Companero
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Why did Che fail to set up a contingency rendezvous? The mystery remains unanswered thirty years later. In the most profound analysis written by a Bolivian officer, Gary Prado Salmón speculates that Che erred because he overestimated his own forces, while underestimating the army’s.75 The key should more likely be sought in Che’s state of mind at that time; he was wracked by fatigue, asthma, ill humor, and innumerable other problems. In his war diary, he recorded constant asthma attacks and depression. None of this was conducive to intelligent, prudent, or farsighted decisions.
Che had hoped, during those weeks in April and May, to forge links with peasants in the area—though he knew it would not be easy. He achieved exactly the opposite. The death of two civilians created ill feeling among local residents; the armed forces’ anti-Communist propaganda proved effective; and the communiqués issued by the newly formed National Liberation Army, as Che baptized his band of warriors, went largely unheeded by an increasingly censored press. The local population barely sold supplies to the guerrillas, and only with great reluctance. And they immediately reported any contact to the authorities.
On April 15, Havana published an essay by Che in Tricontinental magazine, in which he famously called for “the creation of two, three, several Vietnams.” He also exalted violence and mortal sacrifice—or martyrdom, some would say—in unusually explicit terms:
Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become; a people without hatred cannot triumph over a brutal enemy.76
Che’s article was also openly anti-Soviet and propagandistic in tone.*30 The magazine published six photos of him, two in civilian clothing and four in olive-green fatigues. As he noted in his diary on April 15, “now there should be no doubt of my presence here.” At that point, the Bolivian army’s counterinsurgency campaign turned into a manhunt. All local resources were mobilized toward a single goal: to capture and/or kill Che Guevara. Soon, thousands of soldiers were combing a huge and inhospitable area, tracking down less than forty weak and hungry men, split into two isolated groups.
The United States had been involved since the beginning. True, two of the three Cuban CIA agents, Félix Rodríguez and Gustavo Villoldo, did not fully join the counterinsurgency offensive until June; they landed in El Alto, outside La Paz, on July 31. But analysis meetings had been taking place in Washington since April. According to Andrew St. George, the journalist who interviewed Fidel and Che in the Sierra Maestra, on April 9 a highlevel committee met for the first time in the American capital to work out a response to reports of Che’s presence in Bolivia.*31 The conclusive proof of Che’s location, according to St. George, was a photo of the bread oven at Ñancahuazú: its rounded clay design replicated the ovens of Vietnam and Dien Bien Phu.
After a visit to La Paz by U.S. General William Tope, Washington concluded that “these people have a tremendous problem but we are going to have great difficulty in getting together on even how to approach it much less find a solution.”77 On April 29, U.S. officers and twelve soldiers, led by Ralph “Pappy” Shelton, headed for Bolivia. They immediately began a nineteen-week training course for several hundred Bolivian troops. The latter would become the first group of Rangers in Bolivia; less than six months later they would capture Che Guevara and defeat his guerrilla expedition.
Yet the months of May and June were not all bad for the rebels. At the end of May, they occupied three villages in a single day, in a show of ubiquity and professionalism which demoralized the army once again. But while Che’s guerrilla fighters had an abundance of courage and tenacity, they showed less and less tactical creativity. Indeed, Che hardly conducted any offensive actions at all in Bolivia: he never attacked any military facilities, either with commandos or with larger units, or any communications routes near urban settlements. Most of the time, he simply reacted to the army’s assaults with ambushes and defensive maneuvers, or by occupying villages.
During this period, he lost several men who were both valuable and dear to him: San Luis, or Rolando, on April 25, whom he had known since the Sierra Maestra and who was perhaps the best military man on the team; Carlos Coello, or Tuma, whose death he mourned deeply; and Papi, on July 30, 1967, in a minor skirmish. Though Papi had disappointed him repeatedly, his death was still a terrible blow. If his men kept being picked off at that pace, without any new recruits to take their places, his guerrilla war was doomed. No matter how successful his forces were in striking at the army, they would eventually be worn away. This was already obvious to the leadership in Cuba; public news of the guerrilla casualties was a clear indication that disaster was fast approaching.*32
Until mid-year, though, the military balance of power was not necessarily unfavorable to the revolutionaries. According to a secret memorandum written in mid-June by the U.S. National Security Adviser, Walt Rostow, to Lyndon Johnson,
They [the guerrillas] have so far clearly outclassed the Bolivian security forces. The performance of the government units has revealed a serious lack of command coordination, officer leadership and troop training and discipline.78
However, the rebels’ advantage was misleading. Che’s real weakness lay elsewhere. The local inhabitants of the area he crisscrossed for months on end never supported him, never welcomed him, never understood the meaning of his expedition. Not a single peasant joined the guerrillas, neither in late June when the group came into closer contact with the population as the area of operations shifted, nor when Che practiced as a dentist in several villages. The guerrillas also could not profit from the mining crisis that broke out in mid-June, when workers at the Siglo XX, Huanuni, and Catavi mines went on strike supported by the student movement. The existence of a strong labor movement was one of the reasons Che had chosen Bolivia in the first place. Separated from the miners by the Andes and over a thousand kilometers, without any political ties or means of communication, the guerrillas stood by helplessly as the government massacred dozens of demonstrators on the day of San Juan. The uprising soon subsided.
