Rodolfo Walsh
Encyclopedia
Rodolfo Jorge Walsh was an Argentine
writer, considered the founder of investigative journalism
. He is most famous for his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta
which he wrote the day before his murder, protesting that their economic policies were having an even greater effect on ordinary Argentines than their human rights abuses. He was murdered on March 25, 1977.
Walsh finished his primary education in a small town in Río Negro Province
, from where he moved to Buenos Aires
in 1941, where he completed high school. Although he started studying philosophy at university, he abandoned it and held a number of different jobs, mostly as a writer or editor. Between 1944 and 1945 he joined the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista, a movement he later denounced as "Nazi". In 1953 he received the Buenos Aires Municipal Literature Award for his book Variaciones en Rojo.
After initially supporting the Revolución Libertadora
which overthrew Juan Perón
in 1955, by 1956 he rejected the hard line path of the military government of Aramburu
. In 1957 he finished Operación Masacre
, an investigative work on the illegal execution of Peron's sympathizers during an ill-fated attempt at restoring Peronism to power in June 1956. In 1960 he went to Cuba
, where, together with Jorge Masetti, he founded the Prensa Latina
press agency. He was then close to the CGT de los Argentinos.
While in Cuba, it has been proposed that he decrypted a CIA telex referring to the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion
, helping Castro prepare for the supposedly secret operation.
Back in Argentina, in 1973 Walsh joined the Montoneros
radical group, but eventually began to question the views of the organization. Four years later he was killed during a shoot-out with a special military group that set an ambush for him. His body and some of his writings were never seen again.
Four films have been based on his work, including Operación masacre (1973) and Asesinato a distancia (1998), and three of his books were published years after his death, most notably Cuento para tahúres y otros relatos policiales.
Walsh's daughter Patricia Walsh became a politician.
locality of Río Negro Province
, Argentina. For a long time there was confusion regarding Walsh's birthplace, due to the renaming of Colonia Nueva del Pueblo de Choele Choel to its current denomination of Lamarque, in 1942.
In 1941 he moved to Buenos Aires to attend secondary school. After graduation, he began studying philosophy, but then left school and took on a diverse range of jobs: office worker in a meat processing plant, labourer, dishwasher, antiques vendor and window washer. Then at the age of 18 he began working as a proofreader at a newspaper, the humble beginnings of what would develop into a distinguished career in journalism, which continued until his assassination in 1977.
After meeting a survivor of the Shootings of José León Suárez, Walsh produced a book about the event, in which he wrote "This is a story that I'm writing spontaneously and in the heat of the moment, so that they don't beat me to it, but that afterwards will crumple day by day in my pocket, because I'll go all over Buenos Aires and no one will want to publish it or even know about it." In 1957 he went to the office of Dr. Jorge Ramos Mejía and asked Dr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, director of the weekly Azul y Blanco to help him publish the book.
With the financial backing of Mejía he was able that same year to produce Operation Massacre (Operación Masacre
), with the subtitle "A process that has not been closed" from Ediciones Sigla, an investigative journalism piece that was later brought to the cinema.
His works are principally in the genres of Police and Crime, Journalism and Testimonial, with books that have been widely published like Who killed Rosendo (Quién mató a Rosendo).
Walsh was never an actual supporter of Peronism
, but he became more sympathetic towards the group from October 1956, writing in that month's edition of Leoplán, Here they closed their eyes, a tribute to the naval aviators who had died during the Revolución Libertadora
.
In September 1958 he wrote:
In 1959 he travelled to Cuba, where with his colleagues and compatriots Jorge Masetti, Rogelio García Lupo, and the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez
, he founded the agency Prensa Latina. On returning to Argentina he worked at the magazines Primera Plana and Panorama. During the Onganía dictatorship he founded the weekly CGTA, which he directed between 1968 and 1970, and which after a raid and the detention of Raimundo Ongaro
was published clandestinely. During 1972 he wrote for the weekly Semanario Villero and from 1973 in the daily Noticias with his friends Paco Urondo and Miguel Bonasso, among others.
