by Ciro Bustos
In the morning, we were the butt of gossip in the hostel canteen. The local clientele were used to families cohabiting, but they didn’t think it normal for a gringa to share a room with two men. Tania went out again to organize the next part of our journey, the right thing to do but with no very satisfactory results. There was no public transport between Sucre, where we were, and Camiri, our destination, a subtropical oil town in the province of Santa Cruz. There was nothing for it but to hire a taxi, or rather, look for a driver prepared to cross a mountain range which, as we were to discover, was an almost impossible safari due to the recent rainy season. Tania found one, argued, insisted, doubled the rate and ended up bribing the driver to take us to Camiri that same day. The owner of a canvas-topped Fiat, a wheeler-dealer of uncertain origin, settled in the area since God knows when, he was one of the ‘motorized class’, which allowed him to behave with aggressive arrogance towards the ‘pedestrian’ locals, though he was docile with his gringo ‘bosses’. Anyway, prematurely drunk, he said we had to leave at once if we wanted to get to Camiri in daylight, because the road was very bad. It was about ten o’clock. We put our stuff in the car and left.
Sucre sits astride the Central Cordillera, which marks the boundary between the high Altiplano and the tropical valleys below, and the Bolivian Chaco beyond. Its foothills run down into Argentina, parallel to the great exodus of Andean water via the Bermejo and Pilcomayo rivers: the region that would be our new ‘Salta experience’. We had to cross this cordillera, a difficult task at the best of times because the roads are mountain tracks with precipices on either side, frequently blocked by land and rock slides. After heavy rain the road disappears altogether, becoming an impassable mud channel, only attempted by lorry drivers and guides with winches, or by the irresponsible. In our case, the latter. The guy drove at top speed in the passable stretches, as if he were taking part in a rally, and in the muddy sections, the jeep lurched from side to side, totally out of control. The wheels sometimes hovered over the abyss, while the gearbox crunched, trying to engage the four-wheel drive to get us out of trouble. Tania roared with laughter in the front seat, enjoying it as much as the driver, who was toasting her health with swigs from his bottle. The Frenchman and I, our bodies and heads battered about in the back seat, could only grip the metal door handles to try to protect our backsides.
I finally reached the end of my tether and yelled at the guy and Tania to stop. I leapt out of the back door and asked Tania for a word alone. Without a fuss, but with authority, I told her I was taking over the operation, since the guy was clearly a danger and I hadn’t come to Bolivia to fall down a cliff face because of some drunken idiot. Tania concurred, as if she had suddenly come to her senses. I then talked to the driver and made it clear that if anyone was going to end up in the river, it was not going to be me, and least of all not at his hands. I confiscated the bottle and threw it into the void. I said I could drive if he didn’t feel well, but he claimed dolefully: ‘No, señor. You have to know the road, señor.’ The rest of the journey was exhausting, but calm. We all rode in silence, me in front, beside the upright driver.
We arrived in Camiri at twilight. It was a town surrounded by low densely wooded hills, and inhabited by a heterogeneous population of Quechuas migrating from the Altiplano, Chapacas from neighbouring Tarija to the south, or Cambas from Santa Cruz in the east, mixed with the descendents of the native Guaraní from the Chaco plain who have always lived in this area. Camiri was a garrison town, the headquarters of the Fourth Army Division. But it was also a fiefdom of the state oil company, the YPFB. Both institutions stemmed from the Chaco War (1932–35), fought because of the thirst for oil, urged on by two big international oil companies, US Standard Oil and Anglo-Dutch Shell. The region became the bastion of Bolivian resistance, and spawned the new army. The presence of both institutions was immediately noticeable in town: soldiers, police, military personnel of all types, oil company technicians and workers, all enjoying a minimal, but lively, commercial and entertainment infrastructure.
Among the businesses which had flourished was the Italian restaurant to which we headed after Tania had made her contact. The Marietta, named after the owner’s daughter, belonged to an Italian who was getting rich by being able to turn his hand to good pastas, sauces and other peninsular food. The place was not very big but had an open-air patio, tablecloths, and good family-orientated service, typical of a Roman trattoria. Not surprisingly, everyone ate there, from army officers to oil workers, either with their families, or alone before they plunged into the darker reaches of the town’s nightlife, drawn from a broad international spectrum, but mainly Argentina.
Tania had returned to her role as hostess and guide, and had also picked up a jeep ‘of her own’, a bullet-proof Toyota, that she had left on a previous visit. We left all our bags in it, except for our documents and personal stuff, books, etc., and the jeep returned from whence it came. We walked the few blocks to the Marietta, to stretch our legs. The streets were furrowed with craters, a sign that the storms carried everything in their wake. The square was full of people, and music from a military band accompanied the locals as they walked their dogs or stood chatting. It didn’t inspire much joy though, more like depression.
