Che Wants to See You

by Ciro Bustos

  Under the supervision of our architect Enrique, before he left to set up the base in Salta, Masetti had dug a refuge in the ground with a roof of branches. In this ‘commander’s headquarters’, he escaped the mosquitoes that devoured him as he tried to write and held his private meetings, including those he had with me before and after my trips. I passed on anxieties and concerns. The Pasado y Presente group in Córdoba, our most supportive political structure, had already rejected (through me) the repressive ‘court martial’ as not conducive to the ideals of a liberation project. Now I used practical arguments. Masetti had already agreed to five dismissals, plus the one confirmed case of desertion, and no harmful consequences had ensued. However, we were talking at cross purposes. His arguments were military and mine were political. Nonetheless, Masetti finally bowed to my experience and made me responsible for organizing Nardo’s departure, on condition he did not return to his former haunts in Córdoba. That was the deal.

  Pirincho had gone to Buenos Aires at the end of January to prepare the ground for his maritime operation. He was to go back to his family and friends with some credible story, take up his privileged life again: yacht club, sailboat, excursions to Tigre and Punta del Este, and his girlfriend. I was to meet up with him on my next trip to evaluate security in terms of Customs and Coast Guard. Charged with these tasks, I set off again in February 1964.

  My stopover in Córdoba was devoted to meetings with contacts, and plannng Nardo’s transfer to some remote part of the province. One possibility was Gustavo Roca’s finca in Ongamira. Roca agreed to have him there as an ‘administrator’.

  I carried on to Mendoza. Cholo knew of a workshop (one of his former Communist Party colleagues worked there) that designed secret compartments in vehicles smuggling goods from Chile for select clients. We needed a vehicle to transport ‘compromising material’ and Cholo found a Ford 350 pick-up with bodywork covering the back and a large part of the total space hidden under this imposing facade. Commissioned by a smuggler who was now in jail, it was on sale at half price. I authorized its purchase. Cholo would take it to Buenos Aires as soon as the paintwork was finished.

  In Buenos Aires, I met contacts, travelled to towns in the immediate vicinity, and discussed supplies and potential recruits with Bellomo and Rafael. Among the candidates were a couple of militants from a Communist Party cell in Matanzas, a town in the province of Buenos Aires. Che’s firm stance was ‘not to pinch people from the CP’ so as to avoid international relations problems unconnected to the project. Contact with these two had cooled, and they had never had access to home addresses or phone numbers. Neither did they know who the political leadership was. Nonetheless, they kept insisting they wanted to join. The fact that one of the candidates was a pedicurist was very tempting, a gift from heaven for feet on forced marches. They were told to resign their party affiliation and finish their studies, then we would see. But the expectations raised back at camp by the possibility of such sophisticated health-care boosted the decision to let them join. They were told they would be contacted at the appropriate time.

  Finally free of other engagements, I phoned Pirincho. He sounded a bit ambivalent, but I attributed it to family reasons. We agreed to meet in a café in the Barrio Norte, a smart area near the centre. He did not come. I phoned him and he apologized, alluding to family problems. He asked me to phone the following day. We arranged to meet in a tea room opposite the Belgrano R train station, another elegant area slightly further from the centre. I went with Paula (Ana María), as usual. Ten in the morning was ‘family hour’ in those circles. From a café across the road, we watched the crowded tea room. I told Ana María not to wait more than half an hour. Crossing the road, I went inside.

  Couples and youngsters were sitting at tables against the windows and walls, encircling the centre of the tea room where Pirincho was sitting alone at a table, a coffee in front of him. Intangible criteria that you feel rather than see indicate whether a clandestine meeting will go well or not. The phone calls, the failure to show up, the excuses, had put me on my guard. Pirincho, also obviously wary, had chosen a table in full view of everyone in the café. As I sat down opposite him, I felt apprehensive. His reaction was distant, he showed neither enthusiasm nor surprise.