Towards the middle of 1970, Walsh began to associate with the Peronismo de Base (Base Peronism) a political branch of the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas (Peronist Armed Forces) a peronist organization that in 1973 merged with militant Montoneros
. He was an important official, working on the press distribution for the movement, and intelligence. His first nom de guerre was "Esteban", and later he was known as "El Capitán", "Profesor Neurus" or just "Neurus".
In the letter he wrote to the leadership of the organization, he wrote:
About this, Walsh wrote in a private letter on December 29, 1976:
It has been suggested by M. E. Andersen that Montoneros could have been nurtured by the military in order to justify their coup. According to this version, shortly after the military coup on 23 March 1976, Walsh would have written that the Montoneros welcomed the coup "as a victory in the making" and that the coup "will culminate in the seizure of power by the revolutionary left."Private Daniel Tarnopolsky serving in the Argentine Marine Corps in 1976, passed on valuable information to Walsh regarding the tortures and killings of left-wing guerrillas taking place in ESMA.He was later made to disappear along with his father Hugo and mother Blanca and sister Betina and brother Sergio in revenge for a bomb that he planted in the detention center that failed to explode.
, Walsh created ANCLA, (Clandestine News Agency), and the "Information Chain", a system of hand-to-hand information distribution whose leaflets stated in the heading:
He was also accused of being responsible for the murder of Augusto Vandor
, whom he blamed for the assassination of union leader Rosendo García in one of his books.
After this incident he took refuge in the city of El Tigre
.
That same year in Mendoza
, his friend Paco Urondo who fought in the Montoneros, committed suicide to avoid possible arrest at a military control post in the street, by swallowing a cyanide pill, thus following official procedure.
His other daughter, Patricia, is currently an Argentine political leader.
(Carta Abierta de un Escritor a la Junta Militar), Rodolfo Walsh was on foot near the crossroads of San Juan and Entre Ríos Avenues, in Buenos Aires
, (according to the investigator Natalia Vinelli "after mailing the first copies [of the letter] at the mailbox in Plaza Constitución"), when a group of soldiers from the Navy School of Engineers ordered him to surrender. Walsh resisted with the gun that he carried, but was mortally wounded.
The members of that group are now being judged for the kidnapping and murder of the writer. The accused, who according to the Chamber "passed the kidnapped in an automobile" to identify Walsh, also know who betrayed him by passing on the details of the appointment that the writer had in the location where he was kidnapped. Ricardo Coquet, a survivor who testified before federal judge, Sergio Torres, stated that one of the accused, ex-officer Weber, told him proudly "We took Walsh down. The son of a bitch took cover behind a tree, and defended himself with a .22. We hailed him with bullets and he didn't go down, the son of a bitch." According to declarations by detainees who survived, his body was later shown to them in the ESMA (Navy School of Mechanics).
Rodolfo Walsh's personality has been studied in literary circles as a paradigmatic example of the tension between the intellectual and the political, or between the writer and the committed revolutionary. Walsh however, thought of himself as a revolutionary more than a writer, and stated so publicly.
His Carta Abierta a La Junta Militar was brought to cinema through the short film The AAA are the three weapons (Las AAA son las tres armas), produced by the group Base Cinema (Cine de La Base) led by the disappeared director Raymundo Gleyzer.
On December 17, 2007, federal judge Sergio Torres mounted a trial on the charge of "illegitimate deprivation of liberty doubly aggravated for having been committed with abuse of office and with the corresponding aggravation of having been perpetrated with violence and threats" and "robbery aggravated for having been committed in public and in a group" of Alfredo Astiz
, Jorge "Tigre" Acosta, Pablo García Velasco, Jorge Radice, Juan Carlos Rolón, Antonio Pernías, Julio César Coronel, Ernesto Frimon Weber and Carlos Orlando Generoso.
