By Carlos Aznárez on March 25, 2022.
Roldolfo Walsh
46 years after the most atrocious civil-military-corporate-religious and media coup our country has ever endured, it is essential to remember all the resistances that defied the dictatorship during that period. From the most heroic to the most anonymous, carried out in neighborhoods, factories, schools, by countless fighters who never gave up in the face of adversity. Among these experiences, journalism also had its place, and the case of the Clandestine News Agency (ANCLA) is fundamental when taking that into account.
Inevitably, talking about ANCLA today leads us to imagine that a man, wiry but agile, cerebral but at the same time talkative, brilliant but also endowed with a humility that almost always caught us off guard there was Rodolfo Walsh. He was a kind of militant who was always imagining new alternatives to challenge the system, and he did so bearing in mind that one of the most valuable weapons one can count on in an unequal battle is the management of information. And above all, that which influences opinion makers and that which penetrates deeply into the ranks of the enemy to be confronted.
That is why Walsh worked in his early days in solidarity with the Cuban revolution, which he loved so much, forming a news collective called Prensa Latina, which eventually managed to establish itself with great acceptance in most Third World countries, continuing to this day.
However, ANCLA was somewhat more specific and no less forceful in its results. We were living in the midst of a military dictatorship, enduring an information blackout such as had never happened before in Argentina, and it is in that context that the Montonero officer Walsh merged mentally and physically with the communication strategist Walsh. He then gave birth to an instrument that served to break the wall of silence that the dictatorship wanted to impose on us, and also knew how to overcome the discourse of terror, which acted as a demobilizer and paralyzer of society.
With these premises and the tacit recommendation that for those of us who were part of the ANCLA team, this was going to be, from that very moment, our priority area, a tool was born in June 1976 that lasted little more than a year but left a deep mark on the scene of insurgent journalism.
The issue was of great importance: we had to transform a clandestine space into a counter-information and denunciation source about the excesses, abuses, human rights violations (torture, murders, concentration camps) and other misdeeds that were being committed by all three arms of the military, and the important group of civilians who accompanied them in the genocide.
In addition, it was essential to circumvent censorship in order to publicize the numerous actions that the popular resistance (not only the armed resistance) was generating day by day in every corner of the country.
It is important to understand that in order for all the tasks, local or external, that he did for the agency to be relatively successful, Walsh gave his team constant guidelines linked to the efficiency and the contrast of information sources so as not to generate errors that could cause the loss of confidence in what ANCLA disseminated.
ANCLA was one of the great contributions to the popular resistance imagined by Walsh, to give battle by all possible means, and therefore it is necessary to reaffirm that this revolutionary experience made in a difficult time, was his way of showing us that even in the worst circumstances, if you fight for a just cause you can obtain victories that manage to transcend through the years.
On September 25, 1977, exactly 45 years ago, Walsh would undertake his last and great political-informative operation challenging the militarization in which the country was submerged a year after the military dictatorship: he made public the Letter to the genocidal Military Junta. In it he detailed in detail the atrocities committed against the people by the three armed forces and the police. He signed the Letter with his name in order to knot in this way the links forged at the level of investigation and journalistic denunciation, since his first and powerful book, “Operation Massacre”, about the executions carried out by another dictatorship, the one that overthrew Perón in 1955 and the one that his followers carried out from 1976 onwards.
After sending the Letter and organizing the distribution from ANCLA so that it would be known in the world, Walsh went to an appointment with a colleague and was ambushed by Navy troops. Knowing what awaited him if he was taken prisoner, he drew a .22 caliber revolver and defended himself until he was killed, winning the last battle against his enemies and cemented his place in the history of revolutionary journalism.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – Buenos Aires