by Mitch Weiss
Vargas took a deep breath as he watched the first one, chest-deep with his rifle over his head, cross the midpoint in the river. To his astonishment, none of the guerrillas provided security on the opposite bank. That was basic tactics—in the water they were vulnerable. One by one, the ragged men followed the leader into the water, trusting Rojas and the apron signal . . . but men? Vargas couldn’t be sure, but from this distance one of them had a feminine shape.
The Bolivian soldiers watched and waited. The other nine were in the water when the first insurgent reached the opposite bank. The first guerrilla was barely on shore when Vargas cried out. The Bolivians opened fire. The lead man fired back, killing one soldier before he was cut down. His body slid down the muddy bank. The guerrillas trapped in the water had no chance. Vargas watched as the bullets turned the muddy river red. The barrage cut the guerrillas down in seconds. Several were swept downriver.
But two wounded and dazed guerrillas—both Bolivians—were fished out of the water: Freddy Maymura, a Japanese-Bolivian medical student, and Jose Carillo, a wild-eyed youth who insisted he was a student, not a fighter. Both men were rail-thin, with thick hair and beards. Vargas’s unit regrouped. A squad of soldiers approached Vargas.
“We want one,” one of the soldiers said.
The lead guerrilla had killed one of their patrol. They wanted revenge. Vargas glimpsed the prisoners. Carillo kept his head down. Maymura, the doctor, was defiant. He looked at the soldiers and refused to back down.
Both the men were injured, but Maymura was the logical choice. He had a deep chest wound—his shirt was soaked in blood. Meanwhile, Carillo continued to squirm on the ground, forcing his legs underneath Vargas. He begged for his life.
Vargas nodded toward Maymura.
The soldiers marched past Vargas and sprayed Maymura’s body with bullets. For the moment, the other prisoner was spared. Despite the bullet wound in his arm, the soldiers marched him twenty miles to their headquarters in Vallegrande. The man was elated to be alive. He said his “camp name” was Paco.
Rojas ventured outside after the gunfire died down. He crept slowly to the riverbank and looked to where the noise had been. He was nervous—what if the guerrillas had won? But when Rojas saw the Bolivian soldiers leaving with a prisoner, he knew the guerrillas’ fate.
When Major Saucedo, the Eighth Division intelligence officer, learned of the ambush, Rodríguez was the first person he called.
“We got Paco,” Saucedo said.
It was exactly what Rodríguez wanted to hear.
CHAPTER 17
Paco
Rodríguez followed Saucedo down the tiled halls of Nuestra Señora de Malta Hospital in Vallegrande.
The pair had arrived the morning of September 3 on an olive-drab C-47 cargo plane. They were there for one reason: Paco, the survivor of the ambush. Rodríguez had never met the student, but he had an inch-thick file on him. Paco had been in custody for three days. He was recovering from a gunshot wound in his arm.
Paco’s hospital room was crowded with Bolivian soldiers with guns at the ready. Paco was slumped in a chair, his arm heavily bandaged. His hair was long and dirty. A Fu Manchu mustache covered his lip, and patches of wispy beard covered his chin and cheeks.
Paco didn’t look like he needed six guards. He looked like he needed a shave and a clean shirt. He was a sorry sight, and a potential gold mine of information about the guerrillas.
“We need to get this guy released to us,” Rodríguez said to Saucedo. “Can you help me?”
Saucedo agreed.
The Bolivian Third Tactical Command headquarters was in an elegant colonial house nearby. The commander, Lieutenant Colonel Andres Selich, was there, chatting with a visitor from La Paz, General David Lafuenta. They introduced one another—Lafuenta had seen Rodríguez somewhere before, at a social event.
Selich was enjoying his moment in the spotlight. For the past three days he had paraded Paco around as his officers had their photos taken with “the notorious insurgent.” Paco was his victory; one of the army’s first real successes, and the colonel was reluctant to give up his trophy.
“We already told the press that the prisoner is badly wounded and is not expected to survive. Besides, I don’t think we can get any more out of him,” Selich told the intelligence men. He looked to Lafuenta for guidance. “General, just give me the word and I’ll execute him.”
