Operation Massacre

by Rodolfo Walsh

  With Operation Massacre, Walsh puts forward and elevates the raw truth of the facts. He offers a direct accusation, a documentary story instead of a novel based on fictionalized political events. The political use of literature ought to take a step away from fiction. This is Walsh’s great lesson.

  He notes in his Diario that “[T]o be absolutely diaphanous” is the goal of his writing. Clarity is a virtue, but not because things need to be simplified in order for people to understand—that’s just the rhetoric of journalism. The virtue lies in confronting a deliberate darkness, a global jargon, a certain established rhetoric that makes clarity difficult to attain. “For a rigorous man it becomes more difficult each year to say anything without raising the suspicion that he might be lying or mistaken,” he wrote. Aware of this difficulty and his social circumstances, Walsh produced a unique, flexible, and inimitable style that permeates every text he wrote and that we remember him for.

  Throughout his work, Walsh engages with two distinct poetics. On the one hand, fiction for Walsh is the art of ellipsis: it deals with allusion and that which is not said. Its construction is in total opposition to the simplification and the aesthetic of urgency that characterize social realism. Walsh’s second poetics manifests as the documentary story, the autobiographical treatment of testimonies, pamphlets, and diatribes: the writer is a historian of the present who speaks in the name of truth and denounces misuses of power. Walsh’s “Open Letter to the Military Junta” is the greatest example of this kind of political writing.

  There is one exemplary story in which the two poetics clearly play out and interact. “Esa mujer” (“That Woman”) is a story Walsh wrote in 1963 about someone who speaks to a former State Intelligence Services officer in an attempt to find the body of Eva Perón. The narrator is a journalist confronting and negotiating with this figure who symbolizes the world of power. He wants to unveil the secret that will lead him to Eva Perón’s body, with everything that goes along with finding that woman who embodies the history of an entire people. This intellectual’s investigation, this search, is the driving force of the story.

  The first indicator of Walsh’s poetics is that Eva Perón is never mentioned explicitly in the story. We all know that she is the one being discussed, but the most important aspect of a story should never be named. Walsh practices the art of ellipsis, which clearly calls for the reader to crack the encoded context to seek out the implicit story, what is said in the unsaid. Walsh moves his style in this direction of allusion and condensation, of saying the most with the fewest number of words.

  We catch a glimpse of Walsh’s other poetics in the stance of this educated man, this journalist who is confronted with an historical enigma. For Walsh, Eva Perón appears first as a secret, a problem that has to be solved, but also as a destination. “If I could find that woman I wouldn’t feel alone anymore,” the narrator says. Finding Evita, who represents the masses and the popular tradition of Peronism, means the intellectual must cross over to the other side. But crossing over no longer means finding a world of terror; instead, it allows for the possibility of finding friends and allies. Suddenly the intellectual does not feel that the barbaric world of the masses is adversarial and antagonistic, but that it is a place to escape to, a point of arrival. This story can be read as a very early allegory foreshadowing Walsh’s decisions to join the Montoneros and convert to Peronism.

  Everything in the story is condensed into the blind search for Eva Perón’s missing body, but at the same time, Walsh is exploring two separate tensions. First, we have the tension between the intellectual and the masses. And second, we have the tension between the ex-Intelligence officer who knows where that woman is, on the one hand, and, on the other, we have the narrator of the story—the journalist who happens to share some of Walsh’s traits in his commitment to decoding secrets and investigating manipulations of power. This is where the writer comes in: his task is to establish the truth, to act like a detective, to discover the secret that the State is hiding, to reveal the truth that is being hidden—buried, in this case, in a hidden body, a historical, symbolic body that has been stolen and disgraced.

  Walsh summons both poetics again when he confronts the question that many writers of the 20th century, among them Primo Levi, Osip Mandelstam, and Paul Célan, have wrestled with: How can you narrate horror? How can you convey horror without just reporting on it? The experience of the concentration camps, of the Gulag, of genocide. Literature shows us that there are events that are nearly impossible to convey and that thus suggest a new relationship to the limits of language. The most poignant example of this in Walsh’s work is the way he tells the story of his daughter’s death in what is known as “Letter to Vicky,” which he wrote to Maria Victoria Walsh in 1976, in the thick of the military dictatorship. This piece of writing is by no means a work of fiction, but Walsh practices ellipsis and displacement nonetheless. After recreating the exact moment when he finds out about her death over the radio and the gesture that comes with this revelation (“I heard your name mispronounced, and it took a second for it to register. I automatically started to cross myself the way I used to as a child”), he writes: “Last night I had a terrible nightmare. There was a pillar of fire, powerful, but contained within its borders, that was flaring up quite intensely.” A nightmare with virtually no content, condensed into a horrific abstract image.

  He then writes: “Today on the train a man said ‘I suffer greatly, I’d like to go to sleep and wake up in a year.’” And Walsh concludes: “He was speaking for himself but for me as well.” He puts words in the mouth of someone else who is speaking about his pain, a stranger on the train, a stranger who happens to be around. The small step he takes away from what he is trying to say is a metaphor that conveys the experience of limits: someone speaks for him and expresses the pain in a somber, direct, and very moving way. From this displacement you get everything: the pain, the compassion, a lesson in style. Through this movement, Walsh shows what cannot be told.

