A bald and hunched fifty-year-old man, who had to wear thick glasses because of myopia, with the absent looks of a retired English teacher, was the obsession of the task group created by Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera to fight against the Montoneros in the capital and in the northern area of Greater Buenos Aires.
This primary goal has been invoked Rodolfo Walschwhich, towards the end of March 1977, had suffered the fall of several of its intelligence staff Montoneros.
Walsh – his nickname was Esteban – knew the enemy was hot on his heels and had chosen to disguise himself as a retired teacher to escape oppression in the modest house he had bought on a country lane protect. Saint Vincentwith no running water or electricity, fifty-two kilometers south of Buenos Aires.
Rodolfo Walsch
Punctually in security measures, he had even dusted off the forged documents on behalf of Norbert Freire used between 1956 and 1957 to research the executions that led to his book Operación Masacre. With this name he signed the title deed that he bought with money from Montoneros or that his first wife, Elina Tejerina, lent him, depending on the source consulted.
“Walsh was considered a very important intelligence quarry; There was a very important effort to take him to ESMA and interrogate him.”commemorated former Montonero Martin Gras who survived the dungeons of the ESMA Officers’ Casino.
By this time, the sailors already knew that Walsh, for example, had staged the Vietnamese bombing of the federal police canteen in downtown Buenos Aires nine months earlier, in which 23 people died and there were 100 and ten wounded. It was the bloodiest attack of the 1970s; actually the entire history of Argentina up to the demolition of the AMIA in 1994.
They also knew that he had participated in other resonant events such as the kidnapping of the Born brothers: drafted the plan for the capture of the businessmen – there were two dead there – and during his captivity questioned Jorge Born about the holding’s relations with the military, police, trade unionists and the press.
He had become a key figure in the Montoneros intelligence apparatus, in direct contact with the leadership of the so-called Montoneros Army and the national leadership of that guerrilla group.
Gras added that Walsh “was almost a legend to some ESMA intelligence officers; They called him “The Walsh Ghost”; They said he walked the streets of the city disguised as a priest to evade the controls. That means there was a whole myth with Rodolfo, a very real myth on the other hand.”
In that sense, his Irish biographer Michael McCaughan noted that Walsh “enjoyed the intrigue and mystery” that surrounded his life as a guerrilla, and “prior to the coup, he offered himself to covert duties, which involved stationing himself in a building or house used for an operation should be . . . The challenge was finding a costume that would allow him to spend enough time policing the place without drawing attention to himself.”
The costume most talked about inside and outside of Montoneros was that of a priest, in which, given his Catholic training, he felt very comfortable with first Italian and then Irish nuns: cassock, long chain ending in a cross, Bible and sandals. And a concealed gun in a black habit.
A scene after the attack in the federal police canteen, 1976
A few months before his death, the Montoneros leadership decided to take him out of the country and to Europe, where he planned to found the Montoneros Peronist movement in Rome in April 1977, surrounded by figures of history and eminence, which would be Walsh’s name , most notable for his status as a notable journalist and writer.
For this they ordered the journalist in February Miguel Bonasso that he finds Walsh and his partner Lilia Ferreyra and gives them two tickets and overnight allowance to travel to Europe.
Bonasso stated that he spent two months trying to find her and regretted not having been able to. your colleague Horace Verbitsky contradicted this version: “I know the story of the other side. Rodolfo went to an appointment several times and nobody was there. Surely it is. Something must have happened.”
How was Walsh’s last day 45 years ago?
At noon on that fateful Friday, March 25, 1977, Esteban left his home on the street that now bears his name and walked a few blocks with his wife to the old San Vicente train station. The Fiat 600 his wife was driving would not start.
He wore a beige three-pocket guayabera, brown pants, matching shoes, thick gold-framed glasses, an Omega watch, a thin mustache, and a straw hat; his last costume.
On the way, an unexpected encounter: Victoriano Matute, the owner of the real estate company involved in acquiring the house, saw him and went to give him a copy of the ticket for the sale of the property on the street that was then known as Triumvirate.
