by Ciro Bustos
The man in question was Armando Coria, who had been one of the Communist Party’s most important and authentic cadres but who now led the province’s ‘revolutionary’ current which was pro-Cuban and pro-armed struggle. Mature and reliable, among so many ‘improvisers’, he stood for solid political thinking, proper analysis of the current Argentine situation, hands-on experience, and links with the working class. His enthusiasm disarmed me, and I asked him to organize our fledgling structure at the national level. I handed him our contacts in Buenos Aires and Mendoza, with a strict internal security plan, and finally I set off north to Bolivia, confident that the organization was really beginning to take shape.
I got off the bus near the trail leading to the finca, and walked for a few hours following the jeep tracks, wading swollen streams and assaulted by insects, without meeting a soul. As the sun was setting I found the barbed-wire fence, and arrived at the house. When I reached the citrus orchard, Hermes came out to meet me, shouting over his shoulder: ‘It’s Laureano, coño, it’s Pelao!’ Masetti welcomed me warmly and enthusiastically, transmitting for the first time something other than praise for military prowess, or recognition of mission accomplished. The house looked the same, but there was no sign of the people I had been expecting. Don Benito was cooking, Furry was away. ‘And the rest?’ I asked, without specifying names. ‘Training with Federico’, said Masetti, ‘they only come home at night’.
The ‘army’ had doubled since I had left, but there was one important absence. Leonardo, Médecin, was no longer part of the original group. Masetti explained that he had asked for permission to leave on health grounds (he had lupus erythematosus), and had returned to Cuba to be with his family. In his stead, he promised to pass through Buenos Aires and send a friend of his; which he did. This explained the sudden appearance of Petiso Bellomo at my Córdoba safe house. Furry had managed to get a passport from the Cuban Embassy in La Paz, and Médecin had departed forever.
Federico appeared with the ‘new boys’ who already looked shattered. Uniforms drenched in sweat, gaunt faces and long beards, they looked like the reincarnation of our time training with Hermes; although that was a walk in the park compared to this mountainous jungle. To compensate, Masetti allowed them to sleep on the living room floor with the rest of us. There was a rota of guard duty until morning reveille, followed by a hearty breakfast, the only food until the evening.
Overall, morale was enthusiastic. Masetti had imposed his personal style of leadership: brilliant, severe and playful at the same time. Using my arrival as a pretext, after our meal he called a meeting that established a hierarchical distinction between the new arrivals and the original core group – now four plus Furry – for military and operational purposes. The structure would be as follows: one operations commander – himself; one rearguard commander – Furry; one captain attached to command headquarters – Hermes; one operations lieutenant – Federico; and one intelligence, security and urban relations lieutenant – me.
Masetti and I talked all night, with me describing every step I had taken and the number and attributes of the contacts I had made. But it was not enough to hide his disapointment at Bettanín’s reaction; he felt as if one half of himself had denied the other. He was amazed, however, by the great potential of three of the recruits: Cordobés Jouvé, Correntino Stachioti (Federico’s friend), and Pirincho Goicochea, a friend of Leonardo and Bellomo from Buenos Aires. Héctor Jouvé, the fourth-year medical student whom I had interviewed strolling under the trees in Córdoba, was the ideal candidate. His humanity enveloped everyone round him. Correntino was the group’s missing link, practically a local man, accustomed to living in the bush, an excellent explorer with unique physical strength. And Pirincho, already a qualified surgeon, was the ideal replacement for Médecin, or even an improvement. He was very calm, with an easy, rather ironical smile, a hard worker, very friendly and willing, although he appeared to think discipline did not apply to him.
In time, being a doctor ceased to be important because we would soon have more doctors than anything else. It might have been copycat syndrome: doctors naturally wanted to be Che. Our main seedbed was the university, and the students who saw suffering and misery at closest quarters were from the Humanities department and the Medical School. The latter in hospital emergency wards, the anthropologists in the shanty towns.
Furry kept bringing in weapons, and we now had more guns than men. The prospects for growth were no longer a dream, it was really happening. Masetti decided to take extra rifles so there would never be men without weapons in the short term. When we arrived in our target area near Orán, I would tour the cities again to establish a line of supply and delivery. Among the new weapons were two Chinese bazookas: a long, thin and light tube with a trigger mechanism. We also had new M1 rifles and Thompson submachine guns, as well as plenty of ammunition and missiles for the bazookas. The house looked like an arsenal, so we stuffed the spare weapons in the ceiling over Furry’s bed, hidden by sacks of potatoes and flour. Our precautions were opportune.
One afternoon, Masetti, Federico, the cook and I were in the house, when we heard the sound of vehicles. They could only be approaching along the track to the house. Furry was away on a trip, and was not expected that day, least of all in more than one truck. Masetti sent Don Benito into the bush to look for Hermes, who was training the recruits, to tell him to cover the perimeter of the finca, then come back himself with wood for the fire. The noise of car engines was now about a hundred metres away and Federico and I went up to the mezzanine, guns at the ready. We saw two police jeeps from Tarija. They stopped at the gate, and the half dozen occupants got out.
