Hunting Che

by Mitch Weiss

  In Bolivia, violence usually came after clear warnings, and attacks almost never came from outside Bolivian borders. Antigovernment demonstrations were not unusual—the students marched in the cities, and the powerful labor unions out in mining country.

  This was something new.

  The ambush occurred on the wrong side of the country, in the remote Rio Nancahuazu valley. There was simply nothing out there but cacti and a few old Indians, the president thought, illiterate campesinos scratching a living from the jungle-covered mountainsides. It was a trackless, mosquito-infested wasteland.

  Barrientos knew his army was not prepared to fight off an uprising, especially if professional revolutionaries and foreign money and weapons were involved.

  Bolivians were good soldiers, he told himself, but history proved they weren’t much good at waging war. A hundred years before, a fight with Chile over mineral-rich deposits of bird and bat dung had cost Bolivia its entire coastline. Thirty years later, Bolivia and Paraguay had sacrificed a generation of their young men in “the Chaco War,” a battle over access to the Paraguay River. It was the bloodiest war of a bloody century in South America. It devastated the Bolivian economy but opened the way to political change. “The Chaco generation,” veterans galvanized by the war, returned home to a land where educated whites—only 5 percent of Bolivia’s four-million population—held most of the power, and only men who could read and write could vote in elections. In 1941, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) was formed and attracted the miners, union members, and farmers who made up most of the population. On April 9, 1952, the MNR rose up and seized power. Party founder Victor Paz Estenssoro’s reforms included the universal right to vote, massive land reform, education for rural children, and nationalizing mines. Indians integrated into national society, with the articulate, half-Quechua General René Barrientos at the forefront.

  The country settled in for a period of peaceful reform. Since Bolivia won independence from Spain in 1825, the country had suffered more than one hundred government coups. The people were worn out by war and instability, so the MNR decided to rein in the military by abolishing the army and closing down the military academy. Both were resurrected within six months, but once the soldiers went home it took years to put the forces back into fighting form. Paz Estenssoro had made powerful enemies.

  Bolivia remained relatively quiet until early 1964, when someone allegedly tried to assassinate General Barrientos. Accounts of the attack are full of cloak-and-dagger secrecy, American CIA agents, and colorful tales. One newspaper said his life was saved when the assassin’s bullet ricocheted off the U.S. Air Force silver eagle wings he wore on his uniform. The general was airlifted to a U.S. military hospital in Panama—two thousand miles distant—for treatment. Credible Bolivian witnesses to the attack could not be found. Still, this “Silver Bullet Affair” turned Barrientos into a dashing national hero. Within the year he used that machismo celebrity to build support and topple the MNR.

  President Estenssoro handed Barrientos the reason he needed by tampering with the constitution to enable himself to run for another term. Estenssoro was reelected by 70 percent of the vote, but General Barrientos and what remained of the Bolivian high command were fed up with what they perceived as an antimilitary regime. They staged a “restorative revolution,” another military coup. Paz Estenssoro fled Bolivia. Barrientos and another army commander ran the country for the next two years, and in 1966 Barrientos resigned from the military to run for president.

  He was a reformer, too, he said, born in the provinces, fluent in indigenous Quechua as well as Spanish. He was a self-made man, a pilot, a born leader, married into the ruling class. Bolivia elected him president in a landslide vote.

  Since then the general-turned-president had kept careful watch on the opposition, but even with all the security measures in place they’d still somehow missed this threat.

  Today’s news had been even more alarming.

  The day after the ambush, police discovered important documents in a Jeep parked on a deserted street in Camiri—160 miles southeast of Santa Cruz. Camiri was an important town, a main stop between Santa Cruz and the borders of Argentina and Paraguay. Parked cars were not unusual, but this Jeep—with La Paz license plates—hadn’t moved in weeks. When police searched the dust-coated vehicle, they found papers detailing guerrilla operations in a secret camp in the Nancahuazu. In four notebooks a woman called Tania listed an entire Bolivian network of urban contacts, friendly Communists outside Bolivia, and several bank accounts.

  Barrientos planned to raid those addresses and arrest the criminals. “They will pay for their treasonous disloyalty,” he promised.

  The evidence pointed to Che Guevara. A week before the ambush, police had arrested two Bolivian men who were trying to sell rifles in Camiri. The men said they’d stayed in a rebel camp for a week or two, but were disillusioned with the harsh conditions and deserted. When introduced to interrogators at Fourth Division headquarters, they revealed even more information: The guerrillas had set up a camp at a farmhouse in Nancahuazu. Barrientos read transcripts of the interrogation:

  Q: Tell us who is in command of those guerrillas where you were.

  A: The main leaders of this guerrilla war are Che Guevara at the top, whom I didn’t have a chance to see because he had gone exploring at the head of twenty-five other men.

  The other man said the same thing.

  The investigators, though, said they doubted Che was in Nancahuazu, but the prospect was disturbing. A few weeks earlier, a journalist had asked the president a routine question about Che and revolution. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” the president said then. “I am convinced that Che Guevara is in the world beyond, together with Camilo Cienfuegos and other martyrs of the Castro regime.”

