Rodolfo Walsh is one of the most important Argentinean writers of the second half of the twentieth century. He is considered a canonical writer in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, where he is well known for his fiction, as well as for his testimonies, which led the way to that genre's boom in the 1960s. His work anticipated the genre of new journalism, which flourished in the United States in the sixties and seventies. Operación masacre, written in 1957, is a seminal text not only as a testimony, but also because of its interplay between fact and fiction and its experimentation with literary devices and journalistic techniques. Because of this he has had tremendous influence on other Latin American writers. He is also considered one of the most important heirs of Jorge Luis Borges, because of his extensive use of popular forms such as detective fiction. Journalist, fiction writer, translator, and political activist, Rodolfo Walsh disappeared in 1977 the day after he sent a letter to the media in which he denounced the crimes committed during the last military dictatorship in Argentina.