  I don’t recall the exact conversation, but the content was memorable. He began by saying he was there out of loyalty to me and our compañeros, not to explain anything to Masetti. He was not going to do the Uruguayan operation, nor returning to the guerrillas, nor staying in Argentina. The day I phoned he had just married his girlfriend, and they were leaving for Europe that very night. If any part of him remained sane, he preferred to put it in his own hands and not in Masetti’s, whom he no longer respected. The most important part of the project had been completed and he promised never to betray that. He preferred to wipe the whole thing from his memory, although there were some of us he would always remember.

  Bellomo, Pirincho’s old friend from medical school, promised to make discreet inquiries. By the end of the day we had confirmation of the wedding and the trip to Europe. Another fellow student had been to a private goodbye party organized by Pirincho’s family. The episode was over and irreversible. I would have to wait and see the effect when I presented my report to Masetti.

  With such a philosophical dilemma weighing heavily on my mind, I started back to Salta. The impact of what had just happened was incalculable, but, analyzing the facts and circumstances, I understood Pirincho, just as I had understood Correntino. They had both taken a gamble, leaving behind a good life for a dodgy offer: beast of burden and totalitarianism, instead of adventure and moral revolutionary. We may all have had, at some time or other, a desire to end such arbitrary and soul-destroying effort. But, for me, personally, still central to everything was a commitment to the ideal and its progenitor – Che – rather than the vicissitudes of its development. The problem was that while some people were ultimately joining a political project, others of us were embodying a myth.

  As I approached the camp, I began to get that sense of freedom again, of being more sure of myself, on my home ground. So, telling myself I was happy to be back was not untrue, but it was better not to show it too much, because in the eyes of those welcoming me, I had the privilege of coming from the easy life, the air-conditioned city world, full of flavours and news. And the news I was bringing was bad. It was hard, then, to believe I would receive news that was even worse – Nardo had been executed!

  Only days after I left, having solved the problem of Nardo’s evacuation to Córdoba, Masetti had set up a military tribunal. Nardo had been tried for moral decline and setting a bad example; in short, as a cancerous, counter-revolutionary infection. At nineteen years of age, he had been found guilty and executed. The fascist mentality had triumphed and struck another fatal blow to our liberating utopia.

  Fascism is a state of mind rather than an ideology: the mentality of the absolute exercise of power over the individual, unrelated to age, the environment you’re born in, or political affiliation. It is not limited to the Right, nor is the Left immune. Power is an instrument of coercion, blackmail, humiliation and crime: a synthesis of pathological sadism and fundamentalist fanaticism, it is the raison d’être of the owners of the truth, from the miserable torturer in the Navy Mechanics School in Argentina to the sinister Pol Pot. We were impregnated with this fascistoide mentality, and we didn’t even know it. We thought we were imbued with revolutionary truth but we were just naïve, enamoured of the idea of imposing justice by force.

  There is a black hole in my memory at this point, I don’t know how the bad news was exchanged. Usually, I was immersed in news long before I reached Masetti, and obviously for the camp the shocking news I brought this time was Pirincho’s defection. The other news, about Nardo, only affected me, like a metaphysical implosion. Masetti took my news as a personal affront, he did not believe Pirincho would desert. I must have misinterpreted the facts out of vanity, perhaps to get promoted. It was pure revolutio
nary infantilism. One phrase echoing this accusation of vanity stuck with me: ‘I was waiting for you with your captain’s stripes. You’ll have to win them again.’ No doubt I thought I would not be promoted and I might have said so. Anyway, the subject was closed.

  I was to set off again to fetch Furry in Buenos Aires (they were receiving coded messages via Radio Habana, or locally through Radio Tarija) and, in passing, bring back Pirincho. The incongruity of the order, a mixture of security mission – the highest level of risk – and impossible fantasy, seemed like a joke. I don’t remember how the discussion continued. There were several other convoluted yet serious suggestions, like beginning military operations by attacking some objective, as yet unidentified but in the pipeline.

