The renowned intellectual’s last work, considered one of his most important texts, was written between January and March 1977, and shortly after its dissemination, Walsh was assassinated by a Navy Mechanics School task force, enforcers of gross human rights abuses.
The letter is a testimony and an indictment of the horrors perpetrated by the dictatorship, including torture, enforced disappearances, death camps and the handing over of the country to international financial powers.
They restored the flow of thought and the interests of vanquished minorities that hinder the development of the productive forces, exploit the people and subvert the nation. Such a policy can only be temporarily enforced by banning political parties, intervening in unions, silencing the press and introducing the deepest terror, Walsh wrote in his letter.
It also condemned the imprisonment, murder, exile and disappearance of tens of thousands of people in the first year after the coup.
They filled the prisons and created concentration camps where no judge, lawyer, journalist, international observer enters. The military secrecy of the procedures, cited as a necessity for investigations, turns most arrests into kidnappings, allowing for unlimited torture and summary executions, he claimed.
They achieved an absolute, timeless, metaphysical torture to the extent that the original purpose of obtaining information is lost in the deranged minds that administer them, to give in to the impulse to crush human substance until it shatters and they loses her dignity, adds the text.
On the other hand, he assures that “the causes that move (…) the resistance of the Argentine people do not disappear, but are aggravated by the memory of the chaos caused and the exposure of the atrocities committed”.
The journalist and fighter closed his letter “without hope of being heard, with the certainty that he will be persecuted, but faithful to the commitment to bear witness in difficult times”.
The writer and founder of the Latin American news agency Prensa Latina was ambushed and gunned down on the corner of San Juan and Entre Ríos in this capital.
His remains, like those of many victims of the dictatorial regime, remain missing.
jcm/gas