The tenth accused, ex prefect Héctor Antonio Febrés, died some hours before by ingestion of cyanide.
The colonel is looking for names, papers that perhaps I might have.
I'm looking for a death, a place on the map. It's not really a search, it's barely a fantasy: the type of perverse fantasy that some suspect might occur to me.
Some day (I think in moments of anger) I'll go and look for her. She doesn't mean anything to me, but I'll go anyway, following the mystery of her death, behind her remains that rot slowly in some remote cemetery. If I find her, fresh high waves of anger, fear and frustrated love will rise, powerful vengeful waves, and for a moment I won't feel alone any more, I won't feel like a wrecked, bitter, forgotten shadow.
The colonel knows where she is.
He moves with ease on the floor of opulent furniture, decorated with ivory and bronze, with plates by Meissen and Cantón. I smile at the false Jongkind, the suspect Fígari. I think of the look on his face if I told him who makes Jongkind, but instead I compliment his whiskey.
He drinks with vigor, with health, with enthusiasm, with happiness, with superiority, with contempt. His face changes and changes, while his fat hands slowly turn the glass.
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
writer, considered the founder of investigative journalism
Investigative journalism
Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, often involving crime, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Investigative journalism...
. He is most famous for his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta
Carta Abierta de un Escritor a la Junta Militar
Around midday on March 25, 1977, the writer Rodolfo Walsh mailed his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta to the editing departments of Argentine newspapers and to correspondents at foreign media organizations...
which he wrote the day before his murder, protesting that their economic policies were having an even greater effect on ordinary Argentines than their human rights abuses. He was murdered on March 25, 1977.
Walsh finished his primary education in a small town in Río Negro Province
Río Negro Province
Río Negro is a province of Argentina, located at the northern edge of Patagonia. Neighboring provinces are from the south clockwise Chubut, Neuquén, Mendoza, La Pampa and Buenos Aires. To the east lies the Atlantic Ocean.Its capital is Viedma...
, from where he moved to Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
in 1941, where he completed high school. Although he started studying philosophy at university, he abandoned it and held a number of different jobs, mostly as a writer or editor. Between 1944 and 1945 he joined the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista, a movement he later denounced as "Nazi". In 1953 he received the Buenos Aires Municipal Literature Award for his book Variaciones en Rojo.
After initially supporting the Revolución Libertadora
Revolución Libertadora
The Revolución Libertadora was a military uprising that ended the second presidential term of Juan Perón in Argentina, on September 16, 1955.-History:...
which overthrew Juan Perón
Juan Perón
Juan Domingo Perón was an Argentine military officer, and politician. Perón was three times elected as President of Argentina though he only managed to serve one full term, after serving in several government positions, including the Secretary of Labor and the Vice Presidency...
in 1955, by 1956 he rejected the hard line path of the military government of Aramburu
Pedro Eugenio Aramburu
Pedro Eugenio Aramburu Silveti was an Argentine Army General. Born in Río Cuarto, Córdoba on May 21, 1903. He was a major figure behind the military coup against Juan Perón in 1955. He became de facto president of Argentina from November 13, 1955 to May 1, 1958...
. In 1957 he finished Operación Masacre
Operación Masacre
Operación Masacre is a nonfiction novel of investigative journalism, written by noted Argentine journalist and author Rodolfo Walsh. It is considered by some to be the first of its genre...
, an investigative work on the illegal execution of Peron's sympathizers during an ill-fated attempt at restoring Peronism to power in June 1956. In 1960 he went to Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
, where, together with Jorge Masetti, he founded the Prensa Latina
Prensa Latina
Prensa Latina, legal name Agencia de Noticias Latinoamericana S.A. , is the official state news agency of Cuba, founded in March 1959 shortly after the Cuban Revolution.-Overview:...
press agency. He was then close to the CGT de los Argentinos.
