Rodolfo Walsh

Rodolfo Jorge Walsh (January 9, 1927 – March 25, 1977) was an Argentine writer and journalist of Irish descent, considered the founder of investigative journalism in Argentina.

He is most famous for his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta, which he published the day before his murder, protesting that Argentina's last civil-military dictatorship's economic policies were having an even greater and disastrous effect on ordinary Argentines than its widespread human rights abuses.

Rodolfo Jorge Walsh (of Irish descent), was born in 1927 on a farm in the Lamarque locality of Río Negro Province, Argentina to third-generation Irish immigrants.

Born in Lamarque, Walsh finished his primary education in a small town in Río Negro Province, from where he moved to Buenos Aires in 1941, where he completed high school.

Although he started studying philosophy at university, he abandoned it and held a number of different jobs, mostly as a writer or editor.

In 1941 he moved to Buenos Aires to attend secondary school.

After graduation, he began studying philosophy, but then left school and took on a diverse range of jobs including office worker in a meat processing plant, labourer, dishwasher, antiques vendor, and window washer.

For a long time there was confusion regarding Walsh's birthplace, due to the renaming of Colonia Nueva del Pueblo de Choele Choel to its current denomination of Lamarque, in 1942.

This other Lamarque is a neighborhood of Choele Choel about nine miles away from Walsh's birthplace.

Between 1944 and 1945 he joined the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista, a movement he later denounced as being "Nazi" in its roots.

Between 1944 and 1945, Walsh was a member of The Nationalist Liberation Alliance (Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista), a group which years later he labelled as being a Nazi front.

In 1951 Walsh began to work in journalism proper, with the magazines Leoplán and Vea y Lea (See and Read).

In 1953 he received the Buenos Aires Municipal Literature Award for his book Variaciones en Rojo.

In 1953 he won the Buenos Aires Municipal Prize for Literature for his book of short stories Variations in Red (Variaciones en Rojo).

After meeting a survivor of the shootings of José León Suárez, Walsh produced a book about the event, in which he wrote "This is a story that I'm writing spontaneously and in the heat of the moment, so that they don't beat me to it, but that afterwards will crumple day by day in my pocket, because I'll go all over Buenos Aires and no one will want to publish it or even know about it."

Initially supporting the "Revolución Libertadora"'s coup which overthrew Juan Perón's democratic government in 1955, by 1956 Walsh already rejected the hard-line policies of the military government led by Aramburu.

""I'm not a peronist, have never been and I don't have the intention of becoming one... I can, without remorse, repeat that I've supported the explosion that took place in september of 1955.

This, not only due to urgent, personal reasons such as family ties –which I had-, but because I harbored the certainty that the system that was in this way being deposed was one which got around the civil rights, which encouraged subservience on the one side and exacerbation on the other.

And I don't possess a short-term memory: what I had thought then, wrongly or not, I continue to believe now… What I don't properly understand is how they intend to make us choose between the peronist barbarity and the revolutionary one.

Between the murderers of Ingallinella and the murderers of Satanowsky"."

Walsh was never an actual supporter of Peronism, but he became more sympathetic towards the group from October 1956, writing in that month's edition of Leoplán, "Here they closed their eyes", a tribute to the naval aviators who had died during the Revolución Libertadora.

In 1957 he finished Operación Masacre ("Operation Massacre"), an investigative work on the illegal execution of Peron's sympathizers during an ill-fated attempt at restoring Peronism to power in June 1956.

Operación Masacre is now considered by scholars as the first historical non-fiction novel, preceding Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

In 1957 he went to the office of Dr. Jorge Ramos Mejía and asked Dr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, director of the weekly Azul y Blanco to help him publish the book.

With the financial backing of Mejía he was able that same year to produce Operation Massacre (Operación Masacre), with the subtitle "A process that has not been closed" from Ediciones Sigla, an investigative journalism piece that was later brought to the cinema.

His works are principally in the genres of Police and Crime, Journalism and Testimonial, with books that have been widely published like Who killed Rosendo (Quién mató a Rosendo).

In September 1958 he wrote:

In 1959 he travelled to Cuba, where with his colleagues and compatriots Jorge Masetti, Rogelio García Lupo, and the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, he founded the agency Prensa Latina.

On returning to Argentina he worked at the magazines Primera Plana and Panorama.

In 1960 he went to Cuba, where together with Jorge Masetti Walsh founded the Prensa Latina press agency.

It has been established that he decrypted a CIA telex referring to the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion, helping Fidel Castro to prepare for the supposedly secret operation.

Back in Argentina in 1961, by the late 1960s he had close ties to the CGT de los Argentinos.

During the Onganía dictatorship he founded the weekly CGTA, which he directed between 1968 and 1970, and which after a raid and the detention of Raimundo Ongaro was published clandestinely.

During 1972 he wrote for the weekly Semanario Villero and from 1973 in the daily Noticias with his friends Paco Urondo and Miguel Bonasso, among others.

In 1973 Walsh joined the Montoneros guerrilla radical group, but eventually began to question the views of the organization, and so decided to fight the new dictatorship that arose in 1976 by the use of words instead of guns, then writing his famous Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta.

At least four films have been based on his work, including Operación masacre (1973) and Murdered at Distance ("Asesinato a distancia", 1998), and three of his books were published years after his death, most notably Cuento para tahúres y otros relatos policiales.

Walsh's daughter, Patricia Walsh, is a politician.

Shortly after, on March 25, 1977, he was mortally wounded during a shoot-out with a "task force" group that ambushed him on the street.

Walsh's body and some of his writings were kidnapped and never seen again, and he is remembered as a desaparecido, as well as a victim of state-sponsored terrorism.

Then at the age of 18 he began working as a proofreader at a newspaper, the humble beginnings of what would develop into a distinguished career in journalism, which continued until his assassination in 1977.