Rodolfo Walsh

Rodolfo Jorge Walsh (Lamarque, Río Negro, January 9, 1927 - Buenos Aires, March 25, 1977) was an Argentine journalist, writer and Peronist militant. He is recognized for being a pioneer in the writing of testimonial novels such as Operación Masacre —considered the first non-fiction novel — and Who killed Rosendo? , although he he also excelled as a fiction writer.

He was part of the Montoneros since before 1976, an organization that first faced Triple A and then the last Argentine civic-military dictatorship (1976-1983). In the midst of dictatorship-imposed state terrorism and a widespread massacre of his fellow militants, Walsh refused to leave the country for protection, choosing instead to live in hiding while he began writing and disseminating a series of "Controversial Letters" #3. 4;. On March 25, 1977, the day after the first anniversary of the coup that gave birth to the dictatorship, while he was distributing the first copies of his famous Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta in mailboxes the city of Buenos Aires, he faced shots with a task force from the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA), who ambushed him and fatally wounded him, taking his dying body on the spot. The dictatorship never revealed where Walsh's remains are located, which is why since then he has been part of the list of detainees disappeared due to state terrorism in Argentina. In 2011 the justice system identified and convicted seven of the perpetrators for murder.

His status as a writer, novelist, and journalist has grown over time, and he is currently considered one of the most outstanding artists and intellectuals in Latin America and the world.

Biography

Walsh was born on January 9, 1927 in Pueblo Nuevo in the Colonia de Choele-Choel (which since 1942 was called Lamarque), in the province of Río Negro. In 1941, he arrived in the city of La Plata to complete his secondary studies, first at a nuns' school in Capilla del Señor and, later, at the Fahy de Moreno Institute, a boarding school run by priests from an Irish congregation, intended for children of families with ancestry of that nationality.

The experience in the latter would serve to set the scene for three stories that formed the «Irish cycle»: Irishmen behind a cat, The land trades and A dark day of justice. All three were published in books (the first in Los oficios terrestres, in 1965; the second, in A kilo of gold in 1967 and, the third, in its own volume in 1973, with an interview by Ricardo Piglia as a prologue); They have been collected in other editions. In the one of the Complete Stories made by the publishing house De la Flor and under the care of Piglia a fourth story was included, El 37, published in 1960 in an anthology of the publishing house Jorge Álvarez under the title Childhood Memories.

He studied Literature for two years at the University of La Plata; he dropped out to work in the most diverse trades: he was an clerk in a refrigerator, a worker, a glass washer, an antiques seller, and a window cleaner.

At the age of 17, he had started working as a proofreader at Hachette publishing house. Shortly after he made his first weapons in journalism, publishing articles and stories in various media in Buenos Aires and La Plata.

Journalistic activity

From 1951 to 1961, he worked for the magazines Leoplán, Panorama, and Vea y Lea, in addition to continuing at the Hachette publishing house, already as a translator. During those years he published the anthologies Ten Argentine police stories (1953) and Anthology of the strange story (1956). Both the 1976 and 2014 editions reappeared in four volumes.

In 1953, his first book came out, Variaciones en rojo, which contains three short novels in the detective genre, which he was very fond of, with which he won the First Municipal Prize for Literature of Buenos Aires. It is dedicated to Elina Tejerina, his first wife and mother of his two daughters, Victoria and Patricia. Years later, he would renounce this book.

In 1956, he witnessed a military uprising against the de facto government that had overthrown Juan Domingo Perón and street fighting in La Plata, where he lived. During the early morning of June 9 to 10, nine civilians were arrested and shot in a garbage dump in José León Suárez on Route 4; the same thing happened in the southern zone of Greater Buenos Aires. Months later, in a bar he frequented, he heard the news that would change his life: "There is a man shot who lives."

Cover of the book Operation Massacre (1957) by Rodolfo Walsh, using as an image the painting On 3 May in Madridby the Spanish painter Francisco Goya.

