Operation Massacre Read Free Page A

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