Companero
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A partisan struggle was imposed on the Bolivian Communist Party by its comrades from Cuba and other countries. The PCB wrote a letter to Fidel Castro, asking that it be allowed to determine the when and the how of the struggle. Fidel reacted negatively. The result: the Party’s propaganda apparatus was completely dismantled, the party banned, the members of the Politburo detained … Comrade Otero sees contradictions between Guevara and Fidel Castro. He believes “Che” is more intelligent, but more dangerous politically.*21
While in Havana, the Bolivians nominally pledged to extend Che logistical support at least, and if possible to send him more people. As late as the beginning of February, Pombo noted in his diary that the guerrillas were still expecting a new Monje visit.49 According to Benigno, as many as thirty-six Bolivians trained in Cuba could have joined the expedition, but never did.50 Any further discussion of the agreements reached in Havana soon became irrelevant, however, once fighting broke out on March 23, New trips by Communist leaders were simply out of the question.
The Congo was still casting its long shadow. After eight months of waiting inertly in the African savannah because he lacked the authority to act, Che could not tolerate any ambivalence in this regard.†13 In another context he might have accepted a leadership council, or some compromise solution that would have satisfied Monje without surrendering to him full command. But after his calvary in the Congo, Guevara was unwilling to make any concessions.
The talks ended in complete disagreement. Monje asked to address the Bolivian Communists who had already joined the guerrillas to explain his stance. Che agreed, adding that all those who wished to leave the camp and return with their leader could do so; none did. Monje presented his position, but soon found his worst fears confirmed: the Cubans had “turned” his people during their training in Cuba, especially the Peredos. He ended his talk with a prescient warning:
When the people find out that this guerrilla movement is being led by a foreigner, they will turn their backs on it and refuse to support it. I am sure it will fail because it will be led by a foreigner instead of a Bolivian. You will die heroically, but have no chance whatsoever of winning.51
Che did not blink, but attempted to minimize the effects of Monje’s decision. As Benigno recalls,
He tried not to show it—but imagine, this forced him to change his entire plan. He called us together and said, “Well, this is over before it even began. There is nothing left for us to do here.” He gave both the Bolivians and Cubans a chance to leave if they so wished, and if any Cubans wanted to go over to the Bolivians they could do that. Nobody would be seen as a traitor or a coward.52
After the failed talks with Monje, attempts to recruit other groups were stepped up—especially the faction led by Moisés Guevara. In the meantime, Che decided to organize a reconnaissance and training march scheduled to last between ten and twenty days; it would drag on for weeks. Che left four men at the camp to receive visitors and recruits, and formed three teams for the mission: a vanguard unit of five men, led by Marcos (Antonio Sánchez Díaz); a main unit commanded by Che himself, consisting of eighteen men; and a rearguard of six men under Joaquín (Juan Vitalio Acuña). The twenty-nine guerrillas—fifteen Cubans and fourteen Bolivians—would return in rags, exhausted and discouraged.
The expedition, originally meant to be of relatively short duration, extended over six interminable weeks. The men trekked through canyons, rushing streams, uninhabited villages, and roads, exploring rocky crags and mountain passes as far north as the Rio Grande and the Río Masicuri. Two new recruits, Benjamin and Carlos, drowned without ever having fired a shot. The dense, thorny vegetation, mosquitoes and other insects (including the “boro,” a fly which deposits its eggs under the skin), the lack of wildlife to hunt, heavy rains and swollen rivers made up a terrain very different from that of the Sierra Maestra. The explorers had to clear their way with machetes. By the third day, several guerrillas were without boots, and all suffered from hunger and thirst after their food supplies ran out; lack of discipline and petty thievery prompted Che to begin meting out the worst punishment of all, suspending food rations. The guerrillas had to sacrifice a horse they had bought just two days before, leading to “an orgy of horsemeat,” as Che called it, and the resulting intestinal ravages. Logically, tensions soon rose to dangerous heights, with constant arguments and quarrels. The reconnaissance mission was useful in that it exposed all of these problems; but it proved very costly for an incipient guerrilla campaign. Tragedy struck on March 17, when a raft overturned in a torrential river: rucksacks, ammunition, and six rifles were lost, and one man drowned—the best Bolivian in the rearguard, according to Che.
