The 70s always come back, but under different masks. There is, for example, the stable mask of the Kirchnerism, who 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 partisans on the Bella Ciao wave that emerged after the coup d’etat of March 24, 1976.
And as if those ideals had included the defense of liberal democracy, freedoms and human rights. Therefore, it is spoken of story, that is to say of a fiction. And it is because, on the one hand, the guerrilla groups were shooting at each other for several years before the coup d’état and until they applauded the dictatorship de 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, that story is useful a lot because it allows him to identify the bad guys of the present, his adversaries or enemies, whom he equates with the bad guys of the ’70s: the military and their oligarch and imperialist leaders, with the complicity of the middle sectors that don’t vote for them, the media that insist on being independent and businessmen who prefer not to join the circle of friends.
There are also lesser masks, like the old fight between two well-known journalists, Horace Verbitsky and Miguel Bonassoboth recycled in Kirchnerism, which knew how to play a leading role in the ’70s, for example, in leading the newspaper Noticias, oriented and financed by Montoneros.
A dispute that was revived on Sunday 27 by bonasso after the publication of an excerpt from my book “Massacre in the dining room at 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 Ferreyra, lived 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 dome of Montoneros he wanted to get them out of the country and take them to Europe, where he 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 that, in February, the National Conduction ordered Bonasso to find Walsh and his partnerand give them the tickets and travel expenses.
Bonasso stated that he spent two months trying to find them and regretted not having succeeded. Your colleague Horacio Verbitsky 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 agreed with the departure from the country of the members of the National Leadership and 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 companion who I had to give him the tickets He didn’t show up for the appointment.” For her part, Lilia Ferreyra 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 they took turns preparing grenades and explosives in case the military showed up. Ferreyra recalled that Walsh 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 Vicki (her daughter who died of her on September 29, 1976) would laugh if we were in Paris!’ because he did not believe much in militancy in Europe”.
Controversy
“An old woman is quoted slander against me devised a few years ago by Verbitsky: that 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 he quoted Patricia Walsh, the surviving daughter of Rodolfo Walsh, who “said it was a falsehood by Verbitsky.”
In any case, it is clear from my book that Walsh’s downfall was due to the torture-extorted confession of the person who nine months earlier had laid the Vietnamese bomb in the canteen of the Federal PoliceJosé María Salgado, Pepe, an infiltrated police agent who was acting under Walsh’s orders.
Was the bloodiest attack of the ’70s causing twenty-three dead and one hundred and ten wounded. 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 Salgado had been kidnapped by marines.
They wanted to capture him alive to interrogate him because they considered him the “diamond” of the Intelligence apparatus of the guerrilla of Peronist origin. They could not: the famous journalist, writer and fighter resisted bullets and forced a gunfight that proved fatal. His remains have been missing for forty-five years.
Obviously, the Montoneros 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 with which he has been honored in all these years. That the facts do not cloud such an effective story