He managed to identify him as Juan Carlos Livraga, whom he interviewed, and from whom he could learn that there were other survivors. He worked the following months in feverish pursuit and search, questioning acquaintances, neighbors and survivors. He rented a house in the Tigre Delta under the false name of Francisco Freire, and in a few months he wrote the first version of what would become Operación Masacre . The prologue to the first book edition shows his intentions not to end the published research:

This is the story that I write in hot and a pull, so they don't earn me by hand, but then I'm going to wrinkle day by day in a pocket because the ride all over Buenos Aires and nobody wants to publish it to me and almost never find out.

Finally, from January 15 to March 30, 1957, it was published in the small nationalist newspaper Revolución Nacional. From June 27 to 29, he published nine more articles in the Mayoría magazine of the brothers Tulio and Bruno Jacovella, on whose recommendation, he appeared at Estudio Ramos Mejía where the weekly Azul y Blanco where he asked to speak with Dr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, his director; In December 1957, the first edition of the book appeared, with the subtitle "A process that has not been closed", by Ediciones Sigla, supported by Jorge Ramos Mejía and owned by Sánchez Sorondo. In subsequent reissues (1964, 1969, seven editions between 1972 and 1974), Walsh rectified data, adding and deleting prologues and epilogues, commenting on the book's impact over the years, and at the same time demonstrating the evolution of his thinking., which was turning more and more towards the armed struggle and moving away from the left-liberalism with which he wrote the first version.

Operation Massacre is considered a piece of investigative journalism forerunner of New Journalism and considered by some the first testimonial novel or non-fiction novel, anticipating In Cold Blood by the American Truman Capote, founder of the genre in the Anglo-Saxon sphere.

Right-wing political activity

Until 1957, his relationship with political groups had been almost nil. Between 1944 and 1945 he was close to the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista, a group that he characterized years later as "the best creation of Nazism in Argentina... anti-Semitic and anti-communist in a city where the Jews and the left had their own weight.".

He was anti-Peronist and supported the coup d'état that overthrew Perón in 1955, at least until October 1956, when he signed the note "Here they closed their eyes" in the Leoplán magazine, laudation of the naval aviators who fell while bombing resistant Peronists during the Liberating Revolution. In September 1958, he stated:

I'm not a Peronist, I haven't been or intend to be... I can, without remorse, repeat that I have been in favour of the outbreak of September 1955. Not only because of the pressing motives of family affection—which there were—but I opened the certainty that a system that mocked civil liberties had just been overthrown, which fostered obsecution on the one hand and overflows on the other. And I have no short memory: what I thought then wrong or not, I keep thinking about it... What I do not understand is that we intend to force ourselves to choose between the Peronist barbarism and the revolutionary barbarism. Among the killers of Dr. Ingalinella and the murderers of Satanowsky

Political activity in Cuba and Guatemala

In 1959, he traveled to Cuba, where along with his colleagues and compatriots such as Jorge Masetti, Rogelio García Lupo (whom he met during his time in the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista) and Gabriel García Márquez founded the Prensa Latina news agency. In 1960, he accidentally intercepted and managed to decrypt with a cryptography manual the secret communications between the CIA and agents in Guatemala about the preparations for the invasion of Playa Girón. He wanted to make a big note on the subject but the Cuban government vetoed the idea. Masetti also arranged for Walsh to infiltrate Cuban training camps in Retalhuleu, Guatemala, disguised as a priest selling Bibles, but the Cuban government had other espionage plans and rejected the idea. Masetti and García Márquez flew on a journalistic mission to Peru and on their return they made an unexpected stopover in Guatemala. Masetti wanted to spy on the Retalhuleu training grounds and García Márquez dissuaded him. Instead, they took testimonial photos in Guatemala with its unmistakable volcano in the background and based on the deciphered cables, they wrote the story of a clandestine trip enriched with imagined details, which they sent to President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes.

In February 1961, without the knowledge of the Cuban government, Walsh sent an extensive report to the Buenos Aires magazine Che revealing correspondence from the US ambassador to Guatemala and although he did not mention the camps training, revealed how he had cracked the codes. Jorge Masetti had resigned from his position at the Agency two days before the publication, the government intervened in the agency and Walsh had to resign.