The group finally returned to the base on March 20, devastated by six weeks of hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and conflict. Visitors were shocked by Che’s appearance: emaciated, his feet and hands swollen, he had lost more than 20 pounds. Back at the camp, he found “terrible chaos”; moreover, the secrecy so vital to the camp, guerrillas, and the comandante himself had been violated. Desertions within Moisés Guevara’s group, the suspicions of local residents, the diligence of the CIA and Bolivian intelligence services, and encounters with several oil technicians from Camiri had finally alerted the Bolivian army. It immediately headed for Ñancahuazú.
A series of events took place between March 11 and 17 that proved fatal. Seven men belonging to the Moisés Guevara faction had finally enlisted in mid-February: one would accompany Che until his death and, like him, would be executed; three others would betray him during those fateful days in March. Though nobody surmised it at the time, the Interior Ministry’s Bureau for Criminal Investigation was tailing Moisés Guevara; in March he was followed to Camiri. When he climbed up to the camp, accompanied by Tania and Coco Peredo, he was tracked by the police. A report was duly remitted to the army’s Fourth Division stationed in Camiri.53 On March 11, two of Moisés Guevara’s men commissioned to hunt for the day, Vicente Rocabada Terrazas and Pastor Barrera Quintana, quietly slipped out of the main camp, dropped their weapons, and fled toward Camiri. On March 14, they were captured by the police and handed over to the Fourth Division. The two men proceeded to recount everything they knew about the guerrilla base, describing its location, composition, and, especially, Che Guevara. They furnished the authorities with his aliases, entry dates into the country, and other details. Neither of them had ever seen him, as he was away on the reconnaissance mission when they arrived.*22 Rocabada even confessed that he learned Che’s identity on January 12, before entering the camp, when Moisés Guevara first asked him to join the guerrillas.
The handful of Cubans in Bolivia were thus condemned by two devastating errors. First, Moisés Guevara was lax in his recruitment procedures: he exaggerated his group’s real strength to Che and, in order to save face, enlisted whomever he could, even offering volunteers money or stipends. He also misrepresented the strength of the guerrilla force to prospective recruits. The latter were further offered the incentive of fighting under the legendary Che Guevara. The men thus enlisted not surprisingly deserted at the first opportunity. This was not just Moisés Guevara’s fault, however. Once freed of his obligations to the Communist Party and eager to enlist more Bolivians, Che himself pressured Moisés to hasten the pace of recruitment. As he noted in his January summary, “the slowest part has been the incorporation of Bolivian combatants.”54
Secondly, Che’s absence caused lapses in the Cubans’ discipline, despite their long training at San Andrés Taiguanabo; elementary security norms were violated. They were indiscreet with both Moisés Guevara’s men and other visitors to the camp. There was an enormous, almost obsessive, amount of picture-taking, involving Che himself. Rocabada and Barrera’s betrayal, and the precise and detailed information they provided, led the army (already alerted to the possible presence of armed men in the area) to order a patrol to investigate the “calamine house” at Ñancahuazú. The guerrilla camp was half-empty; thirty men were away on the reconnaissance mission. The others r
etreated to secondary bases, leaving only a single guard in their main camp: Salustre Choque Choque, one of Moisés Guevara’s recruits. When the army patrol arrived, the Bolivian surrendered without a fight and, on questioning, confirmed the information previously supplied by his two companions. Five hundred meters from the house, the military found the remains of a temporary camp, including six suitcases full of clothes with Cuban and Mexican labels.
The army benefited from the testimony of deserters. But Bolivian army chief of staff General Alfredo Ovando revealed several months later that his men had already detected five foreigners in the area since late February. The outsiders had reportedly inquired of local inhabitants about fords across the Rio Grande; they were later seen swimming, and drying large wads of U.S. and Bolivian money in the sun. In addition, the reconnaissance platoon led by Marcos was separated from the other two groups and returned to the camp before them. This led to an incident at the Tatarenda water station, when Marcos boasted of his guerrillas’ prowess before an oil technician named Epifanio Vargas. His suspicions aroused, Vargas followed the platoon and then rushed to Camiri with the news.
