Operation Massacre Read Online Free Page A

He had separated from his wife and, in 1967 , he met Lilia Fereyra, the woman he would be with for the next decade. With civil protest in Argentina quashed again and again, Walsh became more politically active and gradually moved away from fiction as a genre. He believed he needed to write about true events and expose injustice occurring at this particular historical moment in this particular country. Even when he followed this course, however, there was no guarantee that any social good would come of his work. Walsh strikes a resigned note in the epilogue to the 1969 edition:
    It was useless in 1957 to seek justice for the victims of “Operation Massacre,” just as it was useless in 1 958 to seek punishment against General Cuaranta for the murder of Satanowsky, just as it is useless in 1968 to call for the prosecution of those who murdered Blajaquis and Zalazar and are being protected by the government. Within the system, there is no justice.
    In his excellent 2006 biography of Walsh, Eduardo Jozami writes that when writing Operation Massacre , Walsh used every journalistic means at his disposal to abandon literary fiction and to make the writing more accessible to working-class readers: the language is direct, there are very few abstract concepts, and the book is full of suspense. 4 These, of course, are means used in fiction as well. Still, Walsh insisted on the ideological premium that came with testimonial writing, writing based on true events. He retreated from fiction during the years of his heaviest political immersion, not producing one work of fiction between 1967 and 1972 .
    In 1970 , the Montoneros, a militant Peronist group, kidnapped and murdered General Pedro Aramburu, who had been the de facto president during the June 9 , 1 956 , failed Peronist uprising. The Montoneros cited the events of June 9 , 1956 —which they only knew about in such great detail thanks to Operation Massacre —as part of the justification for their actions. Walsh revised the fourth and final edition of the book, published in 1972 , to reflect his opinions on Aramburu’s murder—see Chapter 37 of this translation. Though he had his disagreements with the Montoneros, Walsh kept collaborating with them and eventually joined them in 1 973 . For him, they represented the most effective popular struggle for social justice at the time. His own true crime writings as well as his increased involvement in the armed Peronist resistance now made him a clear target in the eyes of the State.
    Walsh began writing for Noticias , a Peronist newspaper, and had established his own network of people whom he used as intelligence sources for his writings.After a Peronist victory in the national elections, Perón was invited back to Argentina. His many supporters, including Walsh, believed the change they had been hoping for was coming. But in the latter half of 1973 , Perón’s health began to fail him, and he died on July 2 , 1974 . Another military junta came into power and began to persecute Peronists once more, this time with a vengeance. The Noticias office was forced to close. Walsh started his own underground news agency called ANCLA (“Agencia de Noticias Clandestinas” or “Clandestine News Agency”).
    In 1957 , a writer like Walsh could write a book like Operation Massacre and have it published and widely read, as controversial as it may have been. By 1977 , there was no freedom of the press in Argentina, and the rule of law had been practically abolished. What was to be the most savage military junta in Argentina’s history had been in power for a year. In his introduction to this book, Michael Greenberg describes the way in which more individuals suspected of subversive activities would disappear from the streets of Buenos Aires without a trace. Walsh walked around the city incognito, not acknowledging anyone he knew for fear of being caught. The final, chilling appendix to this book is