When Che arrived in Bolivia, he discovered that the twenty guerrillas requested by Fidel and reluctantly granted by Monje were nowhere to be found. Instead of repairing relations with the Bolivian Communists, or with Oscar Zamora’s pro-Chinese faction (which ultimately decided to keep its distance from the expedition), or even reorienting the entire mission toward the Bolivian miners and popular movement, Che decided to recruit his men through the dissident Maoist splinter group led by Moisés Guevara. This required casting a wider net, with slacker requirements and greater chances for mistakes and infiltrations; recruits enticed by money or promises were more likely to desert after their first brush with combat. However, more careful screening procedures would have delayed the entire operation, since the campaign could not begin without Bolivian combatants, and Monje’s forces were now reduced to only four or five cadres, some of whom were delegated to the cities. The only people left were discouraged Peruvians and overzealous Cubans. The mission had to incorporate more Bolivians. All of these obstacles might have led anyone else to rethink the whole project, or in any case delay it. But Che characteristically decided to outrun the problem. He opted to proceed with the plan as scheduled with the resources at hand. A more sensible and prudent man, with more time and patience at his disposal, might have stopped at the edge of the cliff.
Before leaving, he bade farewell to Aleida and the children. Disguised as a bald, fat, and short-sighted Uruguayan bureaucrat named Ramon, he had dinner with his daughters without revealing his identity. They would learn it only later, when reports of his death were confirmed. On October 23, he flew from Havana to Moscow, together with his traveling companion, Pachungo. From there he skipped over to Prague, then by train to Vienna, Frankfurt, and Paris, where he took a plane for Madrid and São Paulo, finally reaching Corumbá, on the border between Bolivia and Brazil, on November 6. After crossing uneventfully, he and Pachungo were met by Papi, Renán Montero, and Jorge Vázquez Viaña. They then journeyed by jeep to Cochabamba and La Paz. Vázquez Viaña, intrigued by his passenger’s features, was shocked to discover that he was the legendary Comandante Guevara; he’d had no idea.
For a long time, Che’s itinerary was an object of uncertainty and conflicting accounts. First of all, there were discrepancies in the passports he used. When the Bolivian army entered his camp and recovered a large number of documents, they found two fake Uruguayan passports with identical photographs, one bearing the name Adolfo Mena González, the other Ramón Benitez Fernañdez. They both contained entry and exit stamps issued by the Madrid airport, with different dates in October. Che was also sighted a number of times in various parts of the world. Betty Feigín, the former wife of Che’s Córdoba friend Gustavo Roca, recalls that her husband told her in September or October 1966 that he would be away for several days. Upon his return, he claimed that he had met with Guevara in Tucumán or Mendoza. Betty’s sister Nora, who had known Ernesto in his youth, swears that she saw Ernesto walking in shirtsleeves along Monjitas Street in the Chilean capital, near the golf club, in the southern spring of 1966. Though disguised, he was recognizable to anyone who knew him well. Nora waved, but Che signaled that she was not to express any recognition or greeting, and so she continued on her way. When she related the incident to her husband, he asked her to forget the matter entirely; otherwise, he would be obliged to notify the Argentine National Intelligence Service attaché in Santiago.*17
It was also rumored that Che passed through Cordoba, even staying at the home of a Beltrán family on the outskirts of the city. None of these assertions should be dismissed, considering the absurd veil of secrecy still imposed by Cuba on the details of those weeks. Several authors, ranging from the Argentine Hugo Gambini to the Bolivians González and Sánchez Salazar, mention various stopovers in the course of Che’s trip to Bolivia. General Alfredo Ovando, the highest-ranking Bolivian officer in the campaign to capture Che, announced months later that he had entered Bolivian territory between September 15 and 22, 1966, and that he returned on November 24.39 Daniel James asserts that Che zigzagged through Bolivia and several other Latin American countries during the first half of 1966. He quotes an article from the Mexican daily Excélsior published on September 14, specifying the precise day of Che’s entry into Bolivia—two months before the generally accepted date.40 However, there have been so many published accounts, and so many attempts to mislead researchers, that one may safely conclude that Che’s itinerary from Cuba to Bolivia was in all likelihood the one revealed by the captured documents.
