Operation Massacre Read Online Free

the headlights of the police van. We know the exact minute that the establishment of martial law was broadcast over State Radio, know what the victims were carrying in their pockets. We know what position their corpses were in when they arrived at the morgue. The book is built on detail upon detail.
    As Ricardo Piglia notes in the Afterword to this book, Walsh “elevates the raw truth of the facts.” He describes the lives of ordinary men with such considered and caring language that our sense of them is anything but ordinary. Here is Walsh’s description of one man’s youngest child and only daughter who is nine years old: “Dark-haired, with bangs and smiling eyes, her father melts when he sees her. There is a photo in a glass cabinet of her in a school uniform of white overalls standing next to a chalkboard.” The details not only bring these people closer to the reader, they also offer the shape of the life that was lost.
    Over the next twenty years, with the governing power of the country changing hands multiple times and with a personal need for justice spurring him on, Walsh became an activist. He supported the Cuban revolution and aided that government by cracking telex codes leading up to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. He sympathized with and joined different Peronist groups, though he usually had his disagreements with them. He wrote more articles and books about true crimes in his own country— The Satanowsky Case ( 1958 ), Who Killed Rosendo? ( 1969 )—and Operation Massacre was reprinted three times, each time with additions and revisions, a new introduction, or a provisional epilogue.
    The stages of Walsh’s personal journey are laid out most clearly in these texts and in the changes he made to the main text over the years. This journey is what differentiates Walsh and Operation Massacre most from Truman Capote and In Cold Blood , which appeared nearly a decade later and is often noted as a point of reference for understanding Walsh’s work. Both books were considered groundbreaking in their literary treatment of true crimes that the writers had personally investigated and rendered in minute detail. But when Walsh wrote the articles that would become Operation Massacre , the men he incriminates—some of them wielding a great deal of discretionary power—had not been brought to justice, and never would be. His need to set the record straight is what makes him risk his life to tell the story, and what inspires him to keep going back to the original text year after year.
    At the end of the introduction to the first, 1957 edition, Walsh writes: “I happen to believe, with complete earnestness and conviction, in the right of every citizen to share any truth that he comes to know, however dangerous that truth may be. And I believe in this book, in the impact it can have.” As the years passed and the Chief of Police was not convicted, Walsh began to lose heart. Neither the victims of “Operation Massacre” nor their families were compensated. In the epilogue to the 1964 edition, Walsh’s tone has changed:
    I wanted one of the multiple governments of this country to acknowledge that its justice system was wrong to kill those men, that they were killed for no good reason, out of stupidity and blindness. I know it doesn’t matter to the dead. But there was a question of decency at hand, I don’t know how else to say it.
    […]
    In 1957 I boasted: “This case is in process, and will continue to be for as long as is necessary, months or even years.” I would like to retract that flawed statement. This case is no longer in process, it is barely a piece of history; this case is dead.
    […]
    I am rereading the story that you all have read. There are entire sentences that bother me, I get annoyed thinking about how much better it would be if I wrote it now.
    Would I write it now?
    By the 1960 s, Walsh was consumed by writing and activism.