Back to Argentina

Since his return from Cuba (1961) he continued to live in Lorelei, the rented house in the Tigre Delta, where he wrote the first version of Operation Massacre.

In those years, he published his only two plays (La granada and La batalla) and his most famous collections of short stories: Los oficios terrestres (1965, which includes the story "That Woman") and A kilo of gold (1967).

In 1967, he met Lilia Ferreyra, who would be his companion until her disappearance.

From 1968, as Walsh wrote, his ideas about literature and political commitment changed substantially, beginning to privilege the latter over the former.

He worked for the magazine Panorama and during the Onganía dictatorship, he founded the Argentine CGT weekly, which he directed between 1968 and 1970, and which after the arrest of Raimundo Ongaro and the raid in 1969 to the CGTA it was published clandestinely.

In 1969, he published Who Killed Rosendo?, an investigation into the murder of union leader Rosendo García. Walsh concluded that the person responsible was Augusto Timoteo Vandor, general secretary of the CGT, and supporter of a less combative policy and more concessions to the military government. He was shocked to learn of the murder from him.

Militancy in Montoneros

By the mid-1970s, he had begun to associate with Base Peronism, the political wing of the Peronist Armed Forces (FAP). After a split, produced by political differences, a sector of this organization merged with Montoneros. There, his nom de guerre was "Esteban"; then "El Capitan", "Professor Neurus" or "Neurus".

According to Horacio Verbitsky, Walsh met the Villaflor brothers, about whom he wrote in Who killed Rosendo?, in the CGTA and, at first, when he was asked to join the Peronist Armed Forces, he denied.

In 1972, he wrote for a year in the Semanario Villero and from 1973 in the newspaper Noticias together with his friends Verbitsky, Paco Urondo, Juan Gelman and Miguel Bonasso, among others. He was a correspondent for that same medium sent to Palestine. That year he collaborated in the film adaptation of Operación Masacre , directed by Jorge Cedrón, with the participation of Julio Troxler, a survivor of the episode who played himself. The film was filmed in hiding and released a year later.

In 1973 he published his third and last investigation in a book, the Satanowsky Case, about the murder of a lawyer by SIDE agents due to a dispute over ownership of the newspaper La Razón. Although the case and Walsh's investigation of it took place between 1958 and 1959, Walsh did not publish the notes in book form until that time.

At the same time, he published the story A Dark Day of Justice with an interview by Ricardo Piglia as a prologue, in which he explained his thoughts and his idea that writing cannot be separated from political militancy. Walsh did not publish fiction again, he dedicated himself to journalistic activity and militancy in Montoneros, a movement he joined that year.

In 1974, Walsh's differences with the leadership of the movement began, after the movement's decision to go underground. «reintegrate with the people, separate the organization into tight and independent combat cells, distribute the money among them and try to organize a massive resistance, based more on popular insertion than on foquista-type operatives».

ANCHOR

On March 24, 1976, the Armed Forces overthrew Estela Martínez, and began what they called the National Reorganization Process. The Government Military Junta applied censorship to the media, intervened in the unions and undertook a policy of State Terrorism that implied the kidnapping, torture and disappearance of thousands of people.

Faced with censorship, Walsh created ANCLA (Clandestine News Agency), along with activists and journalists Carlos Aznárez, Lila Pastoriza and Lucila Pagliai. The project consisted of setting up an information chain that issued more than 200 cables that circulated from hand to hand. In these newsletters one could read:

Reproduce this information, circulate it by means at your fingertips: by hand, by machine, to mimeograph, orally. Send copies to your friends: nine out of ten will be waiting for you. Millions want to be informed. Terror is based on incommunicado. Break the insulation. Feel again the moral satisfaction of an act of freedom. Defeat terror. Circulate this information. Rodolfo Walsh

After the murder of Walsh, the exile of Aznárez and Pagliai and the kidnapping of Pastoriza, the task was continued by Verbitsky until the following year.