Two additional crises beset the expedition between April and August. The first had to do with the urban network. It had never really functioned, and ended up in the hands of dissident Communists. In the height of paradox, despite their Party’s distaste for the armed struggle, they were nonetheless persecuted and repressed by the government for their links with Che when the PCB was banned. Mario Monje harassed some of the Communists who sympathized with the guerrillas; the government took care of the rest. The Party’s leadership contributed neither supplies, arms, medicines, nor assistance to the guerrillas, much less combatants. Once Tania joined the rearguard and Debray was captured, there was only one foreigner left to work the cities: Renán Montefo, or Iván, whose role in Che’s Bolivian venture remains a mystery. There could be only one conclusion for the Cubans in the field: “If somebody was not sent through to make contact with the city, the prospects looked very poor to us. Logically, we discussed it among ourselves, we could not possibly tell Che.”79
Montero was originally a Cuban; thanks to his services during the Sandinista revolution, he would later obtain Nicaraguan citizenship. He was probably the only Cuban within the network who was not part of Che’s old guard; he belonged to the Cuban state security services, though not to Piñeiro’s group. His assignment in Bolivia, following his arrival in September 1966, was to, along with Tania, receive the Cubans, including Che. He and Tania argued incessantly, mainly—according to Ulises Estrada—because of Renán’s romantic intentions and Tania’s rejection.80 Tensions between them soon reached dangerous heights, if we are to believe Pombo’s diary. After the combatants had been safely escorted to Ñancahuazú, Montero’s mission was to become a businessman, as Che noted in his diary, and penetrate Bolivian society. Iván attained the latter aim, seducing a young woman related to Barrientos. Encouraged by Che, he became engaged
to her.
Renán Montero suddenly vanished at the end of February or early March. He left Bolivia, traveled to Paris, and appeared in Cuba at the end of April, as noted in a coded message from Havana to Che.81 In Montero’s own account, the reason for his departure was quite simple: he needed to have his papers in order. His passport and visa expired after six months in Bolivia. Since he had received no further instructions from Che—communications between the city and the guerrillas had been severed for weeks—he decided to proceed according to the preestablished plan: he left the country to renew his papers.82 This explanation is either disingenuous or deceitful. As Benigno noted, “He would not have left on his own initiative. The decision was not his to make. I have no doubt that he received instructions. He was sent to France in order to recover and then come back, but for reasons unknown he did not. I never understood the true story of Renán.”*33
According to Montero, he was still in La Paz when Tania departed from the capital for the last time in early March with Bustos and Debray.*34 Consequently, he knew that she was now “burned,” useless as an urban contact. He was also aware of the newly begun hostilities, and the intractable problems faced by the Communists since they had been forced underground. Finally, his marriage plans were well advanced and had provided him with a number of high-level contacts, who could easily have helped him with his papers: “Three or four days after the first battle, I saw Barrientos and the family took the opportunity to back my request for land in the Alto Beni.”83 Under those circumstances, it seems unlikely that he would abandon his post and fly to Paris just to renew his papers.
The other reason, mentioned both by Montero and by Che himself in his diary, was illness. But this explanation does not fit in with the custom of the times, which was to suffer any adversity and overcome any weakness for the sake of the cause. In his journal, already quoted, Pombo states that Papi Martínez Tamayo had expressed his misgivings about Montero to Che as early as January: “Iván will not stay, because he has his doubts about the situation.” This soon proved true. Even if Montero decided to return to Cuba on his own initiative, a question remains: how did Havana react to his departure from Bolivia, when he was the only contact left in the urban network? Montero himself acknowledges that he “spent several long months waiting in Cuba,” from early April until September; he expected to be sent back to Bolivia, but “it was decided that I should not, for security reasons. Once the guerrilla’s presence was revealed, it would have been dangerous.”84
At that time, guerrilla cadres were supposed to die at their posts. Any other conduct was seen as a lack of discipline or even treason, and brutally punished. Not only was Montero never penalized for leaving his post; he still enjoys, thirty years later, the favor and protection of the Cuban government. Given that his own explanation is highly implausible, there are two other hypotheses: either somebody tipped him off, advising him to leave Bolivia and re-establish contact with Havana from another safe country, or else he received ambiguous instructions from Cuba, which he interpreted as authorization to leave. One way or the other, from the time he arrived in Havana (or Paris), the Cuban leadership held all the information it needed to conclude that Che’s mission had failed. Its source was Iván, and this has been his insurance policy for the last thirty years: Renan Montero knew that Castro, Raúl, and Piñeiro knew that Che’s expedition was floundering. The next-to-the-last coded message Che received from Havana informed him that a “new comrade” would “soon” be taking Iván’s place; the new comrade never arrived.