Rodríguez nudged Saucedo. “Move in,” the Cuban whispered. “Ask for the prisoner.”
Saucedo tried, but Selich refused. Selich outranked Saucedo, so there was little the major could do. Rodríguez played his trump. He slid the card signed by Barrientos out of his pocket. Lafuenta noticed.
“Mi general,” Rodríguez said to him, “give me and Major Saucedo an opportunity with this prisoner. I assure you the information he will give us will be invaluable. And if, afterward, you don’t agree with our assessment, I’ll never ask you for another prisoner again. But, sir, please let us have this one.”
Lafuenta remembered where he’d seen Rodríguez before—in La Esperanza, at a visit from U.S. General Porter, the SOUTHCOM commander. The Bolivian general knew Rodríguez was part of the U.S. government, but his exact role wasn’t clear. Lafuenta paused, then turned to the colonel.
“Give the prisoner to this young man,” he said.
Selich glowered at Rodríguez. A Bolivian officer wrote the order on the back of a brown paper bag, and Selich signed it. Rodríguez trotted back to the hospital. The last plane for Santa Cruz was leaving within the hour, and if he didn’t get Paco on it, there was no way he would ever get the prisoner to safety.
The Bolivian soldiers didn’t want to give him up and they weren’t going to make it easy. The paperwork must be prepared, Selich’s officers said. They promised to send Paco back to Santa Cruz on a truck the next day. Rodríguez knew that if he let them do that, Paco would “try to escape” and the soldiers would shoot him.
So Saucedo and Rodríguez rushed Paco out of the hospital and shoved him into the back of a jeep. They raced to the airstrip, where the propellers were turning on the C-47. A Bolivian major stopped them at the gangway. The plane was full of reporters, he said. There was no way a nonmilitary passenger would be allowed on board.
“Look,” Rodríguez said, “we have instructions from General Lafuenta to bring this guy with us, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
The major tried to argue, but Rodríguez ignored him. He snatched Paco’s tattered jacket out of the jeep, threw it over the guerrilla’s head, and shoved him toward the hatch of the plane. Rodríguez forced Paco up the ramp.
The reporters heading back to Santa Cruz were crammed into the seats along the fuselage. Rodríguez kept his hand on Paco’s good arm as he pushed the guerrilla up the aisle toward the front compartment, with Saucedo right behind. The reporters watched the trio, curious about the barefoot man covered by the jacket.
Rodríguez and Saucedo didn’t stop for questions.
Safely up front behind the curtain, Paco collapsed in one of the seats. He wept and muttered to himself. Saucedo got a bottle of Coca-Cola and some cookies from the flight crew and handed them to Paco. The guerrilla tore them open and ate ravenously, his hands trembling.
“You’re going to kill me,” Paco repeated between sobs.
“No,” Rodríguez said. “I’m not.”
Paco cried some more, whining between bites and gulps.
“I never wanted to be a guerrilla,” he said. “I never wanted to fight. And now you’re going to kill me. Soon as we get to where we’re going. I know it.”
“We need you alive,” Rodríguez told Paco.
The plane landed in Santa Cruz. Rodríguez and Saucedo waited until the journalists were gone. Then they took Paco in a car to Eighth Division headquarters. They followed a winding route, to throw them off, and Paco never stopped crying. At the h
eadquarters building Rodríguez found a plain room with a single bunk, handed the prisoner some soap, and pointed to the shower room. While Paco cleaned up, soldiers barred the bedroom windows and doors with wood. When it was finished, Paco was ushered inside. Rodríguez could tell that when the young guerrilla saw his “cell,” he knew he wasn’t going to die, at least not yet. The CIA and the Bolivian officer had kept their promise.
Breaking Paco would take time, but Rodríguez was an expert.
Rodríguez hired a nurse to treat Paco’s wound. Flies had got to the hole while it was fresh, and now it was infested with maggots. It was disgusting, but the worms ate rotting flesh and staved off gangrene. They probably saved Paco’s life. As discussions proceeded over the next few days, Rodríguez watched hundreds of the little rice-like bodies moving in and out of the wound.
