Bernardo Verbitsky

Bernardo Verbitsky (22 November 1907 – 15 March 1979) was an Argentine writer and journalist, and father of the controversial journalist and former military collaborator during that country's so-called "dirty war" Horacio Verbitsky.

Verbitsky was born of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. He was a screenwriter, a journalist from Noticias Gráficas, and a member of Academia Porteña del Lunfardo ("Buenos Aires Lunfardo's Academy"). He reported Buenos Aires' ups and downs; his writings were linked to tango and other essential aspects of the city. Hugo del Carril based its 1958 motion picture Una cita con la vida ("A date with life" [1]) on Verbitsky's novel Calles de tango)

His 1957 novel Villa Miseria también es América (roughly "Povertyville is also [a part of] America") gave its popular name to Argentina's shanty towns (villas miseria).

Bernardo Verbitsky died in Buenos Aires on 15 March 1979, in the middle of Argentina's so-called dirty "war"—a year in which his good friend, newspaper publisher Jacobo Timerman, was still imprisoned after being tortured at the direction of neo-Nazi leaning generals during the military dictatorship.

In 2015 it was confirmed that Bernardo's son Horacio, allegedly a hunted member of the left-wing Montonero guerrillas leadership, himself was a ghostwriter for a book—written by a retired senior Argentine Air Force officer and dedicated to those same dictators—that was published the same year that Bernardo Verbitsky died. Noted human rights advocate Gabriel Levinas and his investigative team in early September came out with a quickly best-selling book, Doble Agente. La biografía inesperada de Horacio Verbitsky', documenting Verbitsky's work with the Argentine military during the period of state terror. The disclosures became a media sensation, as one of Argentina's most important newspapers laid bare; "Clarin: La investigación que abre una polémica sobre Verbitsky. Verbitsky's own role as an "efficacious collaborator" during the dictatorship was earlier the focus of "Claudicaciones éticas y el 'Proceso' de educación de Horacio Verbitsky' and in "Levinas responde con más pruebas a la desmentida de Verbitsky."

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