Operation Massacre Read online

  OPERATION MASSACRE

  Rodolfo Walsh

  Translated from the Spanish by

  Daniella Gitlin

  Foreword by

  Michael Greenberg

  Afterword by

  Ricardo Piglia

  Seven Stories Press

  New York

  Copyright © 1957 by Rodolfo Walsh

  Introduction © 2013 by Michael Greenberg

  Afterword © 2013 by Ricardo Piglia

  English translation and translator’s note copyright © 2013 by Daniella Gitlin

  Originally published by Sigla, 1957; Editorial J. Alvarez, 1969; Casa de las Américas, 1970; Ediciones de la Flor, 1972, 2009 under the title Operación Masacre

  First English language edition, August 2013

  Permission from the Fondo de Cultura Económica to adapt portions of Ricardo Piglia’s Tres propuestas para el próximo milenio (y cinco dificultades) (2001).

  Map credit: Jason Parent

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Seven Stories Press

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  College professors may order examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles for free. To order, visit http://www.sevenstories.com/textbook or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.

  Book design by Elizabeth DeLong

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Walsh, Rodolfo J.

  [Operación masacre. English]

  Operation massacre / by Rodolfo Walsh ; translated by Daniella Gitlin ; foreword by Michael Greenberg ; afterword by Ricardo Piglia. -- Seven stories press first edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-60980-513-5 (pbk.)

  1. Argentina--History--Revolution, 1955. 2. Argentina--Politics and government--1943-1955. 3. Police--Argentina--Buenos Aires (Province) I. Gitlin, Daniella. II. Title.

  F2849.W313 2013

  982.06--dc23

  2013012770

  Printed in the United States

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The declarant adds that the task with which he had been charged was horribly unpleasant, and went far beyond the stipulated duties of the police.

  —Police Commissioner Rodolfo Rodríguez Moreno

  Contents

  Introduction

  Translator’s Introduction

  Prologue

  Part One: The People

  1. Carranza

  2. Garibotti

  3. Mr. Horacio

  4. Giunta

  5. Díaz: Two Snapshots

  6. Lizaso

  7. Warnings and Premonitions

  8. Gavino

  9. Explanations in an Embassy

  10. Mario

  11. “The Executed Man Who Lives”

  12. “I’m Going to Work . . .”

  13. The Unknowns

  Part Two: The Events

  14. Where is Tanco?

  15. Valle’s Rebellion

  16. “Watch Out, They Could Execute You . . .”

  17. “Cheer Up”

  18. “Calm and Confident”

  19. Make No Mistake . . .

  20. Execute Them!

  21. “He Felt He was Committing a Sin”

  22. The End of the Journey

  23. The Slaughter

  24. Times Stands Still

  25. The End of a Long Night

  26. The Ministry of Fear

  27. An Image in the Night

  28. “They’re Taking You Away”

  29. A Dead Man Seeks Asylum

  30. The Telegram Guerrilla

  31. The Rest is Silence . . .

  Part Three: The Evidence

  32. The Ghosts

  33. Fernández Suárez Confesses

  34. The Livraga File

  35. Blind Justice

  36. Epilogue

  37. Aramburu and the Historical Trial

  Appendices

  Prologue to the Book Edition

  (from the first edition, July 1957)

  Introduction

  (to the first edition, March 1957)

  Obligatory Appendix

  (from the first edition, July 1957)

  Provisional Epilogue

  (from the first edition, July 1957)

  Epilogue

  (to the second edition, 1964)

  Portrait of the Dominant Oligarchy

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

  Operation in the Movies

  Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta

  Glossary

  Afterword

  Photographs

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  About Seven Stories Press

  Introduction

  I was nineteen when I arrived in Argentina in the fall of 1972. I had been drawn to South America by the literary explosion that began in the 1950s and was still going on—a historical burst of creativity exemplified by Julio Cortázar, García Márquez, Borges, Ernesto Sábato and other equally potent, unclassifiable writers who were, collectively, in the process of changing the tenor of world literature.

  Upon arriving, however, what immediately captured my attention wasn’t literature but the political upheavals of the continent with their alarming urgency of living, present time. In those vintage Cold War years, the political fate of South America—the “mood” in the Latino forests and highlands and streets—was as pressing to US foreign policy as that of the Muslim world is today. Fidel Castro was ten years into his reign over Cuba and at the height of his influence. Salvador Allende, a cultivated, European-style Socialist, was the democratically elected president of Chile. And set to return to Argentina was Juan Domingo Perón, an aging populist with a bewildering, fascist-inflected philosophy who was beloved by Argentina’s working class.

  Perón had been deposed by a violent military coup in 1955. He had been in exile—first in Panama, then in Spain—for eighteen years. During that time, his Peronist party was outlawed, despite or perhaps because of the fact that it would have won any open election by a landslide. After the 1955 coup, the mere utterance of Perón’s name was prohibited and punishable by law.