While in Cuba, it has been proposed that he decrypted a CIA telex referring to the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion
Bay of Pigs Invasion
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was an unsuccessful action by a CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles to invade southern Cuba, with support and encouragement from the US government, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The invasion was launched in April 1961, less than three months...
, helping Castro prepare for the supposedly secret operation.
Back in Argentina, in 1973 Walsh joined the Montoneros
Montoneros
Montoneros was an Argentine Peronist urban guerrilla group, active during the 1960s and 1970s. The name is an allusion to 19th century Argentinian history. After Juan Perón's return from 18 years of exile and the 1973 Ezeiza massacre, which marked the definitive split between left and right-wing...
radical group, but eventually began to question the views of the organization. Four years later he was killed during a shoot-out with a special military group that set an ambush for him. His body and some of his writings were never seen again.
Four films have been based on his work, including Operación masacre (1973) and Asesinato a distancia (1998), and three of his books were published years after his death, most notably Cuento para tahúres y otros relatos policiales.
Walsh's daughter Patricia Walsh became a politician.
Early years
Rodolfo Jorge Walsh (of Irish descent), was born in 1927 on a farm in the LamarqueLamarque, Argentina
Lamarque is an Argentine locality situated about from Choele Choel, in the province of Río Negro. It is the birthplace of writer Rodolfo Walsh....
locality of Río Negro Province
Río Negro Province
Río Negro is a province of Argentina, located at the northern edge of Patagonia. Neighboring provinces are from the south clockwise Chubut, Neuquén, Mendoza, La Pampa and Buenos Aires. To the east lies the Atlantic Ocean.Its capital is Viedma...
, Argentina. For a long time there was confusion regarding Walsh's birthplace, due to the renaming of Colonia Nueva del Pueblo de Choele Choel to its current denomination of Lamarque, in 1942.
In 1941 he moved to Buenos Aires to attend secondary school. After graduation, he began studying philosophy, but then left school and took on a diverse range of jobs: office worker in a meat processing plant, labourer, dishwasher, antiques vendor and window washer. Then at the age of 18 he began working as a proofreader at a newspaper, the humble beginnings of what would develop into a distinguished career in journalism, which continued until his assassination in 1977.
Journalism
In 1951 Walsh began to work in journalism proper, with the magazines Leoplán and Vea y Lea (See and Read). In 1953 he won the Buenos Aires Municipal Prize for Literature for his book of short stories Variations in Red (Variaciones en Rojo).After meeting a survivor of the Shootings of José León Suárez, Walsh produced a book about the event, in which he wrote "This is a story that I'm writing spontaneously and in the heat of the moment, so that they don't beat me to it, but that afterwards will crumple day by day in my pocket, because I'll go all over Buenos Aires and no one will want to publish it or even know about it." In 1957 he went to the office of Dr. Jorge Ramos Mejía and asked Dr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, director of the weekly Azul y Blanco to help him publish the book.
With the financial backing of Mejía he was able that same year to produce Operation Massacre (Operación Masacre
Operación Masacre
Operación Masacre is a nonfiction novel of investigative journalism, written by noted Argentine journalist and author Rodolfo Walsh. It is considered by some to be the first of its genre...
), with the subtitle "A process that has not been closed" from Ediciones Sigla, an investigative journalism piece that was later brought to the cinema.
His works are principally in the genres of Police and Crime, Journalism and Testimonial, with books that have been widely published like Who killed Rosendo (Quién mató a Rosendo).
Political Activity
Between 1944 and 1945, Walsh was a member of The Nationalist Liberation Alliance (Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista), a group which years later he labelled as being a Nazi front.Walsh was never an actual supporter of Peronism
Peronism
Peronism , or Justicialism , is an Argentine political movement based on the programmes associated with former President Juan Perón and his second wife, Eva Perón...