Paco slept in a regular bunk bed. He wore clean clothes and comfortable new shoes. Rodríguez brought him a stack of magazines and newspapers to fill the empty hours, and a barber came to cut his hair and shave his scruffy beard. Rodríguez was determined to talk with Paco like a man, but first he had to make him look like one.
The two talked for hours every day. On either side of a simple table, Rodríguez and Paco shared their stories. Rodríguez talked about Cuba. He told Paco how Castro had ruined his country, ushering in inequality and forcing many Cubans into exile.
“I am an exile,” Rodríguez told Paco. “Your Communism destroyed my country. It destroyed families like mine, and made us seek shelter far from home.”
Paco listened, rapt.
And when Paco told his story, Rodríguez listened just as closely.
Unlike Che and the other fighters, Paco wasn’t really a hard-line Communist. His real name was José Castillo Chavez. He was born in 1937 and started going to Communist Party meetings in 1958. His membership in the party wasn’t cemented until 1967, when his uncle, Bolivian Communist Party leader Moises Guevara, offered him “a revolutionary education” in Moscow and Havana. The young man was delighted at the prospect. But first he would have to escape Bolivia through the countryside, so his passport wouldn’t show he’d left.
Instead of being smuggled across the border, his handlers delivered Paco to a base camp in the jungle, where other recruits joined him. Paco tried to explain that he wasn’t a fighter and had only come for the education. Nato and Antonio, his squad leaders, ignored his complaints. They gave him a backpack, a canteen, a hammock, and a Mauser rifle with 120 rounds. They decided to call him “Paco.”
“You’re a guerrilla soldier now,” Nato told him.
Rodríguez smiled at the story. “You didn’t have a lot of choices,” he said.
It didn’t take long for Paco to learn that the group’s leader, Ramon, was Che Guevara. Paco was starstruck at first, but that faded fast as Che’s fighter-training regimen kicked into gear. Paco struggled to keep up with the days-long marches in the mountains. The guerrillas carried all their gear and sometimes had to race up the mountains as fast as they could. It was the way Che hardened up his fighters. He was a brutal taskmaster, and he’d seen the method succeed. This was how they’d done it in Cuba, when they were stuck in the Sierra Maestra—and just look at the glory they’d achieved.
Paco obviously admired Communism, but he felt used by the Communists. Rodríguez was determined to jam a wedge between the belief and the experience.
Rodríguez was warm and friendly. He asked about Paco’s family. He offered to get a message to Paco’s parents, to assure them he was all right. Rodríguez handed Paco a pen and paper and made sure the letter was mailed. Soon, Rodríguez and Paco had built enough rapport that Paco talked about his daily life in Che’s guerrilla force.
Even while he worked with Paco, Rodríguez mined another rich vein of inside information on the rebel force. His name was “Braulio,” and he was dead, killed in the river at Yado del Yeso. His real name was Israel Reyes Zayas. He was a Cuban lieutenant, and a dedicated diarist. Between conversations with Paco, Rodríguez read the diary—a handwritten book of revelations.
According to Braulio, the guerrilla war was poorly organized, badly planned, and poorly manned. The fighters in his unit were weak and sick from hunger. Supplies were scanty and of poor quality. But most amazing of all, Braulio’s force had absolutely no communication with Che’s unit. Before it was ambushed, his unit had been wandering through the mountains. The two halves of Che’s dreaded rebel army had lost each other. They wandered around the jungle for months looking for each other.
All this talk about hundreds of disciplined guerrillas poised to make a run at La Paz? Horseshit, pure and simple, Rodríguez realized. The world had been scared for nothing. What the hell was Che doing out there? Rodríguez just shook his head in disbelief. It was unreal.
He used insights gleaned from the diary to work on Paco. It was a delicate dance, built on the illusion of a friendship. Paco thought Rodríguez was in his corner, protecting him, so he continued to talk. The more Paco talked, the more details emerged. Details would lead them to the guerrillas, and to Che.