Furthermore, since the creation of the guerrilla foco in November, a local resident named Ciro Algarañaz had demonstrated immense interest in the daily life of the camp. He even offered to help the supposed farmers, assuming that they were cultivating coca crops and producing cocaine. Algarañaz assigned one of his laborers to watch the calamine house. When the armed forces arrived in March, they corroborated all the suppositions and information delivered by Algarañaz and his hired hand.
So there were many clues signaling the presence of armed men by the time the chief of the army’s Fourth Division dispatched his patrol to investigate the farm. Marcos and his vanguard group ran into the army patrol; after killing a soldier they promptly retreated, dodging combat and abandoning the farm. The military returned to Camiri, humiliated but bearing a priceless trophy: confirmation of the existence of a rebel group in the Ñancahuazú canyon. The war was starting in the worst possible conditions. The recently regrouped guerrillas did not even have time to rest, incorporate their new recruits, attend to visitors, or bolster their supplies. They were immediately confronted with the consequences of having lost their cover.
Marcos had already exasperated Che during the march by his constant bickering with the others, and especially with Pachungo (who was also the object of several of his leader’s outbursts). When contact was re-established and Guevara learned of Marcos’s retreat and the army’s discovery of the calamine house, he exploded in anger. A guerrilla must never retreat without fighting; there can be no victory without combat, as Che noted in his journal. According to Régis Debray, Che was furious, screaming, “What’s going on here? What sort of a fuck-up is this? Am I surrounded by cowards and traitors? I never want to see your Bolivian shit-eaters again, they’re punished until further orders.”55 No matter that the defensive position was intended to mount an ambush; no matter that a long discussion took place among Marcos, Rolando, and Antonio (Orlando Pantoja) about the strategy to be followed.
Depressed by the string of misfortunes, worn out by hunger, thirst, and illness, and ravaged by his chronic intestinal problems and all the jealousies and intrigues, Che made one of the most critical and questionable decisions of his life. Despite his experience and the unspoken but evident disapproval of his subordinates, he organized an ambush against the military unit that would doubtless appear in the wake of the discovery by army headquarters of the rebel camp and the death of a Bolivian soldier. The guerrillas were not at all prepared to initiate hostilities. Their lack of cohesion, and the very nature of the whole long-term strategy, argued against the notion of immediate combat. Though the initial skirmish had exposed them, there still would have been time to escape and avoid contact with the enemy. Che chose the opposite course.
His decision was deliberate and unavoidable, according to both Humberto Vázquez Viaña, a member of the urban network, and Gary Prado, the Bolivian officer who captured him at the Yuro Ravine. Vázquez Viaña believes that the time and place were those originally planned, and that Che had no intention of letting months go by before submitting his cadres— neophyte Bolivians and reckless Cubans—to the test of combat. In his view, the expedition did not founder merely because it was premature, but as a result of a myriad other factors.56 Prado believes Che’s decision was appropriate given the circumstances: the alternatives—fleeing without fighting, or disbanding his group—were less attractive. Flight would not remedy their discovery by the army, and dismissal was not a viable option.57 However, Fidel Castro himself has stated that premature hostilities exacted a heavy toll.*23 Given the Bolivian army’s initial disarray and its natural tendency to elude combat, the guerrillas could have abandoned the field and started over later without any major problem. U.S. intelligence repeatedly emphasized that the Fourth Division’s patrols, based in Camiri, pursued the guerrillas half-heartedly at best.†14
On March 23, half the army unit of eighty men sent to Che’s camp was attacked by the guerrillas in the Ñancahuazú gorge, in a textbook ambush. Overflights by the air force alerted the rebels; long experience allowed Che and his companions to execute the operation perfectly. Seven members of the armed forces, including one officer, were killed immediately; fourteen more surrendered, among them four wounded. The guerrillas did not suffer a single casualty. Their booty encompassed sixteen rifles and two thousand rounds of ammunition, three mortars, two Uzi machine guns, one submachine gun, and two radio outfits. From a strictly military and tactical point of view, the exercise was a complete success: it was a first, victorious combat experience for the guerrilla unit, both effective and economical. But in its aftermath, the small and isolated group of poorly armed and ill-fed men would have to confront an entire army which, while undeniably mediocre, would enjoy growing U.S. support.