In any case, he finally completed his long journey and arrived at the Ñancahuazú camp in early November. He discovered that none of the carefully laid plans had been executed: there were few weapons, and no Communists other than those he already knew; Monje was not even in the country; the team’s communications equipment was virtually useless, and the area presented innumerable problems.†10 Che’s optimism allowed him to overcome some of these setbacks, though when Benigno arrived on December 10, he found him “in a state of horrible impatience and in a very bad mood.”41 But nothing mattered: the excitement of being in the mountains, ready for combat, finally free of the ambivalence of Prague and Cuba, helped Che to forge ahead. No obstacle seemed too great, and the well-trained Cuban recruits were able to accomplish their initial aims despite a series of hindrances.
The country in which Che had chosen to light the fires of Latin American revolution was no longer the one he had known in 1953. Bolivia’s chronic political instability had gradually given way to an incipient institutionalization, as represented by the more or less democratic election of President René Barrientos in July 1966. Its relations with the United States, born of Milton Eisenhower’s mission in 1953 when Che was hitchhiking through the Andes, had developed into close ties of aid and complicity. By the mid-seventies, American military assistance per capita was the highest of all Latin America, and second only to U.S. aid to Israel. Over one thousand Bolivian officers had been trained at Panama’s School of the Americas. Cooperation between the two armies reached such heights that when Barrientos requested a U.S. Air Force plane for a vacation trip to Europe, his petition was instantly granted.*18 There was no doubt of Bolivia’s submission to the United States; but the nationalism of its 1952 revolution had given that submission an idiosyncratic bent.
Bolivia was still, first and foremost, a very poor country—after Haiti, the most backward in all of Latin America. A large part of the population lived in rural, marginalized, and poverty-stricken areas. But, as in Mexico, its poverty was very special: the peasants had received land thanks to an agrarian reform; the workers belonged to powerful labor unions that were alternately banned and rehabilitated with astounding frequency. The country’s natural resources—mainly tin, antimony, and petroleum—had been nationalized by the revolution. The armed forces, always ready to take a hand in government, held the Latin American record for military pronunciamientos; but they displayed a peculiar combination of nationalism and pro-U.S. conservatism reminiscent of Brazil. The Nationalist Revolutionary Movement of Victor Paz Estenssoro had withdrawn from the government; the Confederation of Bolivian Workers, or COB, was in the opposition; and Bolivian civil society enjoyed a vigor and pluralism that few other countries in the region could boast.
Finally, the election of Barrientos, an air force officer who was a founder and strong supporter of the armed forces’ Program for Civic Action, reflected still another unique feature of Bolivian politics. Since 1952, the coexistence of the old army, trained early in the century by the Germans, with peasant and worker militias had led to a close linkage between the military and the peasant caciques involved in land reform. Ever since the Alliance for Progress, the Program for Civic Action had “allowed the armed forces to take the political initiative in fulfilling the local needs of the population. … for instance, building schools and roads in rural areas.” 42 Barrientos was fluent in Quechua and was genuinely popular among the peasants, not because of any personal charisma, but thanks to that prec
edent and tradition. Shortly after taking office in 1966, he signed a Military-Peasant Pact which, among other things, pledged that:
The Armed Forces will enforce respect for the conquests achieved by the majority classes, such as the land reform, basic education, the workers’ right to unionization. … For their part, the peasants will firmly and loyally support and defend the Institution of the Military at all times. They will place themselves under military orders against all subversive maneuvers of the left.43