Masetti came out to welcome them like a finca owner receiving friendly visitors and, although we could not see them, we heard them talking animatedly on the patio in front of the kitchen window. At one stage, Masetti came into the house and, standing beneath the mezzanine, told us to jump out of the back window if we heard him cough, and hide in the undergrowth behind the house, in order to block their way if they wanted to search the finca. He went out again carrying the briefcase with the finca deeds, a bottle of brandy and glasses ‘to toast the police chief’. We opened a small skylight, climbed out backwards, our rifles slung across our backs, and hung by our fingertips from the edge to shorten the four metre fall to the ground. When Masetti coughed, we dropped one after the other, our rifle butts scraping the wall, as if we wanted to draw the attention of a whole regiment! Masetti persuaded the police chief he was just a regular landowner come to farm pigs. He avoided a catastrophe. The policemen drank coffee, picked grapefruit, and left.
After a reasonable amount of time had passed, Masetti posted sentries along the road and concluded the time had come to leave for good. In the meantime, we had to go back to sleeping outside, except for the legal ‘owners and administrators’, cook included.
During the final preparations for our second attempt to enter Argentina, two envoys from Che arrived unexpectedly in La Paz. Furry brought them to the finca. One was a captain in the Cuban intelligence services, but assigned to Che, called José María Papi Martínez Tamayo (he had fought with Raúl Castro in the Sierra Maestra); the other was Alberto Castellanos, a lieutenant in Che’s bodyguard, a comrade of Hermes. It made us think Che was preparing to come himself. But we were nowhere near ready, nowhere near our target zone of operations.
Alberto tried to persuade Masetti to let him join our column, despite strict orders to wait at the finca until his boss arrived. He argued, not unreasonably, that the person who would be taking Che into Argentina should already be familiar with the route and any potential obstacles. He would gain valuable experience, he said, rather than staying at home eating. Also, it was an unequivocal token of his good will. Masetti saw the advantages, given the huge load of extra weapons to be carried, so he finally agreed. Alberto was added (but not given a rank) to my rearguard group of Cordobés, Pirincho and Pupi. Pirincho moved to the middle group with Masetti and Hermes.
&nbs
p; On a September day, after a pep talk about the whys and wherefores of the People’s Guerrilla Army, the growing core of the EGP swore to take the Revolution to Argentina; a disproportionately large aim compared to our meagre forces but not compared to our love, illusions and dreams. We struggled across the frontier into our nation’s territory.
The extra men and equipment meant that transporting us along the road was more complicated this time, given the weight on a not very big Toyota. But we did it. Furry worked with his usual cool punctillious confidence, as if detached from the emotional turmoil raging inside the rest of us. He took loads to the main road, hid them, and came back for us. At dead of night, he packed us into the jeep, even on the running boards, and delivered us all in one go. The new ford in the river, further south past the highest peaks, was swollen by the melting ice caps and the freezing water was chest deep. In the darkness we formed a chain to pass the equipment across the river.
First we said goodbye to Furry, who stood on the bank embracing us one by one, like a stage director introducing his actors before raising the curtain and turning on the spotlights. He was gone before we were even out of the water. If all went well, we would see him again soon. We had a rendezvous in two weeks’ time at a point on the map where a track branched off the road to Orán, and disappeared into the jungle near the River Pescado (a mountain river that was impassable according to what Furry had seen on his jeep excursions round the area). What is more, the agricultural valley around the city of Orán was also impossible to cross unless the guerrilla army was invisible. So the rendezvous was like a message written on water: a predetermined date and hour which would only be met by the magic of Furry’s operational precision and our own superhuman efforts.
We needed to trek through the jungle in order to avoid the border patrols, but we also had to stay in the foothills which, from that point on the map, became lower and spread out to form the wide valleys of Calilegua, Orán and the other agricultural areas fed by the rivers gushing down from the melting snows of the Andes. These rivers span huge differences in altitude, down from 5,000 metres to practically sea level on their way to the River Paraná.
Our biggest problem was the enormous weight we were carrying. Hacking our way through the undergrowth up the hillsides, it became clear we could not do it in one go. We established a system of advancing in stages, leaving part of the load, walking on for while, then leaving the first load and coming back for the rest. We covered three times as much ground, but only carried half the load. On our previous attempt, we had been forced to dump equipment that we never recovered (among other things, the damn generator). But this time, we had weapons and ammunition we could not afford to lose.
Such a situation divides the strong from the weak, the more able from the less able. It is a debilitating process that the military mindset easily falls into, and guerrillas are no exception. It became gradually clear to us at two extremes: while Correntino got stronger by the day, carrying the heaviest loads, doing most of the exploring (walking on while the others rested), Pupi – another of Leonardo’s Buenos Aires recruits – was falling to pieces. Although everyone gave him a hand, he was my responsibility, both as the officer in charge of his group and as ‘political commissar’, so I had my work cut out encouraging him, giving him moral support, and keeping the problems he was causing from Masetti. Apart from Pupi, all the others coped well with the pitiless life of a guerrilla, and displayed qualities and virtues. Enduring hunger and bugs was a personal matter; enduring the workload and discipline (and some injustice) was a question of principle.
