Margins
Operación Masacre book cover
Operación Masacre
1957
First Published
4.26
Average Rating
236
Number of Pages
  1. Argentina has just lost its charismatic president Juán Perón in a military coup, and terror reigns across the land. June 1956: eighteen people are reported dead in a failed Peronist uprising. December 1956: sometime journalist, crime fiction writer, studiedly unpoliticized chess aficionado Rodolfo Walsh learns by chance that one of the executed civilians from a separate, secret execution in June, is alive. He hears that there may be more than one survivor and believes this unbelievable story on the spot. And right there, the monumental classic Operation Massacre is born. Walsh made it his mission to find not only the survivors but widows, orphans, political refugees, fugitives, alleged informers, and anonymous heroes, in order to determine what happened that night, sending him on a journey that took over the rest of his life. Originally published in 1957, Operation Massacre thoroughly and breathlessly recounts the night of the execution and its fallout.
Avg Rating
4.26
Number of Ratings
6,351
5 STARS
48%
4 STARS
35%
3 STARS
14%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
1%
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Author

Rodolfo Walsh
Rodolfo Walsh
Author · 11 books

Rodolfo Jorge Walsh was an Argentine writer, considered the founder of investigative journalism in Argentina. He remains disappeared since March 25, 1977. After finishing the primary education in his small town in Río Negro Province, Walsh moved to Buenos Aires in 1941, where he completed high school. Although he started studying philosophy at university, he abandoned it and did a number of different jobs, including editorial. In the late 1940s he joined the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista, from which he later moved to the Peronist cause. In 1953 he received the Buenos Aires Municipal Literature Award for his book Variaciones en Rojo. In 1957 he finished Operación Masacre, an investigative work on the assassination of opposition figures during the military government of Aramburu. In 1960 he went to Cuba, where, together with Jorge Masetti, he founded the Prensa Latina press agency. He was then close to the CGT de los Argentinos. Back in Argentina in 1973, Walsh joined the Montoneros radical group, and four years later he was killed during a shoot-out with a special military group that set him an ambush. His body and some of his writings were never seen again. The day before his death he wrote an Open Letter to the Military Junta protesting that their economic policies were having an even greater effect on ordinary Argentines than their human rights abuses. Four films have been based on his work, including Operación masacre (1973) and Asesinato a distancia (1998), and three of his books were published years after his death, most notably Cuento para tahúres y otros relatos policiales.

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