Rodríguez’s interrogation plan worked, with only one hitch— one afternoon a U.S. Special Forces officer in Santa Cruz decided to “have a talk” with Paco. The prisoner didn’t know the man, and he wasn’t as forthcoming as he was with Rodríguez. Sensing that Paco was lying, the officer threatened him and dunked his head underwater.
When he learned about the unauthorized visit, Rodríguez was livid. He apologized to Paco, promised it would never happen again. Then he made it clear to the guards that no one was allowed to speak to Paco without Rodríguez’s direct clearance.
Soon, Paco was feeling like himself again.
“Tell me about the camps,” Rodríguez said. He wanted a clear picture of the factions within the groups. According to Braulio, there was friction between the foreigners and the Bolivians. He wanted to hear it from Paco.
Paco started with Tania, an East German agent named Tamara Bunke Bider. Tania worked for the KGB and brought Debray and Bustos to the camp. She set up the urban support network that was broken up by the Bolivians after her Jeep was discovered.
“She wrote all of the nasty things anyone said about her in a notebook,” Paco said. “She then took the notebook to Che. Tania and Joaquin, the leader of the rear guard, argued about who sacrificed more for the revolution. The arguments always ended with Tania in tears.”
Rodríguez smiled and listened. He soaked up the details. Between conversations with Paco, Rodríguez cross-referenced his story with Braulio’s diary.
“She couldn’t keep up on the marches. She fell back frequently,” Paco said. “She slowed the whole group down.”
Tania was Che’s radio operator. She got messages at noon, 1 P.M. and later at 8 P.M., Paco said. Paco’s memory for detail was prodigious. The more Rodríguez talked to Paco, the more he figured out the man had a knack for retaining information. He would have been a great intelligence agent. He recited the names of places he’d passed through six months before, and the addresses and names of sixteen different people involved in the movement.
“What happened to Tania?” Rodríguez asked.
“She was killed in the ambush,” he said.
“Are you sure?” Rodríguez asked Paco. “We didn’t find her body.”
“She got sucked under the river,” Paco said. “She’s probably wedged between some rocks not far from the crossing point.”
After the meeting, Rodríguez shared his information with Saucedo. Four days later, Bolivian soldiers, in the exact place Paco had indicated, discovered Tania’s body. Unlike the other guerrillas, who were buried in a mass, unmarked grave, Barrientos ordered that Tania have a proper Christian burial.
One story that intrigued Rodríguez: how two fellow Bolivian guerrillas deserted early in the campaign.
“Vicente and Pastor were sent to check traps for food,” Paco told him. “They too
k off and they never returned.”
“How do you know they deserted?” Rodríguez asked.
“Moises Guevara was concerned when they didn’t come back by early afternoon. He went to check their backpacks,” Paco said. “He found a note from Vicente.”
Paco remembered exactly what was written.
“‘I am not leaving because I am a coward, but because I am profoundly preoccupied and worried about my little children. As soon as I can take care of my problems at home I am going to return. It is a matter of economics. My children do not have anything to eat.’”
Three days after the desertions, Che arrived in the camp with his entourage, including Pombo, a veteran of the Sierra Maestra. Pombo was Che’s right-hand man, his bodyguard in Cuba and in Africa.
“Then what happened?” Rodríguez asked.
“Tania was in the camp kitchen, and when she saw Che she kissed him and shook his hand,” Paco said. “Che was angry there were so many people in the camp. He wanted to know why the guerrillas weren’t more spread out at other camps.”
To Paco, this was just the daily soap opera of being in Che’s dysfunctional guerrilla family. But for Rodríguez, it was a window into the soul of the movement. He urged Paco to continue.
“El Chino told Che about the desertions, and that Marcos, the camp commander, retreated because the army was getting too close and he didn’t want to fight. Che was pissed off. He ordered the guerrillas to go back to their camps the next day and not give them up without a fight.”
Rodríguez checked his notes. This happened in March, about six months ago. It was around the time the Bolivians were first hit by Che and his guerrillas.
Paco said Che’s people cooked a meal in the kitchen and Che sent for Marcos. When Marcos arrived, there was a vicious argument. Che called Marcos “a piece of shit and a coward.”