Death of his daughter Victoria and Paco Urondo

The year 1976 not only represented a change in Walsh's life due to his going into hiding, but also due to two very significant losses: that of his friend, the poet and guerrilla fighter Urondo, and that of his daughter Victoria.

Urondo was ambushed and assassinated in Mendoza on June 17. In a text in which he recounted the event, Walsh criticized the decision of the leadership of the movement to send him to an area that was known to be dangerous:

Paco's transfer to Mendoza was a mistake. Who was a permanent sangria since 1975, could never stand it. The Paco lasted a few weeks... It was fearing what would happen. There was a meeting with an enemy vehicle, a chase, a shooting of the two cars at par. Iban Paco, Lucia with the baby and a partner. They had a metra, but he was in the trunk. They couldn't take off. Finally Paco stopped, looked for something in his clothes and said, "You escape." Then he added: "I took the pill and I feel bad." The companion remembers that Lucia said to him, "But, Dad, why did you do that." The companion escaped between the bullets, and days later she got hurt to Buenos Aires... Paco got two shots in his head, although he was probably already dead.

Urondo died from an exploding skull caused by a rifle butt fired at him by police officer Celustiano Lucero.

On September 29, 1976, his daughter María Victoria (her nom de guerre was “Hilda”, and “Vicki” for family and friends), a 2nd Montoneros officer, died in a confrontation (the Combate de Corro Street) with the Army, one day after his 26th birthday. Finding herself surrounded and with no possibility of escape on the terrace, she and Alberto Molina, the last survivor, raised their arms and after a brief speech that ended with the phrase "You do not kill us, we choose to die », were shot in the temple. In December, Walsh published a message ―in which he recounts the circumstances of the event― called Letter to my friends He ends with this reflection:

In the past I have reflected on that death. I wondered if my daughter, if all those who die like her, had another way. The answer springs from the depths of my heart and I want my friends to meet her. Vicki could choose other paths that were different without being dishonorable, but the one he chose was the most just, the most generous, the most reasoned. His lucid death is a synthesis of his short, beautiful life. He did not live for her, lived for others, and those others are millions. His death yes, his death was gloriously his, and in that pride I affirm myself and I am the one who reborns from it.

Her other daughter, Patricia, is an Argentine political leader who became a national deputy for the Izquierda Unida coalition, in 1999 she was a candidate for President of the Nation and since 2007, she has served as a legislator for the city of Buenos Aires.

The Walsh Papers and his Open Letter

'Open Letter' by Rodolfo Walsh, work by León Ferrari located in the Space Memory and Human Rights (exESMA).

Between November 1976 and January 1977 Rodolfo Walsh, who had first officer rank under the nom de guerre “Esteban" or "Neurus”, he wrote five internal documents criticizing point by point various self-critical documents issued by the Conduction of Montoneros in those days. These internal documents known as the Walsh Papers, are part of the simultaneous drafting of the famous "Open letter from a writer to the Military Junta", dated one day before he disappeared, on March 25, 1977.

Walsh's criticism is blunt. He clarifies in the papers that it was his opinion and those of & # 34; his subordinates & # 34;. Walsh argues that the Leadership's self-criticism is apparent and that his documents "sidestep the real gravity of our military situation", criticizing the "triumphalist" approach; and "militarist" -he uses those terms-, that he had adopted the Leadership, which on the one hand underestimated the dictatorship and on the other adopted methods of struggle that also violated human rights, referring to the murders of people:

One of the great successes of the enemy was to be at war with us and not with the whole of the people. And this to a great extent by our mistakes, that we self-insulated with ideologism and our lack of political proposals for real people. Our weapons are also in violation of international conventions. They self-sacrifice, but we too, and in that thunder they win, because we had to stop it and they didn't.

Rodolfo Walsh in "Observations on the Council document of 11/11/76"

Walsh argued that the root of the problem was political: the mistaken assumption of the Montoneros that the Peronist movement had exhausted itself and that its place was being taken by the "montonero movement. He denies that there is a feeling of adherence to a supposed "montonero movement" within the people and specifically in the working class. Quite the contrary, state terrorism, Walsh maintains, led the people to take refuge even more in their own political culture, Peronism, and to move away from Montoneros, losing "popular representation" that he knew he had two years before. In this way, Montoneros and his militants, instead of taking refuge in the wide coverage that Peronism offered them, separated from it, leaving them without refuge in the face of a repression that reached unknown levels.

