Rodolfo Walsh

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Rodolfo Jorge Walsh (born on January 9, 1927 in Lamarque*, died March 25, 1977) was an Argentine writer, considered the founder of investigative journalism in Argentina.

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.

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.

Walsh's daughter Patricia Walsh became a politician.

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[edit] Birth place

Walsh was born in a farm in the Lamarque locality. For a long time there was a confusion regarding Walsh's birthplace, which was created by the renaming of the Colonia Nueva del Pueblo de Choele Choel in 1942 to its current denomination of Lamarque.

[edit] Work

  • Diez cuentos policiales (1953)
  • Variaciones en rojo (1953)
  • Antología del cuento extraño (1956)
  • Operación Masacre (1957)
  • La granada (1965, teatro)
  • La batalla (1965, teatro)
  • Los oficios terrestres (1965)
  • Un kilo de oro (1967)
  • ¿Quién mató a Rosendo? (1969)
  • Un oscuro día de justicia (1973)
  • El caso Satanovsky (1973)
  • Los oficios terrestres (1986)
  • Cuento para tahúres y otros relatos policiales (1987)
  • Ese hombre y otros papeles personales (1995)

[edit] Secondary literature

  • Michael McCaughan, True Crime: Rodolfo Walsh and the Role of the Intellectual in Latin American Politics, Latin America Bureau 2000, ISBN 1-899365-43-5

[edit] External links

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