, but he became more sympathetic towards the group from October 1956, writing in that month's edition of Leoplán, Here they closed their eyes, a tribute to the naval aviators who had died during the Revolución Libertadora
Revolución Libertadora
The Revolución Libertadora was a military uprising that ended the second presidential term of Juan Perón in Argentina, on September 16, 1955.-History:...
.
In September 1958 he wrote:
In 1959 he travelled to Cuba, where with his colleagues and compatriots Jorge Masetti, Rogelio García Lupo, and the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
, he founded the agency Prensa Latina. On returning to Argentina he worked at the magazines Primera Plana and Panorama. During the Onganía dictatorship he founded the weekly CGTA, which he directed between 1968 and 1970, and which after a raid and the detention of Raimundo Ongaro
Raimundo Ongaro
Raimundo Ongaro is a prominent Argentine labor leader.-Early career and rise to prominence:Raimundo José Ongaro was born to a middle-class family of Italian Argentines from the Lombardy region, in the Argentine seashore city of Mar del Plata in 1924...
was published clandestinely. During 1972 he wrote for the weekly Semanario Villero and from 1973 in the daily Noticias with his friends Paco Urondo and Miguel Bonasso, among others.
Towards the middle of 1970, Walsh began to associate with the Peronismo de Base (Base Peronism) a political branch of the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas (Peronist Armed Forces) a peronist organization that in 1973 merged with militant Montoneros
Montoneros
Montoneros was an Argentine Peronist urban guerrilla group, active during the 1960s and 1970s. The name is an allusion to 19th century Argentinian history. After Juan Perón's return from 18 years of exile and the 1973 Ezeiza massacre, which marked the definitive split between left and right-wing...
. He was an important official, working on the press distribution for the movement, and intelligence. His first nom de guerre was "Esteban", and later he was known as "El Capitán", "Profesor Neurus" or just "Neurus".
Differences with Montoneros
In 1974 Walsh began to have differences with the Montoneros, after Mario Firmenich made the surprise decision to take the group underground. Towards the end of 1975, several officials, including Walsh, began to promulgate documents recommending that the Montoneros "re-join the people, separate organizationally into watertight and independent combat cells, distribute money amongst them and try to organize a massive resistance, based more on popular involvement than on foquista type operations.In the letter he wrote to the leadership of the organization, he wrote:
His role as part of the Montoneros Intelligence
Rodolfo Walsh reportedly played a key role in gathering important information for the Montoneros' Military Secretariat Department of Information and Intelligence. As a second officer of Montonero intelligence, Rodolfo Walsh had reportedly informed the Montoneros leadership in January 1976 that the Argentine military commanders were planning a takeover in March. According to the book Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina, the son of retired Lieutenant-General Julio Alsogaray, Juan Carlos Alsogaray, had opened his father's safe, copied a draft of "Battle Order 24 March", and passed it on to Walsh. Juan Carlos ("El Hippie") Alsogaray, a Montoneros officer secretly working for Walsh, was killed in a fierce confrontation with Argentine paratroopers on 13 February 1976, when his 65-strong Montoneros Jungle Company was ambushed near the town of Cadillal in Tucuman province.About this, Walsh wrote in a private letter on December 29, 1976:
It has been suggested by M. E. Andersen that Montoneros could have been nurtured by the military in order to justify their coup. According to this version, shortly after the military coup on 23 March 1976, Walsh would have written that the Montoneros welcomed the coup "as a victory in the making" and that the coup "will culminate in the seizure of power by the revolutionary left."Private Daniel Tarnopolsky serving in the Argentine Marine Corps in 1976, passed on valuable information to Walsh regarding the tortures and killings of left-wing guerrillas taking place in ESMA.He was later made to disappear along with his father Hugo and mother Blanca and sister Betina and brother Sergio in revenge for a bomb that he planted in the detention center that failed to explode.