  But in 1972, after a seemingly unending succession of inept military and civilian governments, Perón had struck a deal to return, assume the presidency, and save the country from a leftist guerrilla movement that had been operating in his name.

  I hadn’t been in Buenos Aires long before I became familiar with the name Rodolfo Walsh. A writer and intellectual hero of the left, Walsh was known to anyone with even a glancing interest in the political scene. In a country of adventurers, avant gardists, gangs, demagogues, and sloganeers from every point on the political spectrum, he was a rare voice of integrity—a staunch, clear-eyed realist, more swayed by concrete events than abstract political strategies and ideas. With his strong moral compass, his horse sense, and independent investigative rigor, Walsh was, in the benighted land of Argentina of the 1970s, a cross between Orwell and Woodward a
nd Bernstein.

  Operation Massacre is Walsh’s most famous work—a precise, meticulously researched account of the execution, on June 9, 1956, of five men suspected of participating in a failed coup against the military government designed to return Perón to power. No major Argentine news outlet would touch the story, and Walsh’s exposé was published in a small journal between May 27 and July 29, 1957, and then as a book later that year.

  Walsh was thirty when he wrote Operation Massacre. In spite of the virtual media blackout it faced, the book would launch his career as a public intellectual and political journalist. (In 1960, he would become one of the founders of the Latin American wire service Prensa Latina.) It is a classic case of a writer who, presented with a subject of pressing injustice, puts aside his other literary ambitions. The story of the “secret executions” of June 1956 came to Walsh by chance. At the time, by his own account, he was an avid reader of fantasy literature, a writer of detective stories, an aspiring “serious” novelist, and, last of all, a journalist. He had been staunchly anti-Peronist at the time of the 1955 coup that overthrew Perón, put off by Perón’s zealous persecution of lawful dissenters and his admiration for Mussolini, after whose government Perón had modeled his own, right down to the establishment of a loyal band of privileged workers who acted as his street enforcers and unofficial thugs. By the same token, as a man of the left Walsh could not support the equally repressive stupidities of the military government that replaced Perón. This relative impartiality lent a moral authority to Operation Massacre that a more partisan report could not have possessed.

  The irrefutable nature of Walsh’s investigation is one of the reasons for the book’s enduring power. In a country where state atrocities were routinely buried, where silence was a civic means of survival, where innocent citizens could be kidnapped and executed without leaving a trace and even their families kept in the dark—in this country Operation Massacre was a work of enormous importance. The book was, and remains, a warning and prophecy of what was to come, a cry to a judicial system that, with few exceptions, allowed and even encouraged the state’s security forces to act with impunity.

  Most important, it is a document that fully examines the events, the people, the mechanism of the murders, while identifying and holding accountable everyone involved. Operation Massacre is a true crime story, designed not to titillate or exploit but to instruct, to reveal and enlighten. It is built upon that rarest element of Argentine life at the time: facts. Facts were a form of sedition with their icy power that nothing—not opinion, passion, or rumor—could equal. Uttering, much less publishing, the facts in those days could be punishable by death.

  And the facts are astonishing. On June 9, 1956, the evening of the failed coup attempt, twelve working class men gather at a mutual friend’s house to watch a prize fight, have a few drinks, and play cards. Under orders from military personnel, the police storm the gathering, transport the twelve men to a half frozen suburban field, shoot them, and depart. Due to the hurried, careless discharge of the crime, some of the men remain alive, either wounded or lying motionless and unharmed in the field, left for dead.

  As with all investigations of this scale, the story reveals itself to Walsh in phases, through interviews with survivors, lawyers, prosecutors, police, and military participants. There are moments when Operation Massacre reads like a forensic mystery; and Walsh’s talents as a detective novelist inform the story as it unravels, in increments, with its complicated timeline that is so crucial to determining what actually happened.

  At one point, Walsh is forced to become part of the story himself, confirming the death of a victim to his parents who had been clinging to the hope that their son was still alive. In another instance, that illustrates to perfection the bizarre and perverse ethos that ruled the land, the police claim that one of their victims’ “exhibited injuries”—by which they mean the gunshot wound to the face that they have inflicted on him—are “evidence of his active participation in the revolutionary movement.” Another victim, after being left for dead, is arrested while wandering the streets and thrown into solitary confinement without medical attention. He only survives because the regular prisoners throw scraps of bread through the peep hole of his cell.

  Yet, as atrocities in Argentina would go—and it is a mean and hellish game to compare them—the massacre of June 9, 1956, was “modest.” It is, Walsh knows, the specifics, the particulars, the concrete evidence surrounding a crime that give it meaning, by the simple act of proving that it happened at all. It not only attests to and dignifies the individual suffering that has occurred, it also holds individuals responsible for that suffering. And this exposure, this threat of future justice, may be the only effective deterrent, the only point of restraint on those charged with carrying out the orders of state terror.