We deny the Peronist Movement and the Montonero Movement does not exist. So where are we going to take refuge when the enemy squeezes?

Rodolfo Walsh in "Observations on the Council document of 11/11/76"

Walsh proposed and considered that there was still time to do so, "fall back towards Peronism," dissolve the Montonero Army, abandon the "task of inventing the Montonero Movement, which will have no real existence&# 3. 4; and give broad autonomy to the militant groups, "to resist the dictatorship together with the people." Walsh's five internal documents were published by Baschetti and can be consulted online, in a special edition of the Sudestada magazine.

On March 24, 1977, while Montoneros was debating the criticisms formulated in the Papeles, Walsh sent his famous Open letter from a writer to the Military Junta, described by Gabriel García Márquez as a "masterpiece of journalism". Walsh's text is a terrifying text. He speaks to the Board members in the first person. He tells them about his daughter & # 34; died fighting them & # 34;, a few months before. He speaks to them "of the extermination group", of the "deepest terror that Argentine society has known", of the "disappearances", of the "camps of concentration", of the thousands of habeas corpus rejected, of "absolute, timeless, metaphysical torture," the massacres, the coordination of repression with other South American countries and United States, the illegitimacy of the government, of the anti-popular policy that they were executing:

These facts, which shake the conscience of the civilized world, are not, however, those that have brought the Argentine people more suffering or the worst violations of the human rights in which you incur. The economic policy of that government must seek not only the explanation of its crimes but a greater atrocity that punishes millions of human beings with planned misery.

Rodolfo Walsh, Open letter...

Walsh concludes his letter with a request to the Board and an advance warning, although he makes it clear that he knows he will not be heard:

...give to the Commanders in Chief of the 3 Weapons who will meditate on the abyss to which they lead the country after the illusion of winning a war that, even if they killed the last guerrilla, would only begin under new forms, because the causes that more than twenty years ago move the resistance of the Argentine people will not be disappeared but aggravated by the memory of the rage caused and the revelation of the atrocities committed.

Rodolfo Walsh, Open letter...

Walsh spent his last months in a house in San Vicente, since one of his two houses in the Delta (Liberation) had been raided by the Navy. Although he had not returned to publishing fiction, he continued to write stories such as Juan was going down the river. Both this and other unpublished ones of his were kidnapped by personnel of the Armed Forces when they raided that house (also usurped) on the day of his murder and they have not been able to be recovered.

His murder

Rodolfo Walsh Station, where the well-known writer was shot down.

The disappearance and murder of Rodolfo Walsh was investigated within the framework of the so-called "ESMA Megacause (Second Trial, Testimony C") and judicially resolved by the Federal Criminal Oral Court no. October 2011, when the court sentenced Jorge Eduardo Acosta (life sentence), Antonio Pernías (life sentence), Alfredo Astiz (life sentence), Jorge Radice (life sentence), Ricardo Cavallo (life sentence) for the murder of Rodolfo Walsh., Ernesto Weber (life imprisonment) and Juan Carlos Fotea (25 years in prison). Juan Carlos Rolón and Pablo García Velasco were acquitted in the first instance, but the acquittals were declared null by the Chamber, when the appeals were processed.

The judgment thus describes his murder:

That, upon reaching the Constitution, Walsh telephoned a “cita” with José María Salgado, nicknamed “Pepe”, which would take place between 13.30 and 16.00, in the vicinity of the avenues San Juan and Entre Ríos, of this city and which aimed, like the others planned for that day, to spread the contents of the letter that the name had written on the occasion of the first anniversary of the military dictatorship. On that day, the survivor would have three appointments; in addition to meeting Salgado, he would meet with René Haidar and the wife of a militant, who had died with his daughter in an operation.