ANCLA
In 1976, in response to censorship imposed by the military dictatorshipNational Reorganization Process
The National Reorganization Process was the name used by its leaders for the military government that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. In Argentina it is often known simply as la última junta militar or la última dictadura , because several of them existed throughout its history.The Argentine...
, Walsh created ANCLA, (Clandestine News Agency), and the "Information Chain", a system of hand-to-hand information distribution whose leaflets stated in the heading:
Unconfirmed Versions
A survivor of the bomb attack on the Federal Police dining room, carried out by Juan Carlos Salgado in the city of Buenos Aires, which caused 20 deaths and 66 injuries, has declared that Walsh was the planner and director of the operation.He was also accused of being responsible for the murder of Augusto Vandor
Augusto Vandor
Augusto Timoteo Vandor was an Argentine trade unionist leader, military and politician.-Career:Vandor was born Bovril, Entre Ríos Province, to a Dutch father and a French mother, in 1923. He enlisted in the Argentine Navy in 1940, and later became an officer in the ARA Comodoro Py warship...
, whom he blamed for the assassination of union leader Rosendo García in one of his books.
After this incident he took refuge in the city of El Tigre
El Tigre
El Tigre is a city in the eastern Venezuelan state of Anzoátegui. This city is the shire town of the Simón Rodríguez Municipality and, according to the 2001 Venezuelan census, the municipality has a population of 147,800.-History:...
.
The death of his daughter Victoria and of his friend Urondo
On September 29, 1976, Walsh's daughter María Victoria (nom de guerre "Hilda", or "Vicki" to family and friends), second officer of the organization Montoneros, died in a confrontation with the army, the day after her 26th birthday, in an incident known as "The Battle of Corro Street". Realizing she was surrounded with no chance of escape on the terrace of her house, she and Alberto Molina, the last survivor, raised their arms and after a brief speech that ended with the phrase "You're not killing us, we're choosing to die", both Alberto and Vicki shot themselves in the temple. In December of that year, Walsh published a message in which he described the events, entitled Letter to My Friends (Carta a mis amigos).That same year in Mendoza
Mendoza, Argentina
Mendoza is the capital city of Mendoza Province, in Argentina. It is located in the northern-central part of the province, in a region of foothills and high plains, on the eastern side of the Andes. As of the , Mendoza's population was 110,993...
, his friend Paco Urondo who fought in the Montoneros, committed suicide to avoid possible arrest at a military control post in the street, by swallowing a cyanide pill, thus following official procedure.
His other daughter, Patricia, is currently an Argentine political leader.
Death
On March 25, 1977, one day after publishing his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military JuntaCarta Abierta de un Escritor a la Junta Militar
Around midday on March 25, 1977, the writer Rodolfo Walsh mailed his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta to the editing departments of Argentine newspapers and to correspondents at foreign media organizations...
(Carta Abierta de un Escritor a la Junta Militar), Rodolfo Walsh was on foot near the crossroads of San Juan and Entre Ríos Avenues, in Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
, (according to the investigator Natalia Vinelli "after mailing the first copies [of the letter] at the mailbox in Plaza Constitución"), when a group of soldiers from the Navy School of Engineers ordered him to surrender. Walsh resisted with the gun that he carried, but was mortally wounded.
The members of that group are now being judged for the kidnapping and murder of the writer. The accused, who according to the Chamber "passed the kidnapped in an automobile" to identify Walsh, also know who betrayed him by passing on the details of the appointment that the writer had in the location where he was kidnapped. Ricardo Coquet, a survivor who testified before federal judge, Sergio Torres, stated that one of the accused, ex-officer Weber, told him proudly "We took Walsh down. The son of a bitch took cover behind a tree, and defended himself with a .22. We hailed him with bullets and he didn't go down, the son of a bitch." According to declarations by detainees who survived, his body was later shown to them in the ESMA (Navy School of Mechanics).
