Beyond his sleuthing, Walsh had an eye for literary detail. Walsh lays out his case against the authorities like a lawyer before a jury: “There is not one important piece of information in the text of Operation Massacre that hasn’t been matched and double-checked with the testimony of three or four people, sometimes more,” he writes in the appendix. Walsh tracked down each of the survivors, and in uncluttered, driving prose uncovers the truth of the killings and their subsequent cover-up. Sixty-six years after the book’s publication, the strongest impression made by the work is the depth of its investigative reporting. The authorities’ ruthlessness was matched only by their incompetence: six of the twelve men survived. After months of reporting, Walsh discovered that the police had rounded up a group of men, most of whom had nothing to do with the Peronist uprising then had led them, without explanation, to a remote field to face a firing squad. He went on to write a series of articles in a local newspaper about the killings in 1957, he published a book-length account, titled Operation Massacre. Six months after these events, Walsh, who was then twenty-nine, was sitting in a café when a man approached him and said cryptically: “One of the executed men is alive.” This phrase, paradoxical as it was, piqued Walsh’s interest. Operation Massacre is Walsh’s account of the mystery surrounding a botched secret execution of alleged participants in a failed 1956 uprising by supporters of the recently deposed president Juan Domingo Perón. Daniella Gitlin’s skillful and fluid translation of Operation Massacre is welcome and long overdue.

But the more immediate, and surprising, reason is that his best works have never before been translated into English.

So why have you never heard of him? Cold War politics, coupled with Walsh’s embrace of a notorious leftist militant group called the Montoneros, surely have something to do with it. ” In 1977, hours after penning an open letter to the then-ruling military dictatorship, he was gunned down on the streets of Buenos Aires. He was also famously a political activist, blending his two vocations into what he called “the violent profession of being a writer. Walsh is beloved in Argentina and hailed across Latin America as the pioneer of the so-called “nonfiction novel.” Not only did he found his own news agency, but he also published ten works including short-story collections, a pair of plays, and several books of narrative nonfiction all of which earned the plaudits of such literary luminaries as Gabriel García Márquez. Last March, the Buenos Aires legislature renamed a local subway station in honor of the Argentine journalist Rodolfo Walsh.

Operacion masacre pdf