Operation Massacre Read Free

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 , 19 77 , 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.
    â€œSilencio 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.
    Â 
    â€”Michael Greenberg
    Footnotes:
    1 For details see the essay “Love in the South” in my collection Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life (Vintage 2010 ).
    2 Since the disappeared prisoner did not officially exist, there was no legal necessity to present him before a judge or account for him at all.
    3 National 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.