That, in circumstances when the victim walked through the sidewalk avenue San Juan, between Combate de los Pozos and Entre Ríos, wearing a beige-colored guayabera with three pockets, brown pants, a hat straw, brown shoes, and glasses, and carrying with it a portfolio and a gun brand “Walther”, PPK model, calibre 22, was approached by a group operation belonging to the UT 3.3.2, which was composed of, approximately 25 to 30 men, moving in more than six vehicles, including a “Peugeot 504”, a “Ford Falcon”, a “Ford F 100”, a “recoleta” and a van they called “Swat”.

It was credited that Rodolfo Jorge Walsh introduced one of his hands inside a bag, and inside a bag, and on suspicion of resisting, one of the interveners gave notice of an emergency, and the cry of “Pepa, pepa” - term used to name the grenade-, a lot of officers began to shoot him, until the victim collapsed (as reported. the witnesses Lauletta and Gras, whose testimonies will be analyzed more forward). That Walsh suffered several bullet impacts on his chest that he They caused death. Later, the named was introduced into one of the rolls, and led to the ESMA, where he arrived without life. Once there, it was descended sharply by the staircase that united the hall of the ground floor with the “Sótano” of the building, without being able to specify, on the date, the destination given asus remains.

That the information concerning this “cite” was obtained through the interrogation through torture, practiced José María Salgado, at some point after his abduction, sufficiently in advance to carefully design and plan the operation.

(pags. 878-879 of the judgement)

A day later, after mailing the first copies of the Open Letter in the Plaza Constitución (according to his last partner, Lilia Ferreyra, in the documentary P4R+Operation Walsh), Walsh was ambushed and kidnapped. The versions affirm that the writer had been summoned by a contact at the intersection of San Juan and Entre Ríos avenues, in the San Cristóbal neighborhood, when Task Group 3.3. from the Navy School of Mechanics, commanded by Alfredo Astiz and Jorge "Tigre" Acosta, ambushed him and ordered him to turn himself in, but Walsh resisted, pulled out a.22 short caliber pistol and managed to wound an attacker, but was riddled with a burst of FAL. Mortally wounded, he was put in the car and kidnapped. There are versions that indicate that he shot so as not to be caught alive, since his small weapon was not enough for an armed confrontation. Survivors reported having seen his lifeless body at ESMA, he remains missing.

The subway station located in the place where he was shot bears his name, while in the gardens of the former ESMA, converted into a Space for Memory and Human Rights, there is a work by the artist León Ferrari, called "Open letter", in which the text of the letter is reproduced, on transparent acrylic panels.

Memory

Signature of Rodolfo Walsh at installation Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Board in the predium of the ex-ESMA

Walsh's personality has been highlighted in literary circles as a paradigmatic case of the tension between the intellectual and politics, or between the writer and revolutionary commitment. Walsh, however, considered himself a revolutionary fighter rather than a writer, and so stated.

After the recovery of democracy in 1983, the De la Flor publishing house published posthumous texts, stories, unpublished articles and others that appeared in publications but never collected in a book, in volumes such as Tale for gamblers and other police stories (1987) or That man and other personal papers (1995). In 1996 his journalistic work was published under the title The violent profession of writing , and in 2013 his Complete Stories appeared with a prologue by Ricardo Piglia, which includes previously unpublished stories..

Walsh's life and work were portrayed in the documentary P4R+, Operación Walsh (2000), directed by Gustavo Gordillo and Gabriel Mariotto, from the National University of Lomas de Zamora and has received national awards (Silver Condor for best video film, year 2000) and international.

In March 2012, on the 35th anniversary of his kidnapping, murder and disappearance, the installation "Open Letter from a writer to the Military Junta” was inaugurated in the Memory and Human Rights Space (former ESMA) The work consists of fourteen glass panels with the complete transcription of the text. The installation was based on the idea of the plastic artist León Ferrari, and is located in front of the Official Casino.

In March 2013, the Buenos Aires Legislature approved in double reading and with 47 votes in favor, the addition of the name of Rodolfo Walsh to the Entre Ríos station on line E of the Buenos Aires Subway, on the corner where it was murdered the writer.

