The narrative is laced with Walsh’s growing sense of just how fruitless his task is - and yet he holds on. Perhaps more compelling than the story of that night in 1956, or the story of the successive dictatorships that gripped Argentina for decades, is the story of Walsh himself, woven, almost unwillingly it seems, throughout the story of the men who survived execution. Torture became the norm and spread throughout the entire country.” Aramburu’s government imprisoned thousands of workers, stifled each and every strike, and did away with union organizing.
The story is exemplary in all senses of the word - it both stands out and does not stand out as one of countless atrocious acts of violence and repression that have sprung, seemingly spontaneously, out of no particular intention, but rather a culture of violence, fear, and general repression: “The June massacre exemplifies but does not represent the height of this regime’s perversity. As Walsh explains in exquisite detail, they were gathered in an apartment far from the action listening to a boxing match while some of the men were Peronists and sympathizers, many were not, and almost none of them were directly involved. The men who were arrested and shot were suspected of being Peronist militants involved in the night’s rebellion.
The events that form the backbone of Operation Massacre are almost incidental - as Walsh himself is the first to admit, they are neither the first, the worst, nor the last of the atrocities committed in the name of revolution or order. Operación Masacre has long been recognized as one of the foundational pieces of investigative journalism more than fifty years later, Operation Massacre reaches an English-speaking audience in this clear translation by Daniella Gitlin. Operación Masacre, which Walsh managed to publish piece by piece the following year in the only magazine whose editor was brave enough to run it, is the story of the seven survivors, the events of the night, and Walsh’s quest for truth and justice as his belief in even the possibility of those values turns more and more to ruins. The following year, journalist Rodolfo Walsh published the incredible story of that night’s execution, which, as it turned out, was botched. That night, amid a series of actions that popped and fizzled around the city like scattered fireworks, police forces collected 18 men from an apartment, drove them to a peripheral neighborhood, lined them up, and executed them - sort of.
Jin Buenos Aires, a small rebellion tried and failed to reclaim Argentina for ex- (and future) President Juan Perón, nine months after he had been ousted in a coup.
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