Hunting Che

by Mitch Weiss

  The Director of Information of the Presidency of the Republic has the pleasure of presenting:

  Adolfo Mena Gonzalez

  Special Envoy of the Organization of American States, who is undertaking a study and collecting information on the social and economic relations that prevail in the Bolivian countryside.

  The undersigned, who has presented this credential, ask all national authorities and private persons and institutions to lend Senor Adolfo Mena all the cooperation that they can in order to facilitate his research effort.

  Signed:

  Gonzalo Lopez

  Director of Information

  Presidency of the Republic of Bolivia

  La Paz,

  November 3, 1966

  With this document, Gonzalez and his friend could travel freely through Bolivia. It was his “get out of jail free” card—a rare treasure for any traveler. The woman was well connected to rich and powerful figures in Bolivia. Hard things were easy for her.

  Having walked calmly to the customs table, Gonzalez handed his passport and the letter to the agent. The man in the khaki uniform inspected the documents and closely examined the suit-and-tie photo of Gonzalez. He glanced at Gonzalez to see if the faces matched, then stamped the passport and waved him through.

  Gonzalez sighed and waited for Garrido to clear customs. The pair had memorized the airport layout months before, and they hurried out of the terminal to the curb where the woman was waiting in her Jeep. They kept silent on the ten-mile drive, passing roadside stands where vendors sold fruit, vegetables, and clothing. La Paz was built in a canyon with homes and apartment houses climbing the steep hills alongside. Low stucco shops and cafés stood along crowded, narrow streets. In the distance, through the haze of exhaust, Gonzalez glimpsed the majestic snowcapped peaks of the Illimani, the highest mountain range in the Andes. They traveled north into the city center, on to the fashionable tree-lined Prado district, and up to the Hotel Copacabana.

  More friends greeted him there. He checked into a third-floor suite and they followed him upstairs. For hours they discussed their plans and marveled at how well he looked, until the exhausted Gonzalez excused himself to his private room.

  He was in a fine hotel at the urban heart of Bolivia, but Gonzalez had no intention of staying. He would rest tonight and leave for the ranch first thing in the morning. The trip would take two days, following the edge of a mountainous jungle. Most of the roads were unpaved.

  The noise in the next room died down. He was too tired to fall asleep. He thought about leaving straightaway. He paced the room for a few minutes to calm himself, then brushed back the thick white balcony curtains. The Illimani filled his view and marched away to the horizon, rank after rank of snow-covered glory. He lit a cigar and stared at the dusky vista, then took his trusty Minolta camera from its bag. Gonzalez carried his camera everywhere, snapping pictures like an enthusiastic tourist. He looked around the luxurious room, memorizing details. He was accustomed to the finest hotels and superb restaurants. This would likely be the last such indulgence, he told himself.

  It was worth it. This mission was vital to his greater plan. Here he meant to start “two, three or many Vietnams” in Latin America, and ultimately bring the capitalist warlords of the United States to their knees.

  Gonzalez sat in a chair by the window. On the wardrobe door directly in front of him hung a full-length mirror. He stared at his reflection, startled at his transformation into a middle-class business traveler. Maybe he wanted to document the start of his great journey. For whatever reason, Gonzalez poised his camera in his lap, scowled into the mirror, and snapped his portrait.

  He changed out of his suit and back into himself. The time was right, he knew, for revolution in Bolivia.

  CHAPTER 1

  Ambush

  Captain Augusto Silva Bogado felt a trickle of sweat run from his collar down his backbone. The morning sun was pushing the shade out of the steep valley, shining off the river and turning the jungle into a steam bath. His men walked along the banks below, while he and the higher ranks stayed among the trees on the hillside.

  Silva and his men were part of the Bolivian Army Fourth Division, based in the oil town of Camiri. The men below, thirty-five conscripts under his command, were looking for suspicious foreigners, men with guns and money. They were following up a tip uncovered by Silva himself. It would probably turn out to be nothing, Silva thought. Troublemakers stayed up north near the tin and copper mines. There wasn’t much to occupy a foreigner down here in the southeastern scrubland.

