Rodolfo Walsh

Rodolfo Jorge Walsh was born in Lamarque, Río Negro Province, of Irish-Argentine descent. Initially earning a living as a translator, cryptographer, and detective fiction writer, his life changed radically in June 1956 when he overheard the whisper in a café: 'One of the executed men is alive.' Investigating the clandestine summary executions of Peronist insurgents and civilians in a garbage dump in José León Suárez, Walsh published Operación Masacre in 1957, pioneering investigative narrative non-fiction years before Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

In 1959, Walsh traveled to Havana to help co-found the revolutionary news agency Prensa Latina alongside Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Ricardo Masetti. Utilizing his self-taught cryptographic skills, Walsh famously intercepted and decrypted an encrypted CIA telex that revealed plans for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

Returning to Argentina, Walsh aligned with the Montoneros revolutionary movement as an intelligence analyst, but advocated for political rather than militaristic confrontation. Following the brutal March 1976 military coup that instituted the Dirty War, Walsh created the clandestine news agencies ANCLA and Cadena Informativa to break military censorship. On 24 March 1977, on the first anniversary of the coup, Walsh sent copies of his blistering Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta to newspapers and foreign embassies, detailing disappearances, torture centers, and the economic misery engineered by the junta. The following day, an armed Navy task force ambushed him in Buenos Aires; Walsh resisted with a small pistol and was fatally shot, his body disappeared into the ESMA concentration camp.