Hunting Che

by Mitch Weiss

  First, they cut the telegraph line linking Alto Seco to Vallegrande. Then the guerrillas rounded up all the men inside the school. The men expected violence, but what they got was a guerrilla recruiting pitch.

  “You may believe that we are crazy to fight the way we’re fighting,” one of the guerrillas said. “You call us bandits, but we are fighting for you, for the working class, for workers who earn very little while the military has high salaries. You work for them, but tell me what do they do for you? You don’t have water here, you don’t have electricity, the telegraph isn’t working. You are abandoned like all Bolivians. That’s why we’re fighting.”

  The speech was met with silence, the villagers told the army. The guerrillas left the next morning.

  Then, Zenteno continued, three of the guerrillas were killed in a skirmish on a dirt road between the villages of Pucara and La Higuera. Intelligence had identified them—and concluded that Che Guevara was traveling with this band. That’s why the Rangers were deployed so quickly from La Esperanza. The hunt was on. There was no time to waste. Trucks were requisitioned to move the first squads closer to the area.

  Zenteno turned to the A Company commander. “I want you in the operations area tonight.”

  Captain Celso Torrelio Villa was struck dumb for a moment, then told Zenteno that not all his men and weapons had arrived in Vallegrande.

  Prado interrupted. “My company is ready, sir,” he blurted.

  Zenteno nodded. “Very well, Captain Prado. You go in first.”

  For the next few hours the men loaded weapons, ammunition, food, and medical supplies. As time approached to roll out, Prado gathered his men around him.

  “The guerrillas were spotted near La Higuera. Three of them are dead. We know who they were, and we know they were traveling with Che,” he told them. “You are on the most important mission of your lives.”

  Some of his men were scared. They looked at the ground to avoid eye contact. Prado felt anxious, too, but he couldn’t let it show. That was one of Shelton’s lessons: The officer sets the tone. If Prado was confident, his men would follow confidently.

  “We are Rangers,” he told his men, “the best-trained, best-armed—the elite of the Bolivian military. The enemy is on the run. We have the upper hand.” He turned and spat on the ground. “We will destroy these men.”

  It was another long drive. The road ended in Pucara. Prado hired a guide to lead them the rest of the way to Vado del Oro, a fork on the Rio Grande where they could cut off the guerrillas’ escape route. They loaded the contents of the trucks onto their backs and followed the guide along a footpath into the mountainous jungle. They marched until sundown, set up a patrol base, and waited for morning. They nursed cuts from razor-sharp grass and cacti. But sleep came easy that night.

  The morning brought more of the same. At the head of San Antonio Canyon a man named Francisco Rivas told them his dogs had barked much of the night in the direction they were heading, and his dogs only barked at strangers. B Company searched the area. An hour later, a ragged man emerged from the trees, gasping for breath. He was one of Che’s soldiers, he said. His name was Camba. He wanted to surrender.

  The prisoner was filthy, with long greasy hair, a scraggly beard, and a wild-animal look in his eyes. To Prado, the man looked pitiful. He decided to put him to use. Once his soldiers were assembled again, Prado pointed to the man. “Look at this guy,” Prado said. “Pathetic. A soldier of Che Guevara. Are you afraid of these guys? Look how they are. Are you still afraid?”

  It was posturing. Prado felt a little embarrassed, but he thought it would give his troops a boost. The point was not lost on the men: They still did not know exactly how many troops Che had, but if they all looked like Camba, there was little to fear.

  Camba was taken back to Vallegrande, where Major Miguel Ayoroa, the battalion commander, interrogated him with Captain Raul Lopez Leyton, the battalion intelligence officer.

  Camba’s real name was Orlando Jimenez Bazan, and he was from the Bolivian village of Beni. He said he’d trained in Cuba in 1962 and was recruited by one of Che’s men. They’d been wandering the valleys near La Higuera for days, he said, and if he did not eat soon he would die. He had deserted. He didn’t know where the rest of the group was headed, and he didn’t give a damn what became of them. He didn’t want any part of Che.

