Rodolfo Jorge Walsh (born on January 9, 1927 in Lamarque*) was an Argentine writer, considered the founder of investigative journalism in Argentina. He was murdered on March 25, 1977.
After finishing his primary education in a small town in Río Negro Province, Walsh 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 Revolucion 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 of restoring Peronism in 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's claimed 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, and 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. The day before his death he wrote an Open Letter to the Military Junta protesting that their economic policies were having an even greater effect on ordinary Argentines than their human rights abuses.
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.
Rodolfo Jorge Walsh (of Irish descent), was born in 1927 on a farm in the Lamarque 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.
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 Mejia and asked Dr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, director of the weekly Azul y Blanco to help him publish the book.
With the financial backing of Mejia 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).
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 lent his support to Peronism from October 1956, writing in that month's edition of Leoplán, Here they closed their eyes, a tribute to the naval aviators who died during the Revolución Libertadora
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 on 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 militant Montoneros, and by 1973 he was an important official in the organization. His first nom de guerre was "Esteban", and later he was known as "El Capitán", "Profesor Neurus" or just "Neurus".
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 opining that the Montoneros must "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 insurrection than on foquista type operations.
In 1976, in response to censorship imposed by the military dictatorship, Walsh created ANCLA, (Clandestine News Agency), and the "Information Chain", a system of hand-to-hand information distribution whose leaflets stated in the heading:"Reproduce this information, circulate it through means at your disposal: by hand, by machine, my mimeograph, orally. Send copies to your friends: nine out of ten are waiting for them. Millions want to be informed. Terror is based on lack of communication. Break the isolation. Feel again the moral satisfaction of an act of freedom. Defeat the terror. Circulate this information."
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 insisted for years that Walsh was the planner and director of the operation, but this allegation could never be proved.
Walsh's repeated criticisms of the policy of carrying out small and large attacks in times of withdrawal and massive persecution, which the exiled leadership of the Montoneros advocated, make this version of events appear improbable.
He was also suspected for the murder of Augusto Vandor, whom he blamed for the assassination of union leader Rosendo García in one of his books. However, his apparent shock when he learned of the crime makes this accusation also unlikely:
After this incident he took refuge in the city of El Tigre.
The Death of His Daughter VIctoria and of His Friend Urondomoreless
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, 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.
On March 25, 1977, one day after publishing his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta (Carta Abierta de un Escritor à 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 auto-mobile" 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 judge 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) lead by the disappeared director Raymundo Gleyzer.
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 pronounced 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.
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.
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