Rodolfo Walsh's personality has been studied in literary circles as a paradigmatic example of the tension between the intellectual and the political, or between the writer and the committed revolutionary. Walsh however, thought of himself as a revolutionary more than a writer, and stated so publicly.
His Carta Abierta a La Junta Militar was brought to cinema through the short film The AAA are the three weapons (Las AAA son las tres armas), produced by the group Base Cinema (Cine de La Base) led by the disappeared director Raymundo Gleyzer.
Judicial process for his death
On October 26, 2005, 12 military personnel were arrested, amongst whom were the ex-naval officer Juan Carlos Rolón, in relation to the death of Rodolfo Walsh.On December 17, 2007, federal judge Sergio Torres mounted a trial on the charge of "illegitimate deprivation of liberty doubly aggravated for having been committed with abuse of office and with the corresponding aggravation of having been perpetrated with violence and threats" and "robbery aggravated for having been committed in public and in a group" of Alfredo Astiz
Alfredo Astiz
Alfredo Ignacio Astiz was a Commander, intelligence office and maritime commando in the Argentine Navy during the dictatorial rule of Jorge Rafael Videla in the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional...
, Jorge "Tigre" Acosta, Pablo García Velasco, Jorge Radice, Juan Carlos Rolón, Antonio Pernías, Julio César Coronel, Ernesto Frimon Weber and Carlos Orlando Generoso.
The tenth accused, ex prefect Héctor Antonio Febrés, died some hours before by ingestion of cyanide.
Narrative Style
From the wide window on the tenth floor you can see over the city in the evening, the pale lights of the river. From here it's easy to love, if even just momentarily, Buenos Aires. But it's not any conceivable form of love that has brought us together.The colonel is looking for names, papers that perhaps I might have.
I'm looking for a death, a place on the map. It's not really a search, it's barely a fantasy: the type of perverse fantasy that some suspect might occur to me.
Some day (I think in moments of anger) I'll go and look for her. She doesn't mean anything to me, but I'll go anyway, following the mystery of her death, behind her remains that rot slowly in some remote cemetery. If I find her, fresh high waves of anger, fear and frustrated love will rise, powerful vengeful waves, and for a moment I won't feel alone any more, I won't feel like a wrecked, bitter, forgotten shadow.
The colonel knows where she is.
He moves with ease on the floor of opulent furniture, decorated with ivory and bronze, with plates by Meissen and Cantón. I smile at the false Jongkind, the suspect Fígari. I think of the look on his face if I told him who makes Jongkind, but instead I compliment his whiskey.
He drinks with vigor, with health, with enthusiasm, with happiness, with superiority, with contempt. His face changes and changes, while his fat hands slowly turn the glass.
Excerpt from "Esa mujer"
Work
- Diez cuentos policiales (1953)
- Variaciones en rojo (1953)
- Antología del cuento extraño (1956)
- Operación MasacreOperación MasacreOperación Masacre is a nonfiction novel of investigative journalism, written by noted Argentine journalist and author Rodolfo Walsh. It is considered by some to be the first of its genre...
(1957) - La granada (1965, teatro)
- La batalla (1965, teatro)
- Los oficios terrestres (1965)
- Un kilo de oro (1967)
- ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (1969)
- Un oscuro día de justicia (1973)
- El caso Satanovsky (1973)
- Los oficios terrestres (1986)
- Cuento para tahúres y otros relatos policiales (1987)
- Ese hombre y otros papeles personales (1995)
Further reading
- Michael McCaughan, True Crime: Rodolfo Walsh and the Role of the Intellectual in Latin American Politics, Latin America Bureau 2000, ISBN 1-899365-43-5
- Gabriel García MárquezGabriel García MárquezGabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
(1974) Rodolfo Walsh, el hombre que se adelantó a la CIA (the man who was ahead of the CIA), in Revista Alternativa n. 124, Bogotá, 1974. Collected in Por la libre, Obra periodística 4 (1974–1995)