  But the papers found in the Jeep were clear: Che was almost certainly alive, and possibly working in Bolivia. If he really was out there, he probably had hundreds of fighters. How many of those were Cubans? Che never traveled without his trusted Cuban bodyguards. The ambush survivors said their captors were Cuban, and a guerrilla leader had preached to them about the glory of revolution. That was vintage Che, Barrientos thought.

  While the nation struggled to make sense of the ambush, Barrientos went on the offensive. He monopolized the airwaves, promising an anxious nation he would crush the rebels and their supporters. With newspapers and radio stations reporting what they could of the ambush, Barrientos issued a carefully worded government statement—a bit of creative writing that embellished the facts to save face and appealed to Bolivian national pride to unite the country. These foreign killers threatened the nation’s very sovereignty, the president said.

  This outrageous and cold blooded act . . . is even more serious because it has brought pain and mourning to the families of the soldiers, workers, and campesinos.

  The timely report by the survivors permitted a quick reaction with troops of the Fourth Army Division, backed up by planes of the Air Force, which dispersed the attackers, causing casualties and taking prisoners. In their flight, they left suitcases containing clothing, pieces of equipment, pamphlets on guerrilla warfare and Castro communist propaganda of Cuban origin as well as a tape recorder, a portable high frequency radio and a Jeep.

  The prisoners, local inhabitants and surviving soldiers, reported that a large group of persons of differing nationalities, among them Cubans, Peruvians, Chinese, Argentines, Europeans and also Bolivian communists are involved.

  The statement ended with a warning: “The army has ordered the drastic and immediate eradication of these insurgents.” Citizens were told to report any suspicious movements. The bluster bought Barrientos the time he needed to figure out his next move.

  There was no mention of Che Guevara.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Dinner

  Bolivian Army captain Gary Prado Salmon was a meticulous man.

  He donned his cri
sp khaki pants and polished black belt, buttoned his white shirt, and tugged on his shoelaces to make sure they were just so. His olive skin was shaved smooth and his black mustache neatly trimmed. Everything was perfect. It had to be.

  Prado was headed to his neighbor’s house for dinner, and a special guest was expected to attend—President Barrientos.

  Prado’s family knew Bolivia’s first family well—they were parientes, relations. Rosario, Captain Prado’s wife, had grown up with the girl who later married General Barrientos, and the women were still like sisters. Rosario’s mother was married to Barrientos’s father-in-law. It was like that in Bolivia. The ruling class was very small—maybe two hundred families—and they all were connected somehow. The elite controlled it all: the military, government, mines, and media. They kept within their own social circle and made decisions for the masses.

  Prado’s neighbor, the evening’s host, was Santa Cruz governor Colonel Felix Moreno Ortiz, a fellow who loved to throw dinner parties. When Ortiz learned the president was coming to Santa Cruz, he invited Barrientos to dinner. Nothing fancy. It was just an informal gathering with a few couples, including Prado and his wife. Ortiz said the president was looking forward to relaxing with a few old friends after a trying week.

  Prado understood. It was a stressful time for everyone in the military.

  Prado couldn’t stop thinking about the ambush. He’d read the report and knew some of the soldiers involved. He had trained a few, including Lieutenant Amezaga, one of the first casualties. Prado was an instructor at the military academy—and a damn good one, according to his men. Now, he was part of the Eighth Division cavalry unit and had helped turn Amezaga and other raw recruits into military officers. Prado was soft-spoken and whip-thin, but he commanded respect. An expert on military tactics, he led by example, painstakingly showing soldiers how to shoot and maneuver, skills he had learned from his father, Julio Prado, an exceptional cavalry officer.

  Prado did everything he could to make his father proud. The oldest of three sons, Prado was the only one to join the military. Prado’s father had been an officer during the Chaco War, rising from second lieutenant to captain. Afterward, Julio Prado was among three dozen Bolivian officers selected to train in Europe. He went to Rome in 1938, and that’s where his first son was born. When World War II began in September 1939, Julio Prado returned to Bolivia, where he went on to become the commander of two divisions: military attaché in England and Bolivian minister of defense. He retired as a major general, the military’s highest rank.

  As a child, Prado watched his father train cadets at the military academy. As a teenager, he joined the army and, like his father, was assigned to the cavalry. He intended to speak with Barrientos sometime in the evening, to offer his service as an officer in the field. If there was a rebel force in Bolivia, he didn’t want to be stuck behind a desk. He wanted to avenge his student’s death, he thought, and ultimately his country’s honor.

  He felt Rosario enter the room, felt her arms wrap around him from behind.

  “You look so handsome,” she said softly. Prado smiled uneasily. He didn’t take praise well.

  “Te amo, querida,” he said.

  “Te amo, mi alma,” she whispered back.

  Rosario was a petite, pretty woman with brown eyes and an engaging smile. She wore a colorful cotton dress that hugged her trim figure.

  “We should get going,” she told her husband.

  He reached for her hand. It was a beautiful, starlit night, and the neighborhood was alive with music.