  But no one could afford to ignore rumors repeated several times, in several places. He had to be prepared.

  The men spread out across the valley. Slowly, carefully, the soldiers walked in a jagged line along the Rio Nancahuazu. They wrestled with thick vegetation that lined the valley floor, and they cradled their Mauser rifles as they walked, occasionally splashing into the water and swearing. Silva thought they looked more like reluctant hikers than soldiers. They’d been trained for war, but none of them had ever smelled gun smoke.

  Most of his men were campesinos—poor and mostly illiterate Indians doing their required year of military service. It was their duty to serve, and they were resigned to it. Some even seemed to enjoy army life, and why not? There was no war. Food, shelter, and wages in the barracks usually far exceeded what they had at home, and they received technical training they could use after leaving the military. For the soldiers, this was a routine reconnaissance mission in Bolivia’s remote badlands. The only real danger was a backwoods cocaine producer, or a poisonous snake or spider.

  From his position near the front, Silva scanned the brush on the rocky slopes. So far, he saw nothing. It had been like that for days. He pushed forward.

  He made a mental review of the report he’d turned in:

  9 March, 1967. Dropped off by an army patrol near property owned by Segundino Parada near the village of Tatarenda.

  Assignment: Determine whether there were enough ovens, water, and firewood on the land for turning local stone into calcinated lime, a possible explosive.

  After examining the property, Silva was ready to return to Camiri. There were few army vehicles in the area, so the soldier hitched a ride back with a Bolivian State Oil Deposits truck. During the ride, oil workers told about the strange men with foreign accents roaming the area, “big, bearded men carrying backpacks and with plenty of money,” “forty to fifty million pesos.”

  Silva still smiled at the memory.

  That seemed highly unlikely. Few men in rural Bolivia carried that kind of cash. When Silva told his commander about the rumor, a pilot was sent up for an aerial reconnaissance. Four men were spotted along the Grande River, so Silva and his men were sent out here to gather more information. On the way they learned that in Tatarenda, two men dressed in olive-drab trousers and jackets had bought and cooked two pigs and taken canned food and cigarettes with them into the jungle. Police in the nearby village of Lagunillas arrested two “paramilitary types” for trying to sell weapons. Not a good sign.

  Silva shook his head. Who were these men? What were they doing?

  The army thought it important enough to send another unit to help Silva. After the two units joined forces, they marched on an isolated farmhouse with a tin roof. Inside they found food, blankets, and the key to a Jeep parked outside. A fire was still burning in the kitchen. If the men in the olive-drab trousers had been at home, they’d left in a hurry.

  The dirt paths surrounding the house were worn—a sign that there had been plenty of organized activity.

  Silva had to find these men. They were probably drug dealers, and the army would have to shut them down. First, though, Silva called for more reinforcements—just in case they needed to use deadly force.

  The extra men arrived with Major Hernan Plata, a mixed blessing—Plata had little on-the-ground experience. Silva and P
lata organized the morning patrol along the Nancahuazu, with Silva taking the first section and Plata’s men following about forty-five yards back. A well-armed third section, led by Lieutenant Lucio Loayza, took up the rear with 60mm mortars and a .30-caliber machine gun.

  The plan was to advance up along both sides of the Nancahuazu. If they found the foreigners or ran into trouble, they would call for air support.

  On March 23, they commenced at dawn. Silva had just brought his mental report up to date when one of his soldiers called him forward.

  “Footprints,” the man called to him. “They head up the path cut along the canyon.”

  Silva came up to where the soldier was standing on the bank. In the mud he could just make out the waffle-prints of boots leading down a path that went farther into the canyon.

  “Good job,” Silva said.

  Signaling the point man, he gave the order to move forward.

  The path meandered deeper into the V-shaped valley. Boulders and brush thickened as the walls grew steeper on each side. Silva and his men walked in the brush along the bank for a few minutes before the zigzagging riverbed straightened itself into a narrow arroyo. Boulders dotted the banks. A small stretch of woods stood where the river once again curved away out of sight. The valley was strangely silent.

