Anyone who has spent time in a leftist organisation has probably had a lot of haters. I myself was knee deep in a radical union for a while, and there was a guy once who wrote a full thirty pages detailing why I sucked. Then he went through the trouble of making copies of his screed and passing it out to everyone. A committee had to be put together to read the charges, and they decided it was “just a misunderstanding.”
That was only one example of the uphill battle I faced when I tried to dedicate my life to the left. Sometimes the left, despite its claim to be building a better world, can feel like a hostile place where everyone criticizes everyone over minor differences of opinion. For some reason, I had willingly placed myself in that environment. (I should note, though, that the other issue is that I can be a dick at times.)
These days, it seems like the whole world has become a more hostile place. Right-wing parties seem to be gaining ground everywhere. Like the newly elected president of Argentina, a real piece of work. This is a guy whose symbol is the chainsaw. He wants to take a chainsaw to anything even remotely smacking of socialism. He’s also a denialist who claims that upwards of 30,000 people weren’t killed and tortured and disappeared during the 1976–1983 dictatorship, that the number was less than 10,000.
Milei was only six years old at the time of the coup, and luckily there are still people around who have firsthand knowledge of what happened. Elsa Drucaroff is one of those people. She was eighteen at the time, working at a leftist magazine, when she heard the news that this guy named Rodolfo Walsh had been ambushed by the Argentine Army. Rodolfo Walsh against the full force of the Argentine Army, alone, armed with a measly .22 calibre pistol. He didn’t stand a chance. But he went down fighting.
After he was killed, Elsa Drucaroff went on to become a literature professor at the University of Buenos Aires, where one of the authors she taught classes on was this self-same Rodolfo Walsh. And decades later she went on to write a book about him, too, called Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case. It’s a fictionalized account of the end of his life, pieced together with the few facts available and packaged in the form of a fast-paced thriller. When I got the opportunity to translate the novel, I jumped on it. I knew very little about the Argentine Dirty War before I read the novel, and I had never even heard the name Rodolfo Walsh, though he was an incredibly important figure in Argentine history.
Rodolfo Walsh was a journalist and a writer of fiction, and he was the first to write true crime. Written almost a decade before Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Walsh’s Operation Massacre is a work of investigative journalism about some Peronist workers killed at a garbage dump outside Buenos Aires. Walsh also wrote detective novels and short stories.
One of his stories, called “That Woman,” was exceedingly bizarre, but based on real events. In 1955, Evita Perón’s dead body was stolen by the military dictatorship and whisked away to an anonymous gravesite in an undisclosed location in Italy. The military had the bright idea this would come as a blow to Perón’s supporters.
Elsa took the character of Colonel König from this story written by Walsh. In Elsa’s version, the man who had been in charge of stealing Evita’s body in 1955 “has grown bulky, but cannot yet be called elderly.” He’s also a bit of a blunderer (endearing, though) and while he’s dedicated his life to the Argentine military, he’s not quite comfortable with all the torture and raping and killing, and he decides to help Walsh figure out what happened to his daughter.
Both Walsh and his daughter (in the book and in real life) were members of an armed guerrilla group called Montoneros. People did not know this at the time, but Walsh was the head of intelligence for this group. Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case centres around Rodolfo’s search for his daughter. After a standoff between the five militants at Vicki’s house and 150 troops, there are conflicting accounts as to whether she was killed along with the other four, or taken alive, which would have meant she’d be tortured, pumped for information, and eventually killed anyway.
But for me, it’s about a guy who’s struggling, nearly completely isolated, against a vicious dictatorship that’s consolidating power. A guy who tries to reason with his own organization, and they won’t take him seriously. A guy stuck between loved ones who are in danger and disappearing and an organization that’s being decimated. It’s about what a man does when things go to shit, and I mean really go to shit, on a personal level and all over the country. Luckily, I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet in the present day, but it sometimes feels like we’re moving in that direction.
Rodolof's Walsh's Last Case by Elsa Drucaroff (Corylus Books) Out Now. Translated by Slava Faybysh
A key figure in the politics and literature of Argentina, Rodolfo Walsh wrote his iconic Letter to my Friends in December 1976, recounting the murder of his daughter Victoria by the military dictatorship. Just a few months later, he was killed in a shoot-out - just one of the Junta's many thousands of victims. What if this complex figure - a father, militant, and writer who delved the regime's political crimes - had also sought to reveal the truth of his own daughter's death? Elsa Drucaroff's imagining of Rodolfo Walsh undertaking the most personal investigation of his life is an electrifying, suspense-filled drama in which love and life decisions are inseparable from political convictions as he investigates the mystery of what happened to his own daughter.
The head of intelligence for Montoneros, a clandestine Peronist organisation co-ordinating armed resistance against the dictatorship, Rodolfo Walsh was also a prolific writer and journalist, seen as the forerunner of the true crime genre with his 1957 book Operation Massacre.
What if beneath the surface of his Letter to my Friends lay a gripping story lost to history?
A key figure in the politics and literature of Argentina, Rodolfo Walsh wrote his iconic Letter to my Friends in December 1976, recounting the murder of his daughter Victoria by the military dictatorship. Just a few months later, he was killed in a shoot-out - just one of the Junta's many thousands of victims.
What if this complex figure - a father, militant, and writer who delved the regime's political crimes - had also sought to reveal the truth of his own daughter's death?
The head of intelligence for Montoneros, a clandestine Peronist organisation co-ordinating armed resistance against the dictatorship, Rodolfo Walsh was also a prolific writer and journalist, seen as the forerunner of the true crime genre with his 1957 book Operation Massacre.
What if beneath the surface of his Letter to my Friends lay a gripping story lost to history?
You can find Elsa Drucaroff on X at @Elsa_Drucaroff and on Instagram at @elsadrucaroff
Photo of Slava Faybysh photo by Acie Ferguson
Photo of Elsa Drucaroff by Héctor Piastri
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