Rodolfo Walsh. Writer and Argentine journalist. Wikimedia Commons / Marco Rodriguez Garrido. Some rights reserved.
Rodolfo Walsh’s Open Letter to the Military Junta used to be distributed in Argentina as a pamphlet by the historical memory and human rights organizations in the first decade of this century. Today, after the 2015 election of a historical-revisionist administration in Argentina, the transmission of its message and Walsh’s struggle to the new generations is, again, a peremptory necessity.
Today, its translation into English can also be useful to international readers in general and Americans in particular not only to understand Argentina, but also to better reflect on the despotism that they are beginning to experience, following the election victory of a would-be dictator, Donald Trump, who in his demagoguery and senility recalls the repressive government of Isabela Martínez Perón before being overthrown by the Military Junta, with its programs for national registries of data on militants (today, Trump is seeking to establish "national registries" for Muslims and Mexicans).
Rodolfo Walsh (1927 -1977) was a journalist, literary writer and chess enthusiast, born and raised in Patagonia, Argentina. Fueled by literary hopes and a love for the detective genre novel as a young man, Walsh made his way from Río Negro to La Plata and to Buenos Aires, finding employment at Hatchett’s publishing house. Forays into journalism began after one of the many military coups that have plagued Argentina, the Liberating Revolution of 1955, which ousted populist Juan Domingo Perón and replaced him with General Lonardi’s absolutist military dictatorship. Walsh abandoned chess, but never abandoned literature, despite his descent into journalism, and into armed struggle during the civil-military dictatorship of the 1970s—an armed struggle in which he died fighting, and in which his daughter and many friends underwent a similar fate after being targeted by the murderous machinery of state-orchestrated disappearances.
