Operation Massacre (27 page)

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 struggle, 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
1
977
“Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta,” Walsh was gunned down in the street by agents of the State.

 

About the Translator

Daniella Gitlin is a writer, translator, and editor. She studied comparative literature at Princeton University and received her MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, where she taught for two years. Her translation of Pablo Martín Ruiz's
Epifanías del Danubio
(“Epiphanies on the Danube”) appeared in the January
2011
inaugural issue of
Asymptote
. She lives in New York City.

 

About Seven Stories Press

Seven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women's Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. In
2012
we launched Triangle Square books for young readers with strong social justice and narrative components, telling personal stories of courage and commitment. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.