Denial was no longer possible: a full-fledged guerrilla war was underway in Bolivia, involving both natives and foreigners. Its location, strength, and tactical capacity were now fully recognized. All the guerrillas’ previous plans, so meticulously designed, were overtaken by events. Further meetings with the Communist Party leadership, the recruitment of new Bolivian cadres, the coordinated creation of an urban network, and a timely publication of the guerrillas’ goals, became unthinkable. On April 14 the Communist Party was banned, forcing even those militants distanced from the leadership, like Loyola Guzmán (the youth leader in charge of finances for the urban network), to go underground. They would no longer be able to fulfill the missions assigned them in the cities.
Régis Debray believes today that the skirmish was not entirely negative. Though it by no means constituted a strategic triumph, Che was glad that his troops were no longer idle. Combat helped harden the men, raising their morale and clarifying the situation.58 It is worth recalling the context of Guevara’s unfortunate decision: the climate of apathy and defeat among his men, and his own state of mind. He had become increasingly taciturn and introspective:
Sitting to one side on a hammock, smoking a pipe under his plastic shelter, he read, wrote, thought, sipped maté, cleaned his rifle, listened to Havana Radio on his transistor at night. [He gave] laconic orders. He was absent. Locked within himself. A tense atmosphere in the rest of the camp. Disputes, national sensitivities, discussions about the tactics to be followed, all exacerbated by exhaustion, the lack of sleep, and the continual hostility of the jungle. Anyone else would have mixed with the troops, talking or joking with them. Che applied a bare discipline, without any niceties or personal relationships.59
Before Che’s return from the reconnaissance mission, three important figures showed up at the camp: Régis Debray, Ciro Bustos, and Tania. Tania was not supposed to be there; her mission resided in guiding recruits and visitors to the guerrilla hideout, then returning to La Paz. But this time she burned her bridges. Either deliberately or unconsciously—in a mixture of fantasy, guilt, desire, an obsession with guerrilla warfare and her pr
obable love for Che Guevara, negligence, and nervousness—the Cuban intelligence agent left her jeep at the calamine house, which would be taken over by the army days later. In it she had abandoned telephone directories, clothes, and other belongings that facilitated her identification by the military. As Che would write in his journal, Tania had been “individually spotted; two years of good and patient work have been lost.” According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Che slapped her when he returned from the reconnaissance march and found her at the camp decked out in guerrilla attire.60 One of his few links to the urban network was lost; the others would vanish in the following weeks, leaving the guerrillas completely isolated.
Who was Tania? Why did she insist on joining a guerrilla campaign for which she was not trained, and which she could have served better in the city? A number of myths arose after her death three months later, when she quickly metamorphosed into a “heroic guerrilla warrior” exalted by the Cubans. According to one hypothesis, she was actually a double agent for the KGB or the East German Ministry for State Security (MFS). This interpretation was based on flimsy evidence and mainly on an interview with a former East German agent, Gunther Mannel, which was published on May 26, 1968.61 Mannel, who defected in 1961, recalled recognizing Tania when he saw a picture of her after her death. He had been her handler in East Germany, and claimed that she had worked for the MFS since 1958. Her specialty lay in waiting on foreign visitors—which was how she met Che in Berlin during his first stay there in 1960; in addition, she was a master at the trade traditionally associated with female spies in the literature. According to Mannel, in 1960 the KGB decided to expand its presence in Cuba; he was entrusted with recruiting Tania for that purpose. This he duly accomplished in a Berlin train station.62 This version of events has never been confirmed, and Mannel did not supply any further details. Daniel James reiterated the story in his biography of Che, offering intelligent but unsubstantiated conjectures.