The complexities of politics and culture in Bolivia went far beyond the cartoon vision of the country held by many Cubans. They tended to see it as a prototypical banana republic, bursting with mining resources and an impoverished population just waiting to be liberated. In fact, a strong indigenous composition did not interfere with a widespread nationalism, especially among the armed forces; this would frustrate many of the expectations harbored by Che Guevara. The country presented a further paradox. On the one hand, it possessed a highly politicized, radical labor movement, concentrated in the powerful Confederation of Bolivian Workers, of leftist and occasionally Trotskyist inspiration. The miners’ unions, in particular, wielded enormous influence despite their status as a minority due to their central role in the economy. In 1965, mining represented only 2.7 percent of the working population, but accounted for 94 percent of exports, which in turn constituted a high proportion of GDP: “Thirty thousand tin miners fed a country with five million inhabitants.”44
On the other hand, the left itself was extremely weak; its foundations had been undermined by the revolution of 1952. The Communist Party, Maoist groups, and civil organizations, though not insignificant, were fiercely divided. Hence the CIAs evaluation of Bolivia, in a secret report of 1966, as a country hardly ripe for revolution. The American intelligence service rated Bolivia as the last among nine countries unstable enough to warrant U.S. intervention.45
Such was the country where Che hoped, in November 1966, to implement a project radically different from his original plan. There would be no guerrilla movement in Peru, and things had not worked out quickly enough in Argentina; so Bolivia was chosen as the cradle for Latin American revolution. And it would all happen in Ñancahuazú, the worst possible place for a guerrilla foco. Here there were no communications or landless peasants; on the contrary, the few and dispersed inhabitants were more like settlers, having benefited from land reform. Nor was there much vegetation, wildlife, or water—all indispensable factors in guerrilla warfare. Instead of a well-organized support team, Che found a reluctant Communist Party, with devious leaders and a few enthusiastic but marginal cadres. Yet less than three months after his arrival in the Rio Grande basin, the training camp and school for Latin American guerrillas unwittingly became a deadly combat theater.
Che’s expedition never recovered from its ill-starred beginnings. It lurched from crisis to crisis, starting with the guerrillas’ arrival in early November and concluding at La Higuera in October 1967. The details of the Bolivian saga are well known, thanks to Che’s diary and numerous other accounts. This analysis will consequently focus on the campaign’s successive tribulations, and Guevara’s increasingly desperate and contradictory reactions to them. His fate was fast approaching. Che did not have a death wish, but since his early youth he had yearned for a Christlike destiny: an exemplary sacrifice. He would soon achieve it.
The first crisis was the unexpected resolution of the Communist Party’s ambivalence. Its endless hesitations were no longer tolerable, as they became a real threat to the expedition. The weapons never arrived; the urban network was never formed; the combatants never appeared; and Mario Monje was traveling in other parts of the world. Returning to Havana in June from a trip to Moscow, he refused to stop in Prague, probably believing that the Communists would try to unite him with Guevara so that the comandante could pressure him personally.*19 Castro intercepted him in Havana on his way back from the Bulgarian Communist Party Congress in December 1966. Monje, he said, would be guided to Che’s camp upon his arrival in Bolivia—though Castro did not divulge the camp’s location or tell him it was in Bolivia.†11
On his return to La Paz, Monje called an urgent meeting of the Party leadership. Announcing that he had been invited to meet with Che at his camp, he requested that the Politburo and Central Committee convene as soon as he came back. Monje knew that there could be no agreement with Che. His goal consisted in preserving the Party’s unity at any cost, as its Castroist faction—the youth movement, the clandestine-operations unit, and so on—would obviously support the Cubans and join the armed struggle.
On December 31, Tania escorted Monje to Guevara’s headquarters, by then a full-fledged base with the capacity to house and feed about a hundred men, with several secondary camps removed from the “calamine house,” as it came to be known because of its corrugated-tin roof. The base also included an auditorium for lectures, a bread oven, and a defense system, complete with communications equipment and caves for food, supplies, medicine, and documents.