  Walsh uses the same displacement in his “Letter to My Friends” (written several days later), when he reconstructs the circumstances of Vicky’s death. He reconstructs the ambush on the house where his daughter is in the middle of the city, the siege, the resistance, the combat, the military forces that surround the house. In order to tell the story of what happened, he once again endows someone else with a voice: “I received the testimony of one of those men, a conscript.” He then transcribes the story as told by this man who was there, besieging the place: “The fighting lasted more than an hour and a half. A man and a woman were shooting from up top. The woman caught our attention because every time she shot a burst and we ducked, she laughed.” The laughter is there, the extreme youth, the shock, everything is condensed and narrated by someone else. The impersonality of the story and the admiration for his own enemies reinforce the heroism of the scene: those who are going to kill her are the first ones who recognize her bravery, just as the best epic tradition dictates. Just like the case of the man on the train, here too there is a displacement and the voice is given to another who condenses what he is trying to say, and therefore becomes the solder who tells the story. This displacement recalls the form of a fiction that is intending to tell the truth. Maybe that soldier never existed, just as maybe that man on the train never existed, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the vision it produces, the fact that they are there to witness and can then tell the story of the experience.

  We see this movement as well in the prologue to the third edition of Operation Massacre (1968), where he describes the first scene, the origin of how history and politics came into his life. Walsh is at a café in La Plata where he always goes to talk about literature and play chess. One night in June of 1956, they hear shooting, people are running in the streets, a group of Peronists and rebel officers attack the Second Division Command: it is the start of Valle’s failed rebellion that will result in secret repression and the José León Suárez execut
ions. And that night, Walsh leaves the café, runs along the tree-lined streets, and finally finds shelter in his house. This is when he tells the story: “I also haven’t forgotten how, standing by the window blinds, I heard a recruit dying in the street who didn’t say ‘Long live the nation!’ but instead: ‘Don’t leave me here alone, you sons of bitches.’”

  The other conscript who is lying there terrified and about to die, in him we see the truth of the story. A displacement to the other, a fictional movement towards a scene that condenses and crystallizes a network of multiple meanings. That is how the experience is conveyed; it is far beyond simple information. Walsh had a natural ability to depict a scene using what is heard and to condense pure experience. It is a movement that occurs within the story, an ellipsis that displaces truth-telling onto the Other.

  Walsh is wise enough to know, however, that the writer is not the only one using fictions to his advantage. The State also narrates, constructs fictions, and manipulates certain stories, while literature and the writer construct alternative stories that are in tension with them. The French poet Paul Valéry confronts these questions with the following logic: “A society rises from brutality to order. Barbarism is the age of the fact, so the age of order is necessarily the realm of fictions, because there is no power capable of establishing the order of the body solely through bodily force. Fictional forces are necessary.” The State cannot function by pure coercion alone; it needs what Valéry calls fictional forces. It needs to construct consensus, to construct stories and make people believe a certain version of events.

  What matters is not only the content of these State fictions, not just the material that they manipulate, but also the form that they take. To begin to understand their form, we can look to the methods and devices used to construct them. During the period of the military dictatorship, for example, one of the stories being constructed was what we might call the surgical story, a story that pertained to bodies. The military used a medical metaphor to explain what they were doing. They concealed everything that was happening, but simultaneously did say what was happening, just in the form of a story about sickness and health. They spoke of Argentina as a sick body that had a tumor, a cancer that was spreading—this was the subversive element or revolution—and the role of the military was to operate on it. As doctors, their work was aseptic, beyond good and evil, an appropriate response to the needs of science, which calls for destruction and mutilation for the sake of saving a life. Everything that was secret was actually revealed in this story, just displaced. There were, as in every story, two stories being told: there was the attempt to make people believe that Argentina was a sick society and that the military was coming in from the outside as technicians to fix the problem, and then there was the idea that a painful operation had to be performed and, as Videla used to say, it was an operation that had to be performed without anesthesia. That was the discourse, the fictional version, that the State used: it told the truth about what it was doing, but in a covert and allegorical way.

  This is a very small example of a State fiction. Running in tandem with these fictions are a series of anti-State stories, stories of resistance and opposition that circulate within a society and resist the State fictions. I have often thought that these social stories—anonymous fictions, micro-stories, testimonies that are exchanged and circulated—are the greatest context that literature uses. The writer is the one who knows how to hear them, who is attuned to this social narration; he is also the one who imagines them and writes them.

