Operation Massacre

1956. Argentina has just lost its charismatic president Juán Perón in a military coup, and terror reigns across the land. June 1956: eighteen people are reported dead in a failed Peronist uprising. December 1956: sometime journalist, crime fiction writer, studiedly unpoliticized chess aficionado Rodolfo Walsh learns by chance that one of the executed civilians from a separate, secret execution in June, is alive. He hears that there may be more than one survivor and believes this unbelievable story on the spot. And right there, the monumental classic Operation Massacre is born.

Walsh made it his mission to find not only the survivors but widows, orphans, political refugees, fugitives, alleged informers, and anonymous heroes, in order to determine what happened that night, sending him on a journey that took over the rest of his life.

Originally published in 1957, Operation Massacre thoroughly and breathlessly recounts the night of the execution and its fallout.

The grandson of Irish immigrants, Rudolfo Walsh was born in a small Patagonian town in 1927. He wrote crime fiction and worked as a translator before publishing Operación Masacre in 1957. Walsh then traveled to Cuba in the midst of the revolution and launched a newspaper in collaboration with Gabriel García Márquez, among others. Upon his return to Argentina in 1961 he was shunned by the journalistic community for his connections to the Cuban Revolution. In 1972, Walsh updated Operación Masacre for the fourth and final time before joining the radical leftist group, the Monteneros, the following year. A day after submitting his now famous 1977 “Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta,” Walsh was gunned down in the street by agents of the State.

c o n t e n t s
Introduction xiii
Translator’s Note xxiii
Prologue 1
part one: the people 9
1. Carranza 11
2. Garibotti 14
3. Mr. Horacio 17
4. Giunta 20
5. Díaz: Two Snapshots 21
6. Lizaso 22
7. Warnings and Premonitions 24
8. Gavino 25
9. Explanations in an Embassy 26
10. Mario 28
11. “The Executed Man Who Lives” 30
12.“I’m Going to Work . . .” 32
13. The Unknowns 34
part two: the events 37
14. Where is Tanco? 39
15. Valle’s Rebellion 43
16. “Watch Out, They Could Execute You . . .” 47
17. “Cheer Up” 50
18. Calm and Confident 53
19. Make No Mistake . . . 55
20. Execute Them! 59
21. He Felt He was Committing a Sin . . . 60
22. The End of the Journey 65
23. The Slaughter 67
24. Time Stands Still 70
25. The End of a Long Night 73
26. The Ministry of Fear 77
27. An Image in the Night 79
28. “They’re Taking You Away” 82
29. A Dead Man Seeks Asylum 86
30. The Telegram Guerrilla 92
31. The Rest is Silence . . . 96
part three: the evidence 101
32. The Ghosts 103
33. Fernández Suárez Confesses 106
34. The Livraga File 110
35. Blind Justice 141
36. Epilogue 146
37. Aramburu and the Historical Trial 148
appendices 153
Prologue to the Book Edition (from the first edition, July 1957)
Introduction (to the first edition, March 1957) 157
Obligatory Appendix (to the first edition, March 1957) 165
Provisional Epilogue (from the first edition, July 1957) 183
Epilogue (from the second edition, 1964) 187
Portrait of the Dominant Oligarchy (end of the epilogue to the third edition, 1969) 191
Operation in the Movies 193
Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta 197
Notes 211
Glossary 217
Afterword 221
About the Author 231
About the Translator 233
About Seven Stories Press 235