  Silva glanced upstream at his men. Lieutenant Ruben Amezaga and Epifano Vargas, a civilian guide, stood in the water, cooling themselves in the weak current.

  Someone shouted. A man’s voice in a foreign accent: “Viva la liberacion nacional.”

  A gunshot cracked from the ridge high above. A second later the valley exploded into confusion. A barrage of gunfire made it impossible to hear anything. Rounds sliced through the brush, wood slivers and mud flew upward and perfumed the air. Silva’s men shouted and screamed as the patrol scrambled for cover.

  Lieutenant Amezaga charged forward from his exposed position in the river, firing his weapon toward the woods. Several rounds smashed into him, and the young officer fell headfirst into the water. Vargas turned away from the barrage, but he, too, crumpled into the brown river.

  Silva knew he was in trouble. He and his men were between the hillsides with the enemy above them. They were trapped in the kill zone. They couldn’t move forward—the fire was too intense. Behind them Plata’s men were also pinned down. Bullets raked the path. They were trapped.

  Silva tried to fire back, but it was impossible to get a clear shot at the shooters’ concealed positions in the rocks. He could hear the wounded men screaming. Several lay along the bank, blood pooling around them. Glancing down the path he’d just traveled, Silva saw another of his men stagger to the earth.

  Over the gunfire he could hear the foreign voice calling him to surrender. The accent was not Bolivian, he thought. Cuban, maybe? Silva’s brother was studying in Cuba. He knew the accent.

  With no response, more rounds from the guerrillas’ guns cracked ahead and behind. There was no escaping the cross fire. Silva shouted to his men to cease firing. He glanced at his watch. Six minutes after the first shot, the gunfire stopped.

  Looking behind him, Silva saw Plata’s men drop their weapons. But the rear guard didn’t surrender. Burdened by heavy weapons, the eight soldiers had stayed in place during the firefight. Now they retreated back along the river. Silva could hear the soldiers frantically tearing through the jungle. Maybe they would make it back to Fourth Division headquarters in Camiri. The commanders would send reinforcements, Silva hoped.

  But for now, he had to survive. Atop the hill Silva saw guerrillas emerging from the thick brush. There were only a handful of them, dressed in olive-drab fatigues. Seven Bolivian soldiers lay dead. Four more were wounded. Fourteen more soldiers surrendered.

  A small, bearded man was in charge, Silva saw. The guerrillas called him “Inti.” He wore a green cap over his black hair, and he barked orders at Silva’s men like a drill sergeant.

  “Move the dead onto the riverbank,” he shouted, and the new prisoners rushed to obey. The guerrillas moved down the valley, rounding up more soldiers as they went. Major Plata emerged from behind a bush, crying like a baby. The soldiers looked at the officer with disdain. When Lieutenant Loayza and his men arrived with their hands on their heads, Silva thought he might cry, too—there was no one left to run, or to radio for help.

  The body of Vargas, the oil company guide, was the last pulled from the water. One of the guerrillas kicked it in the ribs. “That’s the way informers die,” he said.

  Led at gunpoint, Silva and his men carried the wounded into the brush and up to the guerrilla camp. Plata followed close on Inti’s heels, babbling about his plans to retire from the army in only a few months. He offered to show Inti his papers, details of the intelligence and battle plans, if the guerrillas would set him free.

  “We are to signal our position soon,” he said. “If they don’t hear from us, the planes will come.”

  One of the attackers took Plata’s papers and disappeared with them over the hillside.

  Inti took Plata aside, but the soldiers could still hear him, weeping and chattering. He gave up the army’s mission, its position and plans.

  The guerrillas gathered Silva and his men into a circle and passed canteens of water among them. They hunched on the ground and swallowed the water in grateful gulps.

  One of the conscripts handed back the bottle to its owner.

  “Please kill that coward Plata. He’s not one of us,” he told the guerrilla. “He’s a despot. He punishes us with no mercy if we break the smallest rule, but look at him now.”

  “He’s a coward,” another of Plata’s men said, spitting on the ground.

  Silva just shook his head and kept his eyes down. Plata embarrassed him, but he knew the commander was trying to save his own life. They couldn’t fight their way out, and only God knew what these men had planned for them.

