Operation Massacre Read online

  On the day Walsh posted the letter, fifteen thousand Argentines had disappeared, ten thousand political prisoners were being held without trial or formal charges, four thousand were dead, and tens of thousands more had fled the country: what Walsh called “the raw numbers of this terror.” During the next six years the terror would continue unabated and the number of victims would increase exponentially—thirty thousand dead is an oft-cited number, though a reliable count has yet to be established.3

  The carnage was the grim natural extension of the executions Walsh had described twenty years earlier in Operation Massacre. By 1977, the details of those executions seemed almost quaint, especially Walsh’s frustration about the impotence of the courts in dealing with the crime. By the mid 1970s, the judicial system had become a shell of its former self, existing only to rubber stamp government crimes.

  Once torture became official policy, its techniques taught in military schools, there was no end to what it could entail: the rack, the drill, the blowtorch, and, in the case of at least one kidnapped Peronist, being skinned alive. During my companion’s times in prison, in 1974, a young man died while being tortured in a room next to her cell. Business as usual in those nightmarish days.

  But Walsh’s letter is more than a list of abominations. He is acutely aware of the less obvious toll of terror—the psychological and moral stain that it spreads through victim and torturer and passive citizen alike, becoming an ineradicable part of the collective consciousness. “You have arrived at a form of absolute, metaphysical torture that is unbounded by time,” Walsh writes, directly addressing the members of the junta. “The original goal of obtaining information has been lost in the disturbed minds of those inflicting the torture. Instead, they have ceded to the impulse to pommel human substance to the point of breaking it and making it lose its dignity, which the executioner has lost, and which you yourselves have lost.”

  No statement gives a more accurate or disturbing sense of this ethos than that of an officer of the junta who declared, “The battle we are waging knows neither moral nor natural limits; it takes place beyond good and evil.”

  Following the tautology of terror, the definition of a “subversive” widened to a surreal degree. Officials, civilians, and Montoneros alike cloaked themselves in the righteous, heightened language of war that allows for no line of thought beyond itself. The president of the Sociedad Rural, the organization of large landowners whose support was critical to the junta’s survival, felt perfectly justified in expressing his anger that “certain small but active groups keep insisting that food should be affordable.” They too would be submitted to the blowtorch.

  In fact, the economic hardships imposed by the junta amounted to another form of torture. Over the course of the junta’s first year, Walsh points out, the consumption of food decreased by forty percent and the number of hours the average employee needed to work to cover his daily cost of living rose from six to eighteen. The annual inflation rate of 400 percent forced shopkeepers to raise prices from morning to afternoon. As I witnessed myself, many stopped accepting Argentine currency altogether, preferring US dollars, but settling for Brazilian cruzeiros (as they were called at the time) or even Bolivian pesos.

  Walsh wrote the letter “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 commitment began with the writing of Operation Massacre in 1956, and continued until his murder, the very day after he posted the letter and disseminated it to the local and foreign press. On March 25, 1977, Walsh was surrounded on a busy Buenos Aires street by a group of soldiers from the Navy School of Engineers, shot, and carried away to be finished off, much like the victims of June 9, 1956, whom he has memorialized in this classic book.

  “Silencio Es Salud” read a huge banner strung across Buenos Aires’ most trafficked street during the bleakest days of the Dirty War. “Silence is Health”—a warning to a terrorized populace. Silence, in fact, is a dictatorship’s greatest weapon. It is a warning that Walsh defied. In Argentina and in the rest of the world his work and life live on as a beacon of intellectual and political integrity and courage.

  —Michael Greenberg

  Footnotes:

  1For details see the essay “Love in the South” in my collection Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life (Vintage 2010).

  2Since the disappeared prisoner did not officially exist, there was no legal necessity to present him before a judge or account for him at all.

  3National Geographic magazine has estimated that the Montoneros and the People’s Revolutionary Army, the other active guerrilla group, were responsible for about 6,000 casualties among the security forces and civilians.

  Translator’s Introduction

  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 blindn
ess. 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.