, and to that end, I have tried to use contractions sparingly and carefully, only in instances where I believe they help to reflect the rhythm of the Spanish text more faithfully. But there is also a more formal dignity and rectitude to his writing:
There had been, in fact, no grounds for trying to execute him. No grounds for torturing him psychologically to the limits of what a person can endure. No grounds for condemning him to hunger and thirst. No grounds for shackling and handcuffing him. And now, there were no grounds—only a simple decree, No. 14.975—for restoring him to the world.
Walsh travels between these registers with grace, imbuing these passages with a nobility that I tried to render in English. Along similar lines, I have tried to keep phrasing that I believe Walsh made intentionally impenetrable in Spanish nearly as impenetrable in English. Walsh was writing in 1957, after all, which meant that I was unfamiliar with certain expressions: What is a multitudinario esquive de bulto? Walsh uses the phrase to describe the reaction he is met with when he tries to publish the articles that would become Operation Massacre. Literally it means something like “a massive, swelling avoidance,” but it’s a colloquial expression that I chose to translate as “no one wants anything to do with it.” No one was interested in publishing Walsh’s yellowing pages, no one wanted to get too involved in his mess.
When I didn’t know something and couldn’t find any written evidence to help me, I would ask my mother, an Argentine who was born in the ’40s, or my right hand in this entire operation, Pablo Martín Ruiz, born in the ’60s in Argentina. Pablo checked over every single translated sentence at least twice with an eye for accuracy and political and historical context. I needed to understand where Walsh stood politically in order to translate his tone with integrity, especially when it came to the appendices, each one tracking a different current in Walsh’s personal journey as an activist. Perhaps the most trying segments were in the third part of the book, which is composed primarily of abstruse legalese. I recruited my brother, a lawyer in the US Department of Justice, to check that my wording was as accurate as it could be, especially given the different justice systems and time periods involved.
I take my lead from Walsh in thanking those who helped make this translation possible: to my dear friend Dante for giving me Walsh’s book as a gift, and to his mother, who took the time to find photographs for possible use in this edition. Thank you to Daniel Divinsky at Ediciones de la Flor and to everyone at Seven Stories Press. The writings of Eduardo Jozami, Michael McCaughan, and Luis Alberto Romero were especially useful to me. I am grateful to Ben for reading and keeping me to a higher standard of excellence. To my family, thank you for supporting me with your time, your attention, and your whole hearts, as always. A Ileana, mi querida abuela, gracias por tu apoyo y tu amor siempre. Pablo Martín Ruiz was my Enriqueta Muñiz: I simply could not have done this without him. Dan Simon was my Bruno and Tulio Jacovella, my Leónidas Barletta. But of course these comparisons are perverse: no one had to risk their lives so that this translation could be published, and for that I am truly thankful.
—Daniella Gitlin
Footnotes:
4 Jozami, Eduardo. Rodolfo Walsh: La palabra y la acción (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2006), 151.