  For Camba the revolution was over. He was lucky—he lived. He was tried by the military and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Camba was pardoned in 1970 and returned to his village.

  * * *

  Barrientos was ecstatic.

  The tables had turned. His troops had Che trapped like a rat in the jungle. It was just a matter of time before the bastard was captured and brought to justice. It was an astonishing turn of events. Just a month earlier, everyone was predicting Barrientos’s downfall. They were taking bets on which of his generals would lose patience first and seize power.

  They underestimated me, Barrientos thought. All they had to do was look at his life. He’d clawed his way up from the tough streets of Cochabama to the presidential palace, and that didn’t happen by accident—not in a country that admired daring and machismo. Che and the Communists talked a good game. They may have landed the first blow, but they’d taken on Barrientos. He wasn’t just the most powerful man in Bolivia, he was a survivor. Now he was back in control. Che would soon be his. Nothing would be more satisfying.

  Che was here in Bolivia, there was no longer any doubt. The interrogations, the documents, the goddam cigar butt even—everything pointed to Che being trapped. The guerrillas didn’t appear to have an endgame. No one was coming to their rescue—not even the Cubans. At this point Che’s guerrilla army wasn’t fighting for revolution, it was fighting to survive. Che was probably desperately trying to find a way to escape, to just see another day.

  Newspapers were beginning to hone in on that point. The New York Times asked if this was “Che Guevara’s last stand.” The story recounted the guerrillas’ success: “In the early encounters with the Bolivian army patrols, who must rank among the worst-trained troops in the world, the guerrillas were murderously efficient; they expertly cut off escape routes, used their automatic weapons well, and showed a total command of tactics.” The article said Samaipata was the rebel’s “boldest stroke of the campaign.” But in August, things began to change. “The guerrillas’ supplies became short. The Bolivian Army began concentrating on containment rather than armed contact.” Now the “dashing Che Guevara” is trapped in a canyon . . . mosquito-bitten and scorched by the sun.”

  Even the United States was beginning to praise Bolivia’s army. After the ambush that killed Tania, Rostow told President Johnson in a memo: “The Bolivian armed forces finally scored their first victory—and it seems to have been a big one.” It should do much to “boost morale” in the Bolivian Army. He added that the Rangers—the unit trained by the Green Berets—was headed to the battle zone.

  To capitalize on the victory, a triumphant Barrientos attended Tania’s funeral in Vallegrande. He went to the home of Honorato Rojas, the farmer who had betrayed Che’s men, to shake the hand of a patriot. He put a price on Che’s head, offering 50,000 bolivianos (4,200 U.S. dollars) to anyone who captured the rebel leader. Newspapers and radio stations carried Barrientos’s statement, and airplanes dropped leaflets announcing the offer throughout the guerrilla area.

  Barrientos wasn’t the only one strutting. Ovando predicted publicly that Che would soon be captured. But until then, none of the high command would rest. It was one thing to predict victory. It was another to make sure it happened.

  * * *

  Mario Salazar sat down and took off his boots. C Company had been hiking all day in the mountains, trying to find guerrillas. The other companies, including Prado’s, searched the arroyos nearby, but the only thing any of them got was blistered feet and aching backs.

  The men were feeling
the weight. Each carried a weapon and forty pounds of his own supplies. Several carried more: food, first-aid kits, ammunition, and camp supplies. Salazar wondered if the four bags of rice on his back would kill him before the guerrillas ever took a shot.

  The worst was the hillsides, where the path dissolved into loose dirt and rocks. Their top-heavy rucksacks made it easy to fall. Everyone’s hands and knees were scraped raw.

  Salazar realized this was even more difficult than training in La Esperanza. There, they had always known they would be headed back to the barracks, where they’d sleep in a dry, safe room. Now they had to stay alert, not just for biting, stinging plants and animals. The guerrillas were right here, somewhere.

  Salazar still wanted to see action. His fellows told him to be careful what he wished for. Yes, they were elites. Yes, they could handle Che. But no one wanted to die. Bad shit happens in firefights.

