Argentine journalist and writer Rodolfo Walsh Gil, one of the founders of the Agencia Prensa Latina, was also the staunch Montonero combatant of the military dictatorship who, upon returning to his country, faced it in Buenos Aires and died in combat on March 25.of 1977 .
Walsh’s common name was Esteban. Knowing the repressive apparatuses were hot on his heels, he lived with the quiet image of a retired English teacher in a austere house he bought on a dirt road in San Vicente, with no running water or electricity, 52 kilometers south of Buenos Aires. .
This rather balding and stooped man, who turned 50 on January 9th of the year he died and wore thick glasses because of his nearsightedness, was the obsession of the task group led by the shadowy Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) founded by the bloodthirsty admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera fights against the Montoneros in the capital and in greater Buenos Aires.
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, and he organized some of his most important actions against the dictatorship. Former Montónero Martín Gras, who survived the dungeons of ESMA officers’ casino, recalled that Walsh “was almost a legend to some ESMA intelligence officers, who called him ‘The Ghost Walsh’; They said he walked the streets of the city disguised as a priest to evade the controls. There was a whole myth with Rodolfo, a very real myth on the other hand.”
Years earlier, during his stay in Havana, the Argentinean Walsh went down in Cuban history as a Prensa Latina journalist who managed to decipher the secret embassies of the United States to invade Playa Girón in Cuba. At this point, the journalist Walsh, with his characteristic way of walking, speaking and being quiet, disguised as a Bible seller, managed to break into the camps set up by the United States in Guatemala to train mercenaries, thus confirming the preparations for the invasion from Cuba.
His life is a clear example of political and human evolution. This change began in him around the time he was writing Operation Massacre. In 1958, following this work, he published the 32 Notes that give life to “Caso Satanowsky”, in which he exposes the activities of military intelligence and its connection with the major Argentine press.
In mid-1959, accompanied by his partner at the time, Pompeé Blanchard, he emigrated to Cuba, where he stayed for two years. There, together with fellow countryman Jorge Ricardo Masetti, he helped found Prensa Latina, what he called “the first Latin American agency to unsettle the Yankee monopolies.”
In PL, as Prensa Latina is known by his initials, he was the first head of special services at the Havana headquarters. There he gradually discovered the Latin American reality to the world and revealed ever better the imperialism operating within it and its internal and external agents.
After the mercenary invasion of Playa Girón in Cuba was defeated, Walsh returned to Argentina that same year, where he was always a staunch defender of the Cuban revolutionary experience.
In 1967 there is a break in his life as a writer, which he himself sums up with the words: “It is impossible to make literature in Argentina that is not related to politics”, and his political development as an underground fighter goes deeper and deeper into the national field.
After the March 24, 1976 coup he organized the ANCLA (Clandestine News Agency) in Argentina and was part of the team that founded the Diario de Noticias newspaper, a progressive press organ of which he became editor. He then wrote History of Argentina’s Dirty War, a heartbreaking synopsis of what was happening in the country.
On September 29, 1976, his eldest daughter Vicky, also a Peronist Montonero fighter, 26 years old and mother of a girl, dies in an altercation. Rodolfo’s life is coming to an end, he is assailed by the same mistakes he denounces by his organization, penetrated by double agents from the Argentine secret services and the US embassy, but he is not listened to and dies faithful to his ideas. On March 25, 1977, he fell in battle with the same determination with which he lived. His body was never found.
As a legacy, he left what Prensa Latina co-founder Gabriel García Márquez called “La Universal”, an open letter from a writer to the Argentine military junta, denouncing the methods and aims of the military dictatorship, the horrors of the disappearances and Torture and death camps and the handover of the country by the government and the oligarchy to the international financial powers, a testament to the brilliance, political commitment and journalistic quality of a great writer, but even more so a great revolutionary.