Several educational institutions bear his name. Such is the case of the School of Secondary Education No. 1 of the City of Buenos Aires; the Technical Education No. 2 of F. Varela; the Municipal Secondary School No. 210 in Mar del Plata; the Secondary School No. 4 of Adolfo González Chaves; a secondary school in Córdoba; the Secondary School 23 of Pilar and Technique No. 2 in La Plata, where the Special No. 515 "Elina Tejerina de Walsh" is also located, in homage to his first wife, who served as a teacher for the blind.

Legal proceedings for her disappearance

There was a trial for this crime: the defendants, who, according to the Federal Court of Appeals, "took kidnap victims in cars" to identify Walsh, also took the person who "sang" that quote that the writer had in the place where he was told. kidnapping. Ricardo Coquet, a survivor who testified before Judge Torres, recounted that one of the defendants, former officer Weber, proudly told him: "We took him down to Walsh." On October 26, 2005, 12 soldiers were arrested, including former marine Juan Carlos Rolón, in connection with Walsh's death.

On December 17, 2007, federal judge Sergio Torres raised the case to an oral trial, from which the former prefect Héctor Antonio Febrés was excluded as a defendant, who died hours before due to ingestion of cyanide in events that required an investigation.

On October 26, 2011, the verdict was read by the Court made up of judges Ricardo Farías, Daniel Obligado and Germán Castelli, after almost two years of hearings in which 160 witnesses testified, 79 of whom were survivors from the clandestine center.

The ruling was read before a massive gathering of political activists and human rights organizations. The Secretary of Human Rights of the Nation, Eduardo Luis Duhalde, also entered the Federal Oral Court 5; the president of the Judicial Council, Mario Fera; the legal secretary of the Supreme Court, Alfredo Kraut, and the head of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto.

As the sentences were announced, the audience cheered and cheered. The most tense situation occurred when the sentence to life imprisonment for Astiz was read. The shouts against him increased, which led to a slight smile from the ex-soldier who also touched the rosette pinned to his jacket. ^{[citation needed ]}

The following were also sentenced to life imprisonment:

• Jorge «Tigre» Acosta,
• Ricardo Cavallo,
• Antonio «Rata» Pernías,
• Adolfo Donda Tigel,
• Oscar Antonio Montes,
• Alberto Eduardo «Gato» González,
• Jorge Carlos «Ruger» Radice,
• Nestor Omar «Norberto» Savio,
• Raúl Enrique «Mariano» Scheller and
• Ernesto Frimón Weber.

In addition, Juan Carlos Fotea and Manuel Jacinto García Tallada were sentenced to 25 years in prison. Carlos Antonio "Tomy" Capdevilla must serve 20 years in prison. Juan Antonio "Piraña" Azic: 18 years old. Pablo Eduardo García Velasco, Julio César Coronel and Juan Carlos Rolón were acquitted.^{[citation required]}

Works

Stories

• Red variations (1953)
• Land occupations (1965)
• A kilo of gold (1967)
• A dark day of justice (1973)
• That woman (1967)

Anthologies

• Ten Argentine police stories (1953)
• Anthology of the strange story (1956)

Investigative / Non-Fiction

• Operation Massacre (1957)
• Who killed Rosendo? (1969)
• Satanowsky case (1973)
• Report Kissinger (1974)

Theater

• The grenade (1965)
• The battle (1965)

Posthumous

• Talent for tahures and other police stories (1987)
• That man and other personal papers (1995)
• The violent job of writing (1996)
• Full stories (2013)
• The Palestinian Revolution (2021)

In October 2018 the book Rodolfo Walsh, reporter in Chile was launched. 1970-1971, where his texts from the "special envoy" from Argentina to record the dawn of the government of Salvador Allende come together.

Filmography

His short story A kilo of gold was one of the stories on which he based the screenplay for the film Just Dale (1974) by Osiris Wilemsky.

In 1973 the film Operation Massacre directed by Jorge Cedrón and co-written by Walsh was released.

Television

In 2015, Public Television launched Walsh Variations, a 12-episode series based on short stories by Walsh.