One evening while pitching camp, Masetti discovered that according to the map we were only a stone’s throw from the rendezvous with Furry. Federico and Hermes went out to explore, and found an old road, just a track really, that looked as if it went down in the vicinity of the river, or even to the river itself if it turned out to be the track that lorries used to carry sand. It proved to be so, and we had indeed arrived at the rendezvous a day earlier than planned. We celebrated the fact with a meagre, almost illusory, amount of food, reinforced by general high spirits.
Dug in at the intersection of the track and the Aguas Blancas-Orán road, we waited for the jeep. It emerged from total darkness at the appointed hour, about two in the morning. Furry flashed his headlights, we answered with a torch, and in silence loaded up the equipment, backpacks and weapons. Half our column got into the jeep, including Masetti and Hermes, while the rest of us stayed to wait for the return trip. The operation was risky despite the late hour. Furry had come from Orán. Although the road had been deserted, and he had checked there were no border police controls, flying checkpoints could be set up at any time if, for instance, the same vehicle was heard passing for a second or third time so late at night. In the solitude of forested ravines and valleys, the sound of a car engine carries a long way and locals know exactly whose vehicle it is. Roaring up to the bridge over the river, the noise of the jeep’s engine made us feel as if we were caught in a mousetrap. If we met a checkpoint, we would have to shoot our way out.
Once again we said goodbye to Furry, who would wait until dawn before returning to Bolivia. The reunited group returned to the undergrowth in search of the distant forested hills below Orán and to the west. This was the area chosen for our exploratory work; it would enable us to move around, without needing to go into the valleys of Tucuamán. But man proposes and hunger disposes. The rest in the jeep had not reduced the weight of our load, and as rations became smaller, the march became impossible. Cooking to soothe the hunger pangs of ten exhausted human wrecks meant continually depleting our reserves of cereal, cans and other transportable food. And thirst was even more of a problem. You can spend days without eating, or eat hardly any food for a month, but no one can go twenty-four hours without water. Although big rivers rushed across the region in some areas, the stunted thorny scrub lowlands that we had to cross did not have a single miserable stream, and the heat dehydrated us even when we stood still.
One midday while we rested exhausted in a clearing, I heard someone slashing at the undergrowth behind me. Federico, who was in front of me, leaning on his rucksack against a tree trunk, machine gun on his thigh, reacted like a sergeant and without moving shouted: ‘Halt! What do you want?’ The man, a poor peasant, followed by a ragged boy in a hat larger than his head, stammered that they were looking for a cow and its calf. ‘Nothing else, señor …’ ‘Get out of here, these are military exercises, it’s very dangerous!’ ordered Federico. No one said a word. The miserable twosome crossed the circle of armed men, ragged as they were, mumbling: ‘Good day, señor … good day’, and disappeared into the brambles.
We had to get out of the area quickly, but we still needed water. Correntino climbed a tree and said that he could see brighter green towards the south. Masetti told me and Cordobés to keep exploring until we found water. We left our backpacks and, each with our own rifle, hooked all the empty water bottles to our waists and set off. We crossed the brambles, sometimes crawling like snakes rattling their tails. We were about to admit failure when the scrub began to change. Flocks of birds flew screeching overhead. We had found the wide brown Las Piedras river. Héctor and I dived in fully dressed among the bamboo eager to drink the muddy waters.
We returned with the good news and the group moved towards the river. We crossed it and continued towards the hills. Masetti sent Correntino to a hamlet marked on the map to buy whatever food he could find. He returned with flour, tins and cereal from a general supplies store servicing the few sparse settlements. Masetti sent him back time and time again, the distance getting greater as we moved further away, and each time Correntino came back loaded like a pack horse with rice, beans and tinned food.
On one of his errands, Correntino did not return on schedule. Masetti ordered Federico and me back down the path to the scrubland to post a sentry, in case he had been arrested and made to lead a patrol after us. We reached the spot at dawn, hid at one end of the forest with an escape ro
ute, and waited. The day passed, and the night brought a persistent drizzle which forced us to lie under our nylon sheeting with branches on top. We took turns sleeping to keep an eye on the bend in the road where whoever it might be would appear. Federico was sure no one would come, and I had an inkling he already knew why.
Correntino never showed up and, back at camp two days and a wet night later, we had to face Masetti’s wrath. Fortunately he respected the rules set by the core group which allowed internal discussion. Federico and I argued that you could not demand supernatural efforts from the same man, day in day out, without pushing him to desert. Masetti decided that, from then on, he would apply the rules equally rigourously to the weak and gutless. He also said that on my next tour of the cities, I should find out what had happened to Correntino before talking about desertion because, were that the case, we had to add theft to the charge, since he had taken the food money.
The EGP did not have much money. Masetti had less than 50,000 US dollars and each officer carried a couple of thousand in case we got separated. I had most of the local currency, a few more thousand (in US dollars, I can’t remember the exchange rate), that I had to manage extremely carefully. But in all honesty, I don’t know exactly how much money we had, or how much Furry managed back at base. Anyway, Che was clearly not squandering the Revolution’s money.