The second crisis eventually cost Che his life in Bolivia. It derived from a handicap that had pursued him from childhood: his asthma. Considerably aggravated since the onset of hostilities in April, it was now accompanied by other illnesses. In May he wrote,
When I began the hike, I had a terrible colic with vomiting and diarrhea. It was controlled by demerol, and I lost consciousness as I was carried in a hammock; when I awoke I was much better, but covered in my own filth like a newborn infant.85
The illness severely affected his mental agility and capacity for decisionmaking. On two different occasions (June 3 and when planning the departure of Debray and Bustos), Che noted in his diary that “my brain did not work quickly enough,” “I didn’t have the courage,” “I lacked the energy.”86 The vegetation, climate, his generalized weakness, and, especially, the scarcity of medicines, finally defeated Guevara. Each decision, each internal dispute and casualty, exacerbated his condition. Che resorted to a variety of potions and home remedies. Hanging from a branch, he asked his men to beat him on the chest with a rifle butt; he tried smoking different herbs in a desperate search for ephedrine. He stopped eating foods that might trigger an attack, and injected himself endovenously with novocaine or cortisone. When he could no longer walk, he rode a mule. Unable to carry his rucksack, for the first time he had to be helped. Though his determination never flagged, his body had reached its limit.
From June 23, Che’s diary contained daily references to his asthma, the lack of medicines, the futility of other remedies, and his despair at finding any relief. This led him to a decision which initially offered some hope: taking the locality of Samaipata, at a crossroads between Santa Cruz and Cochabamba. It was the largest town to be occupied by the guerrillas during their calamitous trek through the Bolivian southeast. The assault was every bit as professional as their first ambush: while some of them harangued the population, the rest fanned out scavenging for supplies and medicines; Che remained hidden in a van appropriated by his men. However, either they could not locate the medicines or there were simply none available. The purpose of the entire operation was defeated: “In terms of supplies, the action was a failure. … Nothing of use was bought, and none of the medicines I needed was found.”87
Mario Monje drew his own conclusions from the fiasco at Samaipata. Initially, he was encouraged by the fact that the guerrillas had descended into the plain, as this meant they had broken through the military encirclement and were headed for the Chapare zone, far better suited to an armed struggle. But, when the press reported that the guerrillas were returning south, he exclaimed at a meeting of the Party leadership, “Gentlemen, Che will not leave here alive. The entire group is going to be exterminated. They have made the worst possible mistake; we must send somebody to Cuba and tell them to save Che.”88 After a long discussion, it was decided that Monje would go to Havana and present his plan for Che’s escape. He traveled through Santiago, Chile, where he shared his project with the Chilean Communists, asking them for assistance in reaching the island. Their reaction surprised him: first of all, they were incredulous; then, they hesitated in their response. Monje was stuck in Santiago for several months; he never reached Cuba, mainly because the authorities in Havana did not respond to requests for safe passage or a visa. If the Chilean Communists were reluctant to send him on his way, their passivity arose from the Cubans’ own reticence. They would never have acted as they did on their own.*35
After the failed attempt to obtain medicines in Samaipata, Che dispatched Benigno, the strongest man remaining on his team, to the caves of Ñancahuazú over two hundred kilometers away, to recover the asthma medication buried there since the previous November. But the caves were discovered by the Bolivian army as he approached them. The announcement was the worst news yet during that worst month of the war. Already, on July 31, eleven rucksacks, the last medicines, and a tape recorder used to copy messages from Havana had been lost; that marked the end of communications from the outside world. On August 8, Che yielded to despair, stabbing his mare in rage; he was overwhelmed by asthma attacks, diarrhea, and the unending string of setbacks, as he confessed in his diary.89 A Bolivian officer, Captain Vargas Salinas, asserts that the Peredo brothers had in fact assumed command since August and that Che had even attempted suicide. This has not been corroborated in any other diary or account.†18
The army’s discovery of the caves was “the worst blow they have dealt us; somebody talked. Who? That is th
e question.”90 An informant led the military to the cave near the first camp, which contained documents, photographs, supplies, medicines, and weapons. According to three survivors—two guerrillas, one in the government—the informant was Ciro Bustos.*36 Che had recruited him due to his links with the Salta expedition; he trusted him without knowing him very well. In Debray’s view, Bustos was the one who led the military to the base: “He would disappear, we could only exchange a few words in the courtyard. But I knew what he was telling them, because I could see what our interrogators knew.”91
Benigno also believes that Bustos guided the army to the caves. Che had brought him from Argentina so he could then return, describe the guerrilla operation, and attract Argentine recruits. That is why he showed off the caves to him in the first place—for they were not known to all: “He would go out walking with Bustos and show him the caves; some were known to the Bolivians, others were not.”92 According to Villoldo, Bustos’s descriptions of the guerrillas—he drew sketches of them for the army—and of the camp and its vicinity were “very important.”93 Villoldo confirms that Bustos took them to the cave, though he also recognizes, “I cannot explain why [he did this], since his life was not in any danger. I cannot say he acted from a lack of conviction, and he was very attached to Che.”94