Rodolfo Walsh: the journalist-militant who "defeated" Kennedy and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs

Abstract

Argentine journalist Rodolfo Walsh made a decisive contribution to the defeat of the forces that, with military support from the United States, tried to invade Cuba and depose Fidel Castro in April, 1961. Thanks to his knowledge of cryptography, he deciphered a message from the Guatemalan government to Washington, intercepted in the offices of Prensa Latina, where he had worked for two years. That message contained all the details about the time, date, and place of the planned landing and attack on the island. In the context of the Cold War, the work of the journalist and the Agency, fully committed to the revolutionary process, affiliated itself with the concept of militant journalism, that is, with the idea of information at the service of revolutionary political objectives. However, the Bay of Pigs issue also had its repercussions in The New York Times, which was sensitive to the CIA's perspective on how the newspaper should handle the matter. This highlights the importance and timeliness of discussing the relationship between journalism and politics.