  With the sun setting over the mountains, the men prepared a patrol base for the night. Salazar was one of the soldiers pulling security on the perimeter of the encampment. It was a bright starlit night—not a cloud in the sky—but it was getting a little cool. Salazar stared at the stars and wondered about his life. Would he make it out of here alive? When this was all over—and if he made it out safely—he’d go home and find a nice girl and start a family. And one day when his boy was old enough, he would tell him how he’d hunted Che in the mountains.

  Still, Salazar prayed that no son of his would ever have to carry a gun, or wonder if a rebel might start shooting any minute. Salazar didn’t mind so much fighting. If he did a good enough job, maybe his son wouldn’t have to fight at all.

  * * *

  The days dragged on.

  The Rangers’ burdens lightened as the rations and supplies were consumed. But soon the food ran low, then ran out entirely. They started cutting edible plants and boiling them together with whatever kind of meat they could trap. Zenteno sent Villoldo into “the red zone” for a status report on the Rangers, and the CIA man was dismayed at the supply situation. As soon as he returned to Pucara, Villoldo let Zenteno have it. The Rangers were in desperate need, he said. Zenteno didn’t seem to hear him. “General Ovando is thinking about requesting dry rations from Argentina,” Zenteno said. “If we can’t get supplies, we’ll just have to pull back.”

  Villoldo knew they couldn’t pull back now. Not with the Rangers so close to getting Che. Instead of waiting for Ovando to start filling out request forms, Villoldo decided to head back the next day to Santa Cruz to see if the CIA could help resupply the Rangers.

  CHAPTER 20

  Che

  For Prado, it had been the same routine for nearly two weeks. His men were stationed at makeshift bases in three villages: La Higuera, Abra del Picacho, and Loma Larga. They got up early, consulted the maps, and spent the day conducting sweeps along the north and south banks of the Rio Grande. Soon they shifted their attention to the narrow canyons that fed streams into the big river.

  By the end of each day, Prado’s men were physically exhausted and anxious. They never had any idea if the day’s hike would end in an ambush. Intelligence sent the same messages: Che’s army was in tatters. No one knew if he had received any new troops.

  In the jungles, anything was possible. Prado’s soldiers had closed off the obvious entry point, but that didn’t mean new recruits weren’t flooding into the operations area some other way. That wasn’t entirely out of the question.

  October 8 looked to be much the same as the previous weeks. Dawn broke over El Churo Canyon, a steep godforsaken place with thickets of thorny bushes. Roosters crowed. The white mist rising from the canyon stream looked like dancing ghosts.

  About 6:30 A.M. a campesino approached Second Lieutenant Carlos Perez at his patrol base in the hilltop village of La Higuera. Perez was the commander of the First Section of A Company. Pedro Peña was a farmer. Like many of the campesinos in the area, he was on the lookout for any strange men. The campesino had heard the radio reports and seen the Bolivian soldiers. He’d heard about the reward.

  He told Perez that shortly after midnight, as he was irrigating his small potato field near a stream that ran through El Churo Canyon, he’d spotted a group of about seventeen men walking slowly along the riverbank. They set up a camp along the edge of the water.

  Peña waited until dawn to go to La Higuera to inform the army.

  Perez thanked the campesino, and immediately told Second Lieutenant Eduardo Huerta. They had to act quickly. Huerta took some men and headed down to the canyon. Following protocol, Perez immediately called Prado, the B Company commander.

  He told Prado what the campesino had said, and asked the captain to bring mortars and light machine guns to help reinforce his operation.

  This was the call Prado had been waiting for. As in a game of chess, the captain had been trying to figure out Che’s next move. If he were Che, where would he go? What would he do?

  Prado knew that if he were in a tight spot, he would move in the dark along the stream in the bottom of the canyon. You made the best time that way, and your pursuers weren’t out looking for you. For the guerrillas, moving in the day would be suicidal. They could be spotted by air, or soldiers stationed on the high ground overlooking the stream.

