Narrative
Operation Massacre
Operación Masacre
Rodolfo Walsh · 1957
Synopsis
On the night of 9 June 1956, during an uprising by military men loyal to Perón, police burst into a house in Florida, a suburb of Buenos Aires, where neighbours are listening to a boxing match on the radio, according to Stephen Phelan. About a dozen of them are taken to a vacant lot in José León Suárez to be shot, and several survive. In December, in a café in La Plata, Walsh hears that one of the men shot is alive, reports Infobae; he tracks down the survivors one by one and reconstructs the night.
Context
Refused by the major press, the investigation first appeared as articles, in Revolución Nacional and then in the weekly Mayoría, before becoming a book at Ediciones Sigla in December 1957. Walsh corrected it in the reissues of 1964, 1969 and 1972, changing the prologues and epilogues as his politics evolved. Phelan sees in it the first great work of narrative non-fiction, nearly ten years before Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Odile Begué translated it into French in 2010, Daniella Gitlin into English in 2013.
Who it is for
An investigation in Spanish, made up of testimonies and documents; translated into French and English.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by the Boston Review as one of the first non-fiction novels, published in 1957.
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