  Prosecutions often occur decades after the crimes. They don’t bring back the dead or change history. But they do affect the future. They lift the cloud of rage and unresolvedness that can hang over the psyche of a country for as long as the perpetrators run free. They force the state, and the general population, to acknowledge the ordeal of their compatriots. They air the truth and relieve an immeasurable weight of psychological repression. Crucially, they vindicate the loved ones of the disappeared who have been consigned to a state of silence and shame.

  Socially speaking, victims are rarely regarded as heroes, no matter their courage. More often they become pariahs, unwelcome reminders of the public’s collective guilt. Writing Operation Massacre, Walsh took the precaution of acquiring signed statements from survivors and witnesses. In doing so he has shown future generations of Argentines that, in the face of iron-clad facts, a form of justice and restitution is possible. The facts, put down by a brave committed writer, ensure that there will be no immunity for those responsible for state-sponsored terror.

  2.

  On June 20, 1973, seven months after I arrived in Argentina, Perón, who in absentia had assumed the proportions of a mythical, magical god, returned to the country. He was almost seventy now, still tall and erect, though his blooming reddened face showed the cost of the debaucheries of his well-heeled exile. Within minutes of Perón’s landing at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires, where three and a half million Argentines had swarmed to greet him, right-wing Peronists opened machine gun fire on the crowd, targeting members of the Montoneros, the militant left-wing Peronist group whose members and legions of sympathizers were there, en masse, to celebrate what appeared to be an unequivocal victory.

  Nearly two hundred people were killed. Many more were injured in the stampede that followed the shooting. And with that, the alliance of enemies that had brought Perón back to Argentina shattered, as it was always destined to do. The Montoneros, whose guerrilla-style agitations had done much to pave the way for Perón’s return, would soon go back underground, even with Perón in power. A flood of betrayals, kidnappings and drive-by assassinations from both sides followed, and the first stage of what the world would come to know as La Guerra Sucia—the Dirty War—began.

  Operation Massacre had been a galvanizing text for the Montoneros during the dictatorships prior to Perón’s return and, despite his strong misgivings about Peronism, Walsh would eventually join the group in the 1970s as a kind of elder, intellectual mentor and guide. As the terror escalated, Walsh came to believe that the Montoneros were the only representatives of the left with sufficient organizational skill and popular support to challenge the dictatorship. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Montoneros had successfully tapped into the profoundly romantic nostalgia that working class and poor Argentines felt for Perón. Their strategy was to cast Perón’s vague and elusive political pronouncements in a revolutionary light, and by doing so ideologically to nudge his supporters to the left. Employing the caudillo’s own words, they couldn’t be accused of disloyalty or distortion. The implication was that “true” Peronism belonged to the left.

  Walsh urg
ed the Montoneros to aspire to the establishment of a democratic government, with a stable judicial system, a functioning congress, freedom of the press, and open dependable elections. Of paramount importance to Walsh was the creation of a strong legal code consisting of humane, enforceable laws that punished political crimes and guaranteed the continuance of democracy. He disagreed with the Montonero leadership when they burrowed inexorably underground, becoming increasingly avant gardist, clandestine and cut off from the general population. By 1974, vicious street brawls between Montonero fighters and government forces were a constant feature of urban life. The explosion of bombs and gunshots throughout the night were normal. My own companion (and future wife) was arrested and almost killed after stumbling upon a surprise Montonero demonstration near the Congressional Plaza.1 For tactical purposes, the Montoneros encouraged the government crackdown, believing that less militant sympathizers, having nowhere to turn and absorbing much of the brunt of the terror, would join them as fighters underground. This was not what happened. An airless blanket of paranoia and fear gripped the country, and the population, for the most part, withdrew, aiming simply to stay out of the way and survive.

  3.

  Walsh wrote his second most famous text on March 24, 1977. “Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta,” it is called. The occasion for this letter was the first anniversary of the military junta that had overthrown Isabel Perón’s government (Perón died in July 1974 while in office and his wife, Isabel, vice president at the time, assumed the top office). Fittingly, the letter is included in this book. Sharpened by Walsh’s lucidly ethical prose, it is a kind of State of the Union, summing up the junta’s accomplishment after one year in power.

  Six months before he wrote the letter, Walsh’s eldest daughter, a Montonero combatant, shot herself in the head after being trapped by a military ambush. Separately, Walsh’s house was ransacked; numerous close friends—academics, unionists, intellectuals, writers—were kidnapped and, in the Kafkaesque parlance of the time, “went disappeared.”2 For Walsh, who had just turned fifty, there seemed to be nothing left to lose.