The Roca Railroad train was about to leave; Walsh had three appointments scheduled, and he wasn’t in time to return to the house, leave the document there, and wait for the next train, which was reasonable for a person so focused on security. He slipped the ticket into his black briefcase, where lay the ten envelopes containing the first typed copies of his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta, which he had finished the night before and which he was about to deposit in the capital’s mailboxes when he arrived in Constitución beautiful.
They sat in the back seats of one of the cars. Lilia Ferreyra recalled that Walsh was in a good mood and even hummed a chacarera. The next day they talked about the Asado to receive their daughter Patricia, their son-in-law Jorge Pinedo, their granddaughter María Eva and their first grandson Mariano Esteban, seventeen days old, whom they did not yet know.
José María Salgado, Pepe, Sergio or Daniel, the 21-year-old agent who planted the powerful Vietnamese bomb that blew up the dining room of the Federal Security Agency in 1976
As soon as they arrived in Constitución, Esteban looked for a public phone and confirmed his appointment with José María Pepe Salgado, one of his most valuable resources in the intelligence apparatus of Montoneros, the young man who planted the bomb that blew up the police canteen. Walsh, his mentor, was unaware that Marines had captured Salgado on March 12. “The meeting is over,” he told his wife, always in a good mood. He reached into his briefcase and handed her five envelopes, which she would mail to expedite the task.
“Don’t forget to water the salad,” were the last words Lilia Ferreyra could say to Esteban. And he saw the writer, journalist, translator and Montoneros official smile at him, adjust his straw hat and go in search of the first mailbox to deposit the first copy of the letter that would become one of his many legacies.
When he had finished mailing the envelopes, Esteban Walsh took a bus and after a short ride, got off a few blocks after the location of his first date with his lover Pepe Salgado to board from the opposite direction he had come Arrive on foot, an elementary security measure.
Appointment with Pepe Salgado would be a walk of a few blocks nearby San Juan and Entre Riosthat at five minutes to three in the afternoon there was a world full of people, as every day of the week; Many of the passers-by were boarding or exiting the E subway station, now called Entre Ríos – Rodolfo Walsh, a dozen blocks from the federal police cafeteria.
But this time Walsh couldn’t blend in with the crowd. If one of the rotatingone of the sailors, who did not belong to Task Group 3.3.2, shouted “Stop, police!” Stefan From his briefcase he took the Walther pistol, model PPK, caliber 22, which his wife had given him for his birthday two years ago. The shorter variant of the German PP series of semi-automatic pistols popularized by Agent James Bond in his first seventeen missions; The weapon that Adolf Hitler used to commit suicide.
It wasn’t that he intended to confront the task force with that pistol, which had been reinforced with more than thirty men to catch him; he just wanted to provoke a deadly shootout to avoid being taken alive to ESMA, the hell he had described so accurately in a report from his Clandestine News Agency (ANCLA) six months earlier. “He was absolutely willing not to drop alive because he knew they would rage against him, and because of his political involvement, he understood the risk of his own death.”explained his wife.
The closest oppressors confused the gesture of his hand on the briefcase; They thought he was going to throw a grenade at them and they screamed Peppa, Peppa!, a word much feared by the group that allowed a sort of free fire against him. The first salvo missed its target; Stefan He managed to get off a few shots and even injure one of his enemies, but was quickly riddled with bullets..
“Today we lowered Walsh. He barricaded himself behind a tree and defended himself with a 22. We shot him down and the son of a bitch didn’t fall off,” Deputy Commissioner Ernesto Weber, 220, told Ricardo Coquet, another of the guerrillas kidnapped at ESMA. His body was taken there and remains missing; As far as is known, it was burned in the back of the establishment a few hours later.
Those were the facts. Then would come the official narrative, which, for example, obscures the massacre in the police dining room and claims that Walsh was murdered by the military and disappeared in retaliation for his famous letter denouncing human rights abuses and economic policies dictatorship; written that at the time of his death he was in fact known only to himself and his wife. As if he had been a defender of democracy, freedom and human rights. All this to disguise with an epic tone his years as a Montonero fighter, during which he was convinced that the socialist or communist revolution was worth dying for and also worth killing.
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The author is a journalist and writer. This text is taken from his book Massacre in the Dining Room