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Walsh’s “Open Letter to the Military Junta,” dated March 24 , 1977 . After listing pages of grievances against his oppressors, he concludes:
    These are the thoughts I wanted to pass on to the members of this Junta on the first anniversary of your ill-fated government, with no hope of being heard, with the certainty of being persecuted, but faithful to the commitment I made a long time ago to bear witness during difficult times.
    The following day, after dropping the letter in the mail to mainstream newspapers in Buenos Aires, Walsh was on his way to a meeting with a fellow Montonero. The person he was supposed to meet was tortured until he surrendered the details of the meeting. Walsh was stopped in the street by one of the State’s armed gangs and managed to get one shot off with the . 22 caliber gun he carried for protection before they gunned him down. He was fifty years old, and to this day his body has not been found.
    Walsh’s effort to tell the story became a fight for human decency. The story became one of life and death and the physical reality of ordinary people being treated horrifically and dying in a shameful way, leaving entire families bereft. Exactly how much is lost in the arbitrary execution of a group of men? Walsh was able to contain his rage and disappointment and convey what happened on the night of June 9 , 1956 , with ferocious precision and a forensic attention to detail. This, to me, is heroic: write so well about everyday people being murdered under a cruel regime that everyday readers sixty-six years later will know what it felt like and maybe also give a damn.
    Translating this book was an enormous honor and a great challenge for me. The book came to me by chance, as a gift from my friend Dante in Buenos Aires. The prologue is what really caught my attention and made me think I could possibly do this text justice in English: Walsh’s sentences were notably short and direct, not circuitous and ambiguous in the way that often makes Spanish deceivingly difficult to translate well. It made sense to me that he had read the English-language crime writers, that he himself had translated from English and came from a family of Irish immigrants. There was something familiarly English about his Spanish. Walsh does, however, change his tense all the time, which can be disorienting in English, but is less so in Spanish. I tried to preserve these changes inasmuch as they reflected the urgency that was present in the Spanish: a sudden switch to the present tense brings the reader swiftly to the present of the text itself. Suddenly she is there, bearing witness to the events of the night of the crime. I had also to acknowledge the frequent changes of register in Walsh’s language: there is certainly a colloquial nature to much of Walsh’s prose, and to that end, I have tried to use contractions sparingly and carefully, only in instances where I believe they help to reflect the rhythm of the Spanish text more faithfully. But there is also a more formal dignity and rectitude to his writing:
    There had been, in fact, no grounds for trying to execute him. No grounds for torturing him psychologically to the limits of what a person can endure. No grounds for condemning him to hunger and thirst. No grounds for shackling and handcuffing him. And now, there were no grounds—only a simple decree, No. 14 . 975 —for restoring him to the world.
    Walsh travels between these registers with grace, imbuing these passages with a nobility that I tried to render in English. Along similar lines, I have tried to keep phrasing that I believe Walsh made intentionally impenetrable in Spanish nearly as impenetrable in English. Walsh was writing in 1957 , after all, which meant that I was unfamiliar with certain expressions: What is a multitudinario esquive de bulto ? Walsh uses the phrase to describe the reaction he is met with when he tries to publish the articles that would become Operation