21 Facts About Rodolfo Walsh

Rodolfo Jorge Walsh was an Argentine writer and journalist of Irish descent, considered the founder of investigative journalism in Argentina.

Rodolfo Walsh is most famous for his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta, which he published the day before his murder, protesting that Argentina's last civil-military dictatorship's economic policies were having an even greater and disastrous effect on ordinary Argentines than its widespread human rights abuses.

In 1960 he went to Cuba, where together with Jorge Masetti Rodolfo Walsh founded the Prensa Latina press agency.

In 1973 Rodolfo Walsh joined the Montoneros guerrilla radical group, but eventually began to question the views of the organization, and so decided to fight the new dictatorship that arose in 1976 by the use of words instead of guns, then writing his famous Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta.

In 1951 Rodolfo Walsh began to work in journalism proper, with the magazines Leoplan and Vea y Lea.

Rodolfo Walsh's works are principally in the genres of Police and Crime, Journalism and Testimonial, with books that have been widely published like Who killed Rosendo.

Between 1944 and 1945, Rodolfo Walsh was a member of The Nationalist Liberation Alliance, a group which years later he labelled as being a Nazi front.

Rodolfo Walsh was never an actual supporter of Peronism, but he became more sympathetic towards the group from October 1956, writing in that month's edition of Leoplan, "Here they closed their eyes", a tribute to the naval aviators who had died during the Revolucion Libertadora.

Towards the middle of 1970, Rodolfo Walsh began to associate with the Peronismo de Base a political branch of the Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas a Peronist organization that in 1973 merged with the militant Montoneros.

Rodolfo Walsh was an important official, working on the press distribution for the movement, and intelligence.

In 1974 Rodolfo Walsh began to have differences with the Montoneros, after Mario Firmenich made the surprise decision to take the group underground.

Rodolfo Walsh reportedly played a key role in gathering important information for the Montoneros' Military Secretariat Department of Information and Intelligence.

Juan Carlos Alsogaray, a Montoneros officer secretly working for Rodolfo Walsh, was killed in a fierce confrontation with Argentine paratroopers on 13 February 1976, when his 65-strong Montoneros Jungle Company was ambushed near the town of Cadillal in Tucuman province.

About this, Rodolfo Walsh wrote in a private letter on December 29,1976:.

Rodolfo Walsh was later made to disappear along with his father Hugo and mother Blanca and sister Betina and his wife Laura De Luca in revenge for a bomb that he planted in the detention center that failed to explode.

Rodolfo Walsh resisted with a small pistol he carried, apparently firing first.

Rodolfo Walsh wounded one of the soldiers, and was then mortally wounded by machine-gun fire.

The accused, who according to the Chamber "passed the kidnapped in an automobile" to identify Rodolfo Walsh, know who betrayed him by passing on the details of the appointment that the writer had in the location where he was kidnapped.

Rodolfo Walsh's personality has been studied in literary circles as a paradigmatic example of the tensions between the intellectual and the political, or between the writer and the committed revolutionary.

Rodolfo Walsh however, thought of himself as a revolutionary more than a writer, and stated so publicly.

Rodolfo Walsh doesn't mean anything to me, but I'll go anyway, following the mystery of her death, behind her remains that rot slowly in some remote cemetery.