Operation Massacre Read Free Page B

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