  Prado and his men arrived at the high ground near El Churo Canyon. He made contact with Perez and Huerta and assumed command of the operation.

  Prado knew the area well. He had been studying the landscape for weeks. El Churo Canyon was only about 330 yards long. At the southern end it merged with La Tusca Canyon and fed into San Antonio Canyon—the two upper canyons like the arms on a letter Y. Because the guerrillas had probably moved since the campesino saw them, Prado ordered Perez’s men to enter through the upper part of El Churo, while the third section of B Company, under the command of Sergeant Bernardino Huanca, would do the same on the upper part of La Tusca. If they were still inside the canyons, the guerrillas would flee downstream, where Prado set up the command post and blocking position at the confluence.

  Everything was ready by twelve-thirty. Prado stayed at the command post at the bottom while the troops swept down from the hills above. He didn’t have time to think about his next move. Gunfire erupted almost immediately from the north end of El Churo.

  Two of Perez’s men fell. Prado ordered Huanca to speed up the search of La Tusca. He had his men train their machine guns and mortars at the confluence of El Churo and La Tusca. Prado was certain the guerrillas would appear any moment.

  Moments later, the canyon erupted with a cacophony of machines guns and exploding mortars. There weren’t many guerrillas, but they were armed. They quickly retreated back into the canyon, hidden by the dense vegetation. They were trapped. There was no way out.

  Prado’s men were in the perfect position. The slopes were steep and rose to open fields where the guerrillas could be seen if they fled. To reinforce the blocking position, Prado ordered two squads from A Company to the confluence to await Huanca’s section, which was still moving slowly in La Tusca.

  Prado’s eyes were fixed on the confluence. He was confident the guerrillas would try again to break through. It was the only way out. The guerrillas again tried to penetrate through the narrow ravine, but were forced back into the brush.

  Prado’s heart was racing. His battlefield fear faded. He was cool and decisive. He grabbed the PRC-10 radio and called back to his base at Abra del Picacho. He described the situation to Second Lieutenant Tomas Totti, who radioed the Eighth Division headquarters in Vallegrande. They were under fire and needed a helicopter to evacuate the casualties. This was the news the commanders were waiting for—and they didn’t want the guerrillas to get away. They dispatched two T-6 airplanes armed with machine guns and bombs, designed to support ground troops. Within a few minutes, the planes were overhead and asking for instructions: They wanted to know where to drop the bombs.

  But Prado held them
off. They couldn’t drop bombs because his men were too close to the guerrillas—the Rangers could be killed alongside the guerrillas. He ordered the planes back to Vallegrande. Soon an evacuation helicopter arrived at the scene. The pilot was going to land at the command post, but Prado told him the guerrillas could hit the helicopter as it landed. Prado had no idea what kind of weapons the guerrillas had.

  During the chaos, Huanca had concluded his search of La Tusca Canyon without finding a thing.

  “What should I do?” he asked, his voice crackling over the radio.

  “Move into the lower part of El Churo,” Prado responded.

  Prado wanted Huanca to continue on upward, to link up with Perez’s section and clear out El Churo.

  Huanca moved quickly to the front of his troops—he was an aggressive soldier. As the point man, he faced the most danger. His men hurried to keep pace. If the guerrillas were still in the canyon, Huanca was going to find them. They ran straight into a volley of fire. His men fell back—one was killed, two more were wounded. They were too close now, and the enemy knew their position. Snatching a grenade, Huanca rushed toward the volley, firing his automatic and throwing the hand grenades. He killed two of the guerrillas and drove the rest deeper into the canyon. Huanca quickly consolidated his men and radioed Prado to report his casualties.

  Prado acknowledged the call and jumped back on the radio to Vallegrande: “I have soldiers dead and wounded. Send me a medical person to take care of the wounded.”

  While Prado was talking, two of Prado’s men spotted a pair of guerrillas moving toward the command post, their weapons at the ready. They let the men advance and, when they were a few feet away, ordered them to surrender.

  The guerrillas lowered the weapons. One of the Rangers shouted to Prado: