ABSTRACT
The Argentine writer, journalist and militant Rodolfo Walsh wrote Operación masacre (Operation Massacre) in 1957, a work of investigative journalism about the massacre of José León Suárez by the Buenos Aires police. The events had been part of the repression against the Peronist insurrection of June 1956 – repression deployed by the military dictatorship of the self-proclaimed Revolución Libertadora, which had ruled Argentina since September 1955, after having overthrown Juan Domingo Perón in a coup d’état and outlawing his political movement. 1 However, Walsh, who still identified himself as anti-Peronist, did not intend at the time to create with Operación masacre a new literary genre, of the kind that would later be labelled testimonio. And, as Victoria García has pointed out, although the origin of Argentine testimonio is located in this work, this origin is paradoxically anachronistic (2015, 20). In fact, invited by the communication theorist Aníbal Ford to the University of Buenos Aires in 1973, after Peronism had regained its formal political power, Walsh sarcastically stated that he simply did that work because he “wanted to be famous … win the Pulitzer … have money” (Ford 2000, 11). But instead, while writing Operación masacre, he had to get a false ID and go underground in order to survive, as he would be persecuted by the coercive forces of the de facto government then led by General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. For its part, the recognition of testimonio as a Latin American literary genre would take several more years.
