Rodolfo Walsh

Who was Rodolfo Walsh?

Rodolfo Jorge Walsh was an Argentine writer, considered the founder of investigative journalism. He is most famous for his Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta which he wrote the day before his murder, protesting that their economic policies were having an even greater effect on ordinary Argentines than their human rights abuses. He was murdered on March 25, 1977.

Walsh finished his primary education in a small town in Río Negro Province, from where he moved to Buenos Aires in 1941, where he completed high school. Although he started studying philosophy at university, he abandoned it and held a number of different jobs, mostly as a writer or editor. Between 1944 and 1945 he joined the Alianza Libertadora Nacionalista, a movement he later denounced as "Nazi". In 1953 he received the Buenos Aires Municipal Literature Award for his book Variaciones en Rojo.

After initially supporting the Revolución Libertadora which overthrew Juan Perón in 1955, by 1956 he rejected the hard-line policies of the military government of Aramburu.