  Santa Cruz was a working-class city, home mostly to factory workers and campesinos fresh from the mountains. The city’s wealth traveled out to the edges, and the ruling class was insulated from the gritty city center by old trees and carved stone walls. This was one of the affluent streets, lined with brightly painted houses, elegant wooden balconies, red-tiled roofs, and wrought-iron garden gates.

  The Prados passed through their neighbor’s gate, and a servant opened the front door before the captain could knock. Laughter rolled toward them from inside the house, along with the mouthwatering aroma of roasted chicken. The tile floors shone almost as brightly as the living-room chandelier.

  Prado spotted the president right away, chatting with Ortiz and several other guests. The couple approached to pay their respects. Prado held his tongue. He wanted to talk about the ambush and ask Barrientos how he planned to counter the guerrilla movement. But this wasn’t the time. Not yet.

  Barrientos had a way of making everyone in a crowded room feel special. The general was a handsome man, tall, with a tan complexion, slicked-back black hair, and a strong handshake. He was a charismatic, skilled politician, but short-tempered and sometimes ruthless. The public rarely saw that side. To them he was a daredevil pilot, jumping into army helicopters and flying from village to village, giving passionate speeches about land reform, law and order, and the evils of Communism.

  He wasn’t all talk. He’d worked for months to fulfill his campaign promises. Now his full attention was focused on the guerrillas.

  The hostess led her guests to the dining area. Ortiz’s cook had prepared picante de pollo—chicken in a spicy sauce with rice and potatoes. As they passed the plates, one of the guests broached the topic everyone had been waiting to discuss: the ambush. Weary as he was with the topic, Barrientos had known it would come up eventually. It was the talk of Bolivia, all over the airwaves—every radio station interrupted its broadcast when news updates arrived. That morning a newspaper had reported that the president had personally flown an army helicopter into the mountains to see firsthand the government drive against the guerrillas. Barrientos told reporters his fighting units “had adequate resources” to deal with an estimated four to five hundred guerrillas who had been receiving “foreign aid for more than a year.”

  Barrientos put the best face on a dire situation. He wanted to quell fears that violence might break out in towns and cities. Then one of the guests shared the latest scoop: Che Guevara was part of the ambush plan, advising the guerrillas. He might even be hiding somewhere inside Bolivia. The guest had heard it on the radio, he said.

  Che was both feared and adored in Bolivia, in equal measures. Che Guevara was a romantic hero, an Argentine doctor who’d abandoned his middle-class life and profession to help Fidel Castro overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. When Batista fled Cuba on January 1, 1959, many people in Bolivia and throughout Latin America expressed joy and solidarity with the guerrillas. Cuba reminded them of their own countries’ struggles for independence, when campesinos all over the continent took up arms to overthrow Spanish rule.

  The Cuban Revolution translated well into the region’s modern struggles. Cuba was not the only country where a ruthless dictator had turned his country into a fiefdom, exploiting is people and the natural resources. If a small group of revolutionaries could topple an entrenched dictator in Cuba, thought people in other such places, why not in their own country?

  Castro was the leader of the Cuban Revolution, but Che was its icon—and his message resonated with insurgents fighting injustice all over the world. With his long hair and scraggly beard, green fatigues and beret, he preached a simple message: The duty of a revolutionary was to make more revolution. And the ultimate goal of any armed struggle was to topple corrupt governments that exploited the people.

  Behind the noble rhetoric, Che was as brutal as any Third World dictator. After Castro seized power in Cuba, Che was the man in charge of executing political prisoners. He worked efficiently and showed no mercy.

  Che embraced his revolutionary image and exported it throughout the world along with ideological how-to books on armed struggle. If it worked in Cuba, it would work in other places. He called his theory foco (“focus”): A small group of dedicated guerrillas, based in a rural haven, could quickly overthrow an established government and liberate a nation.

  Che had see
n the value of rural support while fighting in Cuba. On November 25, 1956, he and eighty-one other guerrillas boarded a rickety old cabin cruiser called Granma and set sail on rough seas for Cuba. Within two weeks they’d landed, engaged the enemy, and lost almost all their men in a disastrous skirmish with Batista’s soldiers. The survivors, including brothers Raul and Fidel Castro, fled to the Sierra Maestra Mountains, where they regrouped and recruited anti-Batista farmers to their cause. It took some time, but two years later, Castro and his guerrillas—known as the 26th of July Movement—overthrew the Batista government and seized power.

  Che held several positions in the new government, but he continued to preach revolution in other developing nations, building himself into a “revolutionary statesman of world stature.”

  The revolutionary delivered his last blistering speech in Algeria on February 24, 1965, at an economic seminar on African-Asian solidarity. There he criticized not only the United States, but also the Soviet Union, saying both governments exploited the world for their own gain. Two weeks later, Che vanished.

  Time passed. Cuba mourned. Fidel Castro went public with a letter Che Guevara had sent him some months earlier. Che affirmed his solidarity with the Cuban Revolution but declared his intention to leave Cuba to fight for the revolutionary cause abroad. He’d resigned from all his positions in the government and party and renounced his honorary Cuban citizenship.