The 70s always come back, but under different masks. There is, for example, the stable mask of Kirchnerism, which is represented as the embodiment of the ideals of the “militants” who resisted the military dictatorship. Like Montoneros and other guerrilla groups would have been Bella Ciao wave partisans that emerged after the coup d’état of March 24, 1976. And as if those ideals had included the defense of liberal democracy, freedoms and human rights.
That is why we speak of a story, that is, of a fiction. And it is because, on the one hand, the guerrilla groups were shooting for several years before the coup d’état and even applauded the dictatorship of Videla, Massera and company because they thought that military repression and economic adjustment would accelerate the arrival of the socialist revolution, which, logically, included a passage through a more or less prolonged dictatorship to abolish all social classes.
In other words, they never defended liberal democracy, nor the rule of law, nor human rights. Sorry, those were the facts.
For Kirchnerism, this story is very useful because it allows it to identify the bad guys of the present, its adversaries or enemies, whom it equates with the bad guys of the 1970s: the military and their oligarch and imperialist leaders, with the complicity of the middle sectors that They are not voted for by the media that insist on being independent and the businessmen who prefer not to join the circle of friends.
There are also lesser masks, such as the old fight between two well-known journalists, both recycled into Kirchnerism, who knew how to play a leading role in the 1970s, for example, in leading the newspaper Noticias, oriented and financed by Montoneros. A dispute that was revived on Sunday by bonasso after the publication of an excerpt from my book massacre in the dining room in La Nación, when he gave his version of what happened between February and March 1977, before the death and disappearance of Rodolfo Walshthe journalist and writer who had become the key person in the Montoneros intelligence apparatus.
As I wrote, towards the end of March 1977, walsh And his wife, Lilia Ferreyralived in a simple house in San Vicente, in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where they had moved to shelter from the repression after the capture of several guerrillas who worked in the Intelligence and Information Service of Montoneros, under the responsibility or leadership of Walsh , whose nom de guerre was Esteban.
The Montoneros leadership wanted to get them out of the country and to Europe, where they planned to launch the Montonero Peronist Movement —in April, in Rome— surrounded by prestigious and historical figures, of whom Walsh would be the most dazzling name.
For this, in February the National Directorate ordered bonasso to find walsh and his partner, and give them the tickets and per diem.
bonasso He stated that he spent two months trying to find them and regretted not having succeeded. Your colleague Horace Verbitsky He always contradicted that version: “I know the history of the other side. Rodolfo went to an appointment, several times, and no one was there. Surely it is so. Something must have happened.”
Verbitsky added that walsh he agreed to the departure from the country of the members of the National Leadership and of some emblematic leaders in the face of advancing repression. “Although he never raised it, Rodolfo thought that he too had to be one of those people. He raised the issue and the Organization sent him the tickets so that he could also go out. Rodolfo accepted that, but the colleague who had to give him the tickets did not appear at the appointment.
On your side, Lilia Ferreyra He maintained that they had thought about leaving the country, but that, in principle, “he rejected that possibility because he believed that we could get around the repression and get lost inside the country” if necessary.
First, he trusted his shelter in the house in San Vicente and had even bought a manual for planting vegetables. He was very strict with security measures: every night, before going to bed, he and his wife took turns preparing grenades and explosives in case the military showed up.
Ferreyra remembered that walsh he agreed to leave the country only if they saw that they could no longer hide in Argentina, “in which case we would go to Cuba.” Not to Europe. “He said: ‘How would you laugh vicky (his daughter died on September 29, 1976) if we were in Paris!’ because he did not believe too much in militancy in Europe”.
“An old calumny is quoted against me, concocted some years ago by Verbitsky: what walsh fell into the hands of the ESMA because he would not have covered an appointment where he had to give him a ticket to leave the country”, he got angry bonasso reading the excerpt.
and quoted Patricia Walshthe surviving daughter of Rodolfo Walshwho “said that it was a falsehood of Verbitsky”.
In any case, in my book it is clear that the fall of walsh it was due to the confession extracted under torture from the person who nine months earlier had planted the Vietnamese bomb in the Federal Police canteen, Jose Maria SalgadoPepe, an undercover police agent acting under Walsh’s orders.
It was the bloodiest attack of the 1970s, causing twenty-three deaths and one hundred and ten injuries.
One of the multiple functions that Walsh fulfilled in the Montoneros Intelligence apparatus was, precisely, the coordination of the infiltrators in the Navy, the Army, the Aeronautics, the Federal Police and the police of the province of Buenos Aires.
walsh went to the appointment without knowing that salty He had been kidnapped by the marines, who wanted to capture him alive to interrogate him because they considered him the “diamond” of the Intelligence apparatus of the Peronist guerrilla. They couldn’t: the famous journalist, writer and fighter resisted gunshots and forced a shootout that was fatal. His remains have been missing for forty-five years.
Obviously, the montane years of walsh and his key role both in the massacre in the police dining room and in other operations as resonant as they are controversial have been neatly hidden by the numerous biographies and writings with which he has been honored over the years.
Don’t let the facts cloud such an effective story.
**Journalist and writer, executive editor of Fortuna magazine.