  Such a plan was diametrically opposed to our project’s strategic goals. And that meant, in fact, we would not be able to do it. It would take only one armed clash to jeopardize the whole programme of exploration, control of territory, growth in manpower and expertise, that was crucial if Che were to come to Argentina. Masetti wanted to strike a blow and then leave the zone, in effect making the anticipated move to a more agricultural region with a larger population, but without doing any of the required groundwork. It was the equivalent of burning your boats without any idea of where you were going. And with a group of men, traumatized by the laws of life and death, showing signs of strength and disenchantment simultaneously. Despite everything, there was one bright spark: Furry’s visit might be related to the pending delivery of weapons or, in the best possible scenario, to transcendental news – the arrival of Che. That was what I was hoping for, and I decided to postpone the battle with Masetti until I came back with Furry and found out what our future was to be.

  The news of Nardo’s fate caused indignation in Córdoba, muted in part by the trust we had built up and the prospect of a discussion with the national leadership when Furry arrived at the camp. I requested lodging for the latter and carried on to Buenos Aires. Things did not have the same immediacy there, not only because of the geographical distance, but also because the group in Buenos Aires was a clandestine cell organization, not a splinter group of a recognized party like Pasado y Presente in Córdoba. Bellomo was a de facto ‘military cadre’ waiting to join the guerrillas once the Buenos Aires infrastructure was firmly in place and Rafael had completed his plan of operations. Meanwhile, they had just dispatched a new group of five volunteers, among them the pedicurist and his friend, the two Communist Party militants from Matanzas. They had left just as I arrived. Of Pirincho, of course, there was no news.

  It was the beginning of March 1964, and Buenos Aires was a Turkish bath; boiling hot streets and everything dripping with humidity, even the walls. Furry arrived by plane from La Paz. A prudent conversation, full of things not said but implied, coded and silent, occupied our waking hours. Furry listened and asked questions but gave no indication of what he thought, or let slip anything that he needed to discuss with Masetti first, although the latter’s change of plans and a few clues intimating Furry’s interest in certain things and not in others (like Pirincho’s desertion, the frustrated Uruguayan operation, etc.) made me think the changes were more serious than arbitrary and that perhaps Masetti’s dilemma lay in having to do something to justify our existence.

  We took the bus together to Córdoba at the crack of dawn. Oscar had arranged for Furry to stay at a relative’s house. He said someone from Mendoza wanted to see me at another house, where I could sleep to avoid having to leave at night. We agreed to meet the following day. I was told which buses to take. After eating a parilla in the garden of a restaurant in La Cañada, we were both taken to the house. The visitor was my ex-wife Claudia. The whole night was spent in a long overdue conversation. Ramón, in Mendoza, had given her the contact.

  We were going to Salta by plane because, as well as saving time, it was less conspicuous than the interminable highway going north, with its endless stops. Oscar would buy the tickets. There was a flight at midday.

  * * *

  * When I told this anecdote to John Lee Anderson in 1995, the only one of Che’s biographers to come and see me about the Argentine part of his project, I confused Jorge with Pupi. However, thinking over the memories that were filtering out, emerging from the shadows, I realized the mistake and wanted to send him a fax telling him this person was not Pupi but another recruit. It was too late, however. So the mistake is not his.

  17

  Sudden and Total Disaster: March 1964

  I left the house in Córdoba early in the morning and went to the bus stop. I bought the newspaper La Voz del Interior, got on the bus, installed myself in a seat and opened it.

  On the front page was a blurred photograph with a heart-sinking headline: ‘Border Police Raid Guerrilla Camp in Salta’. Reality suddenly interrupted the dream. The information, provided by the police, was sparse. It spoke of men in charge of a supply camp being surprised and taken prisoner without offering any resistance. Bearded, dressed in olive green uniforms, one with a foreign accent, they were there to light the flame of Castro-communist intervention. The news had to be true: it was Alberto and the compañeros of Camp No. 1. I kept my rendezvous with Oscar del Barco and we went together to fetch Furry. We had an improvised meeting and took urgent measures.