The meeting was bound to be tense. If Che’s plan hinged on help from the Bolivian Communist Party, and that help was no longer forthcoming (aside from the participation of a few heroic individuals), then the entire project was meaningless. According to Monje, Che led off the discussion by acknowledging that he and Fidel had duped him:
We have, in reality, deceived you. I would say it was not Fidel’s fault, it was one of my maneuvers as he made the request on my behalf. I initially had other plans and then changed them. … Forgive the comrade with whom you spoke, he is very good, absolutely trustworthy, but not a politician, that is why he did not know and could not explain my plans. I know that he was very rude to you.46
The “comrade” was Papi Martínez Tamayo; the initial project was to travel to Argentina. This hypothesis has already been suggested: perhaps Castro initially suspected he would not be able to dissuade Che from his original scheme. Monje’s version is also plausible: Che himself admitted that the Cubans had deceived him. Their true intent may always have been to create a guerrilla foco in Bolivia, aware that neither Monje nor the other Communist leaders would ever agree.
Che then proposed that Monje become part of the armed struggle as its political leader; he himself would retain military command. The Bolivian agreed to resign from the Party and join the guerrillas, on three conditions: one, the creation of a broad continental front, beginning with a new conference of Latin American Communist parties; two, that the armed struggle should go hand in hand with insurrection in the cities, under the coordination of the Communist Party; a national political front should be established including groups throughout the country, united under a single revolutionary command; and three, that the struggle not be limited to guerrilla warfare; it should include other activities. The military command would be subordinate to the political leadership, headed by himself. Monje would not accept a foreigner in that position, no matter how illustrious or experienced; the top leader must be a Bolivian. If one believes the journals of some of Che’s aides, Monje also insisted that the pro-Chinese group of Oscar Zamora be excluded, and Che agreed, admitting that he had been wrong about Zamora from the outset.47
Che wrote in his diary, however, that the three demands seemed dishonest and contrived to him. What the Bolivian really wanted was a complete break; thus he fabricated conditions that he knew were unacceptable.*20 Che warned Monje that resigning as Secretary-General of the PCB would be a mistake. As for Monje’s international requirement, Guevara was partly indifferent, partly skeptical: it resembled transforming poachers into gamekeepers. And he rejected categorically the condition regarding the struggle’s leadership: “I could not possibly accept it. I had to be the military commander, and could not accept any ambiguities in that area.”48
This was Che’s fatal mistake, in the view of Emilio Aragonés. A more politically minded person would have accepted Monje’s requirements, leaving it for later to find a way around them. Fidel, for instance, would have agreed.†12 But
Che almost preferred to do without Monje: perhaps he still believed in the fantasies of Cuban intelligence, which continued to insist that most of the members and leaders of the Communist Party would rally to his cause and leave their Secretary-General behind. This might explain the following entry in his journal: “Monje’s attitude might delay developments in one sense, but in another helps free me from any political obligations.”‡5 But Che was completely mistaken. Just eleven days later, Monje obtained the full support of his Politburo and Central Committee, which drafted a unanimous collective letter to Fidel Castro reiterating their position vis-à-vis Che Guevara.**3
All was not lost, however. When PCB Number Two man Jorge Kolle and Communist labor leader Simón Reyes met with Castro in Havana at the end of January in an attempt at reconciliation, Fidel notified Che that he would be “hard with them”; they then decided to revise their attitude, in view of Castro’s emphasis on the project’s continental nature. In a sense, this was a new deception; any alternative plans for other countries were by now purely imaginary, if they had ever existed: the Peruvian project had long been abandoned, nothing was happening in Argentina, and the Brazilian option had always been a fantasy. Fidel tried to play down Che’s intransigence, explaining that Che wanted to lead the Bolivian guerrillas precisely because it was part of a regional strategy. He brought all his gifts of persuasion into play, largely in vain. The meeting was acrimonious in tone, according to a secret report sent to the German government by a member of the Politburo, Ramiro Otero:
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