BY PEDRO MARGOLLES —Granma International staff writer—

ON March 25, 1977 a repressive task force from the Argentine military dictatorship killed the outstanding journalist, writer and revolutionary combatant Rodolfo Walsh in unequal combat on the streets of Buenos Aires.

With his death, the Argentine people and Latin America lost one of their most illustrious sons, a worthy intellectual and a journalist who was a genuine innovator in his profession. It was the loss of a Latin American patriot, whose figure has grown on remembering him 30 years after his death.

Eighteen years earlier, with Jorge Ricardo Masetti, he founded the Latin American News Agency Prensa Latina in Havana. They were the historic days of 1959 when the mystique of the triumphant guerrilla movement in the year of liberation could still be felt.

Walsh himself took it on to relate the circumstances surrounding the Cuban Revolution at that time: "The campaign against the revolutionary government is attaining an unprecedented intensity; the agencies who had a monopoly of the world news market orchestrated that torrent of informative garbage that continues today, preparing the ground for the chain of aggressions that was to culminate in the Bay of Pigs (invasion)."

With his incisive and direct style of writing he stated then what he was doing in his work as a journalist: "giving an image of the Latin American countries that is not formed by interests alien to our peoples, but not making rhetoric or propaganda, but working hard and with the truth."

Masetti gave Walsh responsibility for the agency’s Special Services Department, where he launched himself intensively into recruiting talented, mostly young, journalists to write on the realities of our peoples and expose the imperialist interference and aggression being plotted against the Cuban Revolution.

It is said that Rodolfo was an acute observer of what was transmitted by the noisy teletypewriters crammed into the newsrooms at that time. One calm night in the Prensa Latina headquarters, a strange message composed of figures and letters appeared in one of them, confirming that it was one of those commonly utilized by the intelligence services for communicating with their agents.

With the aid of basic code books that he acquired with much effort in old Havana bookstores, Walsh set himself to the task of deciphering those messages.

When he disclosed their content, Jorge Ricardo Masetti himself was shocked. In was a report from the CIA center in Guatemala directed to Washington detailing the training in that country of a mercenary force to invade Cuba. That was made concrete some time later with the mercenary Bay of Pigs invasion.

It was a lead that provided an opportune alert to withstanding that act of aggression organized by the United States.

During his two-year stay on the island, Rodolfo had the opportunity of listening to and observing at close hand Comandante Che Guevara, who turned up form time to time in the agency newsroom and talked with the journalists and their editor.

Those encounters prompted an extraordinary admiration for the legendary figure of the heroic guerrilla. There was nobody like Rodolfo with his exceptional revolutionary sensibility who could better appreciate Che’s character and thinking.

Walsh’s perceptions appeared in his famous article "Guevara," published in the Casa de las Américas magazine, in an edition totally dedicated to recalling the figure of Che.

In the article, he wrote of Che’s commitment, which he completely met. He said: "it is hard to elude the shame, not of being alive because it is not a desire for death; it is the opposite, the force of the revolution, only that Guevara died with so few people around him. Of course, we didn’t know, officially we didn’t know anything, but some of us suspected, feared it. We were slow, guilty? It is useless to discuss it now, but that sentiment that I am expressing, at least for me, perhaps a new starting point."

His commitment to the liberation of our peoples was sealed before history.

Rodolfo Walsh cannot be simply described as a revolutionary man of action, he was before anything a thinking man, an outstanding writer and journalist who shaped the experience of Latin American events throughout his life in his work with the news, in his features, reporting and articles. He did so in a creative, innovative manner, leaving an extraordinary rich legacy to the journalistic profession.

His work is an example to study and falls within the classics of Latin American journalism.

Before he came to Cuba he was already known for his investigative journalism work, later published in book form. One outstanding piece was his inquiry, with acute informative perception, of the 1956 shooting of 14 people by the dictatorship’s repressive forces in a garbage dump in the Argentine capital.

In his investigation he reached conclusions that exposed the repressive and criminal essence of that military regime.

He managed to find some people who had escaped the murder unharmed, reconstruct the event, inquire, interview, and put in print everything that happened.

All that journalistic work was published in a book that constitutes a veritable literary work of nonfiction, of testimony. For those exposés he was harassed and persecuted, having to go underground for a number of months until his Operación Masacre (Operation Massacre) was published in 1957.

Prior to that he had ventured into detective novels with Diez cuentos policiales y sus variaciones en rojo (Ten Police Stories and Their Variations in Red).

Afterwards other literary works appeared like ¿Quién mato a Rosendo? (Who Killed Rosendo, 1969) and in 1973, Caso Satanovsky (The Satanovsky Case), a collection of articles compiled into a book, a new professional inquiry into the merciless world of violence experienced by Argentina in those years.

There was also a book of short stories that was highly popular.

He was a member of the Argentine insurrectionist Monteros organization in which he held leadership posts and was an exemplary clandestine combatant.

His commitment as a revolutionary and journalist led him to edit various publications in his country, some of them underground.

At the point of the hardest fight against the military dictatorship he founded the underground news agency ANCLA, which exposed the crimes and outrages of the regime.

At that time his daughter María Victoria, an active revolutionary fighter, was killed in a confrontation with the Argentine forces that lasted for a number of hours in which helicopters and artillery were used. Rodolfo received the news, which profoundly moved him as a father and a revolutionary.

It should be noted that the day before his death he wrote from the underground "Carta abierta a la Junta Militar" (Open Letter to the Military Junta), a resounding document signed in his name, in which he makes a courageous denunciation of the murders and crimes perpetrated.

The document is also a detailed analysis of the grave economic situation that condemned millions of human beings to a planned poverty and the repression of workers.

A few hours before he died he distributed it personally with great daring and bravery.