  As just one example of these anonymous stories, consider an anti-State fiction that circulated during the military dictatorship, around 1978 and 1979, at the time of the conflict with Chile. The war was about to become one of the political schemes that the military was looking for, just as the Malvinas later were. Attempting to construct political consensus through war was the only way that the military had of generating public support. There was a pervasive feeling of repression in the country, and the idea of going to the South in search of conflict was in the air. Multiple versions of an anonymous story began circulating in the city. It was said that somebody knew somebody who had seen a train stacked with coffins headed south at a deserted train station in the suburbs at dawn. A cargo train that someone had seen pass by slowly, like a ghost, in the silence of the night. Those empty coffins corresponded to the disappeared, to the bodies with no graves. It was also a story that foresaw the war in the Malvinas because there was no question that those coffins in that imaginary train were headed towards the Malvinas, to where soldiers were going to die and need to be buried.

  This seemingly insignificant, forgotten story presents a clear, compact version of the way alternative stories are created, anonymous stories that, in their condensed and extraordinary form, have multiple meanings. Some truth has been captured briefly in the metallic sound of a train passing through the night. There is a very important difference between showing and telling in literature: this story does not tell or say anything directly, but it allows the reader to see and to understand, which is why it lives on in our memories as an unforgettable vision. The image of an unending train that passes at dawn through an empty station and the fact that someone is there to see it who can then tell the story—this is a very good telling of what it was like to live in Argentina during the dictatorship. Because it is not just that there is a train crossing in the story, but that there is a witness who tells someone what he has seen. There will always be a witness who has seen and will tell the story, someone who survives so that the story is not forgotten.

  On some level, this tension between the State story and the contradictory stories of the masses that circulate, is the story that Walsh has always tried to tell. Because, in a sense, Walsh has tried both to discover the truths that the State is manipulating, and also to listen to the story of the masses, the alternative versions that circulate and contradict. Operation Massacre is a definitive text in this sense. On the one hand, again, the intellectual, the educated one, confronts the State and exposes it for constructing a false version of the facts. In order to construct an opposing reality, Walsh records the antagonistic versions, looks for the truth in other versions and voices. He tries to show how this State story hides, manipulates, and falsifies, and tries to show the truth through the version provided by the witness who has seen everything and survived. If you read Operation Massacre, you will see how he goes from one voice to the next, from one story to the next, and this story as a whole runs parallel to the dismantling of the State story. The individuals who have lived through that brutal experience and who give the writer fragments of that reality, they are the witnesses who, in the night, have seen the horror of the story. The narrator is the one who knows how to transcribe these voices. The voice you hear has the spoken quality of the voice of the masses.

  Walsh essentially listens to the Other. He knows how to hear the story that emerges from the popular voice and tries to get closer to the truth by using it. The truth is in the story and the story is partial: it modifies, transforms, alters, and sometimes deforms the facts. A web of alternative stories needs to be constructed in order to bring back what has been lost. Walsh the craftsman deftly handles this basic dual movement of hearing and transmitting the popular story while also disarming the State fiction. The conquerors write the story and the conquered tell it. Walsh dismantles the written story and contradicts it with the witness’s story.

  With Walsh, the nonfiction story moves towards the truth and reconstructs it from the perspective of a well-defined political stance. This reconstruction presumes a neatly defined position within the social realm and a clear conception of the relationships between truth and struggles for social justice. In this sense, Walsh’s nonfiction books present a departure from the more neutral versions of the genre as it has been practiced in the United States, starting with Capote, Mailer, and what’s been called “New Journalism.” In Walsh’s work, access to the truth is tangled up with political st
ruggle, social inequality, power relations, and the State’s strategizing. Since he is dealing with a notion of the truth that escapes the most immediate evidence, he must first dismantle the fictional forces constructed by the powers that be, and then rescue the fragments of truth, the allegories, the stories circulating among the people. Walsh is fighting for this latter, social truth that has been lost, and is recording and reconstructing it. The truth is a story that someone else tells.

  ­—Ricardo Piglia

  Photographs

  Mayoría cover from May 27, 1957. Bottom left reads: "Lived and complete history of the innocent victims of the José León Suárez killings and of those who miraculously survived."

  Walsh's first article for Mayoría. The title reads "'Operation Massacre' by R. J. Walsh: a book that can't find a publisher." Pictured in the photos are Nicolás Carranza and Francisco Garibotti, both of whom were killed in the José León Suárez execution.

  The line of eucalyptus trees that Giunta could see from the site of the execution.

  The garbage dump in José León Suárez where the killings took place.

  Survivor Juan Carlos Livraga's formal accusation as published in the newspaper Propósitos. The title, "Castigo a los culpables," translates as "I Call for the Punishment of the Guilty".

  About the Author

  The grandson of Irish immigrants, Rodolfo Walsh was born in a small Patagonian town in 1927. He wrote crime fiction and worked as a translator before publishing Operación Masacre in 1957. He traveled to Cuba in the midst of the revolution and launched a newspaper with Gabriel García Márquez, among others. Upon his return to Argentina in 1961 he was shunned by the journalistic community for his connections to the Cuban Revolution. In 1972, Walsh updated Operación Masacre for the fourth and final time before joining the radical Peronist group, the Montoneros, the following year. A day after submitting his now famous 1977 “Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta,” Walsh was gunned down in the street by agents of the State.