  Silva listened while his commander “sang like a canary.” He formed a plan of his own. If he pretended sympathy with the guerrillas’ cause, maybe they wouldn’t execute him or his men.

  When Silva’s turn came to talk with Inti, he hinted at Communist ties. “I joined the army on request of the party,” Silva said. “My brother is studying in Cuba.”

  Silva told the stranger about life in the Bolivian Army, how hard it was to fight when resources were stretched so thin, the food was bad, and no one could be bothered to communicate. A little later, he passed along the names of two officers he thought might collaborate with a revolution.

  Inti listened to Silva ramble, and ordered the guerrillas to treat the wounded. As they bandaged the wounds, the guerrillas talked about the cause, how theirs was a struggle for freedom and the people, how the Bolivian campesinos were being exploited by the government and the military. The Bolivian people deserved a better life, they said. They finished up by offering the Bolivian soldiers a place in their ranks.

  The men listened quietly to the speeches.

  “I don’t know why I have been sent to fight,” one of the wounded said.

  “We have no choice. Our fathers had no choice. We do what we are told,” another conscript told them.

  They were in survival mode. No one wanted to die.

  Night fell, but nobody slept. Silva didn’t know what would happen. He considered his options, and prepared to die. When? He didn’t know. He thought about his family, his wife and children. Silva had to find an escape. But there was no way out of the camp. They had too many men, too many guns. This wasn’t some ragtag gang. They were well-trained, well-armed fighters.

  At daybreak Inti addressed the prisoners. Silva’s heart raced: Was this it? he thought. But Inti surprised them all.

  “All the prisoners will go free,” Inti told them. “We don’t kill unarmed enemies. We treat them with dignity and respect. You have until noon March 27 to gather your dead.”

  One of the fighter
s brought two large satchels into the clearing and dumped out a ragged assortment of shirts, pants, and oddments of clothing. The soldiers were ordered to strip down to their underwear and exchange their camouflage for civilian clothes. Only Silva and Plata were allowed to keep their uniforms. Before they set off into the trees, one of the guerrillas turned to the prisoners and invited them to come with them, to join the movement to liberate the country.

  But the men were moments from freedom. None of them stood to join the guerrillas.

  The ragged men waited until all sounds of the guerrillas faded away before they rose to leave the camp. They were lucky to be alive, but the worst was yet to come, Silva thought. He and Plata had to tell their commanders they’d been ambushed, that more than thirty soldiers were captured, seven were dead and several more wounded. Their mortars and big .30 machine gun were gone, along with more than a dozen Mausers, three Uzi submachine guns, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The soldiers had been stripped of their radios, boots, and the very clothes on their backs.

  Later that afternoon the sorry group straggled into the Fourth Division headquarters in Camiri. By then Silva and Plata had agreed they couldn’t tell their superiors that fewer than ten guerrillas had done so much shameful damage. Instead they reported an organized attack by dozens of paramilitaries, disciplined men, overwhelmingly armed. They told their commanders that the foreign-led guerillas had as many as five hundred soldiers in the Nancahuazu region.

  CHAPTER 2

  El Presidente

  Bolivian President General René Barrientos Ortuno reread the last pages of the after-action report and slammed the folder onto the table. The report had shot up the ranks, traveling from desk to desk before it finally landed in front of Barrientos.

  Somewhere along the line the story leaked to the public, and the newspapers and radio stations went crazy with conjecture.

  At age forty-seven, Barrientos was already a wily old soldier and politico, an army general who’d achieved his country’s top post via military coup. His government was fragile, and his country’s economy and spirits were shaky from almost a century of bad leadership, military coups, and lost wars. Foreign guerrillas were the last thing he needed. The report said the rebels sounded Cuban. Was Cuban dictator Fidel Castro involved? If so, why would he involve himself in Bolivia? Che Guevara? But Che Guevara had disappeared two years before, was probably dead in a ditch somewhere, the president thought. He shook his head in disbelief. It just didn’t make sense. Nothing about the skirmish made any sense.