  Police operations in the north had temporarily blocked the road so we cancelled our flight and our entire trip. Furry needed to leave Argentina immediately and get back to the Bolivian finca in Tarija. The people most visibly connected to the EGP had to leave the cities and go into hiding. I had to stay in Córdoba and wait for a pre-established emergency contact, so I could resume our internal links. We organized Furry’s return to Buenos Aires to catch an international flight. One of the girls from Córdoba, Jorgito’s girlfriend, would accompany him. This was obviously not to nanny him, which he would not want, but an extreme security measure. His being a Cuban comandante would create a diplomatic scandal if there were any incident involving the police, his Cuban accent drew attention like a neon sign, and his unpredictable fits meant it was not safe for him to travel alone in Argentina. The girl would put him on the plane, and then make the necessary contacts in Buenos Aires to raise the alert and take emergency measures. Claudia was to do the same in Mendoza.

  Between March and May 1964, the border police occupied the whole guerrilla operations zone, gradually capturing all its members, alive or dead, with the exception of Masetti and Atilio. Those responsible for the EGP infrastructure in Salta were also arrested, and, thanks to the typical error of writing down names and phone numbers, so was a member of the Pasado y Presente group, the psychiatrist Samuel Kiszkowsky. The only other civilians to be detained were Eugenio Franco and his wife Nora Levin. We were unable to establish any contact at all with the guerrillas, so our only source of information about how events were developing, week by week, was the press.

  Meanwhile, we got together a team of lawyers headed by Antonio Lonatti and Gustavo Roca from Córdoba who, with the help of Farat Salim, Norberto A. Frontini (Grillo’s father), Silvia Bouvier and others, interceded for the lives of the detained and acted for the defence during their subsequent trial in Salta. Through them, we were able to piece together information from the survivors and reconstruct the events. It turned out that rumours of suspicious activity in the guerrilla zone had set in motion two lines of investigation, independent of each other and a thousand kilometres apart, by two separate repressive agents of the state.

  In Salta, landowners and tenant farmers in the area had heard stories from their day-labourers of mysterious armed men in vehicles moving about the area. They lost no time in informing the border police of the rumours, mainly because they were afraid of losing the exclusive control of the territory they enjoyed, if, as they thought, the men were rustlers or smugglers. Aware of the continual changes to smuggling routes, the border police decided to patrol the zone.

  At the same time, in Buenos Aires, three factors coincided: the Secretary of the Argentine Communist Party, Victo
rio Codovilla (an Italian CP leader imposed by Stalin), was told ‘confidentially’ by the Secretary of the Uruguayan Communist Party, Rodney Arismendi, that the Bolivian Communist Party ‘had confided to him’ that they were supporting an Argentine armed group linked to Cuba that was operating in the north of Argentina. As I have already mentioned, Rafael, our man in charge of recruitment in Buenos Aires, had long been in contact with two members of a CP cell in Matanzas who wanted to join. One of them was the pedicurist who had interested us for obvious reasons. In fact, both men were undercover agents of the DIPA, the Argentine secret police (División de Información Política Antidemocrática), and had been embedded in the Communist Party for a long time. They had received the same order from both the Communist Party and the secret police: infiltrate the EGP, find its base, and return with information.

  Getting the thumbs up after being fobbed off for so long took the couple by surprise, so they had not been able to leave a contact in Buenos Aires. They had no choice but to follow their orders: go to Salta and keep a rendezvous. Their police handlers, however, had them followed in the train until they met their Salta contact. When they learned the new recruits would be continuing the journey in a pick-up, the DIPA decided to continue the operation without informing other parts of the force. An unmarked jeep followed Canello’s pick-up (driven by Enrique) with the five volunteers under a tarpaulin in the back. The pedicurist signalled to the jeep with his torch every now and again, but Enrique had perfected his security technique and routinely changed direction when he stopped to fill up at a petrol station, losing the police jeep that was tailing him. The would-be infiltrators were alone and unprotected when Canello’s pick-up turned off the road up the trail into the jungle to where their reception committee came out of the undergrowth to greet them. Armed men with beards distributed the heavy loads they had struggled to carry and ordered them to start marching. They had no option but to obey.