Sitting at a table in the Marietta while we waited to order a pitcher of wine, Tania and I twittered away like parrots about silly things. We had introduced ourselves by now, more or less. I knew who Régis Debray was, a young French philosopher and writer, but he did not know who I was, except that I was called Carlos, an Argentine compañero. On second thoughts, maybe he knew who I was, and I did not know him. While Tania and I talked, he said nothing. We jumped from topic to topic, from the weather to oranges, to tropical food to vegetarian cooking, from bread with tomato to wine boiled with lemon, from cars to the immortality of the crab … It was Tania’s most appropriate behaviour to date and I was seconding her enthusiastically. Suddenly Debray shattered the mood, and revealed the personality he had chosen for himself and would try to construct throughout his life, inspired by the hero and author of L’espoir, André Malraux, his alter ego. In a fit of Jacobin rigour, he banged the palm of his hand down hard on the table, making the plates and cutlery jump, and shouted to our and the assembled audience’s surprise: ‘Please, señores! I can’t stand it … Let’s talk about something serious.’
We were finishing our ice cream in silence when Tania’s contact appeared. He came in, greeting some of the diners as he passed, and sat down at our table, as if we were old friends. It was Coco Peredo. He was coming to fetch us but now discovered Tania wanted to be part of the group too. We left the Marietta together. That meal was the last Tania would have sitting at a table with napkins and glasses, desert and coffee. We got into Coco’s jeep, its headlights piercing the darkness as it sought the road. It was eleven o’clock. It had taken us twelve hours from Sucre, but Coco said we would be able to rest in a couple of hours if there were no problems on the road. As a precaution, we had to flatten ourselves against the sacks of flour, rice and potatoes he was carrying in the back when we passed a barracks or a village, or, later on, any curious neighbour. The road was just a track cut through clay earth, a bush trail, and the jeep shuddered and whined. At about two in the morning, the trail died in the patio of an adobe house with a bright zinc roof. We had arrived at the Casa de Calamina.
A man came out, covering his eyes from the glare of the headlights. According to Coco, he was the finca’s ‘caretaker’. We went into the house while they unloaded the jeep, and were soon enveloped in the aroma of freshly made coffee and a worrying tale of a row with a neighbour, who had threatened to fetch the army if he wasn’t let into some imagined ‘business’ that he supposed was drugs. This threat altered the situation and our plans for a night’s rest. Tania needed to change her plans too. Coco suggested she go back to Camiri with him, but she was determined not to. So Coco decided we should spend the night in the forest, in a so-called ‘emergency and contact camp’. He would go
back and show his face in Camiri, and try to use his contacts to stop any repressive action. One of the caretaker’s men would show us the way. So, in the dark, we transferred the jeep’s cargo to a place in the woods near the river, and Coco left before dawn.
Lying in the undergrowth against the trunk of a tree is not ideal for a tired traveller, but it was not impossible to sleep for a few hours despite the mosquitoes. Halfway through the morning, the caretaker who was keeping watch with one eye on the path up to the house and the other on the trail to the river, spied the group he was expecting: uniformed with beards. If I still had any doubts about what I was going to find, they disappeared completely. Leading the new group, carrying a M2 carbine and wearing a cowboy hat, was Captain Olo Pantoja, our former instructor in the house in Havana. He embraced me warmly. It was now clear. Che was not simply passing through; he was implementing his project. It was not a complete surprise, since I was here to meet him, but all the same I was astonished that military action was a fait accompli.
Perhaps in retrospect I should not have complained about the time I was wasting in Havana. I should have abandoned my trip to China and just waited for his orders. The China trip had not materialized out of the blue, of course, but I should have waited to learn the details of his plans. According to Olo, Ramón (Che’s name now) had taken the bulk of his men, most of them Cuban, on a long exploratory training march. Papi Martínez Tamayo, who had been with us in Havana and Salta, was with them. I was supposed to have come in January or at the end of March, not at the beginning. It was 6 March 1967.
The group who had come to fetch the provisions consisted of four or five men. This was something they did regularly between Base Camp and the Casa de Calamina, an operation they called the ‘gondola’. Gondola is the name country folk in Bolivia give to the buses which do the round trips between provincial towns and cities. People use them not only to travel from place to place, but also to carry their produce, animals, furniture, everything they need for family life and commerce. The gondola carrying food and equipment between the Base Camp and the finca was done two or three times a week. Including us foreigners and the caretaker’s men, it was a pretty big column. We began by fording the Ñancahuazú river a couple of times because it made an S bend at that point before heading northwards. The river was rough and difficult, sandwiched between rocks and jungle-clad cliffs. Once the S bends had been left behind, the river itself became the path, against the current, to the north east. In a few places, trails ran along the river bank, otherwise the main part of the journey meant wading from one side of the river to the other, over stones and the odd sandy beach.
We did not have rucksacks, so we carried our stuff in jute sacks on our backs. My lack of training, and a few extra kilos, began to make itself felt and, after a couple of hours, I was on the verge of collapse. As often happened to me in Salta, just when I was about to throw in the towel, Olo called a halt. We did a bit of shooting practice and the Frenchman showed he knew how to use a gun, shooting a turkey or some such. In the late afternoon, after about eight hours marching, we reached a place where gentle rocks rose from the river and embedded themselves in the jungle, like a beach of pink granite. There, on the right-hand side, the column left the river and climbed into the trees, skipping from stone to stone, leaving no tracks.
After a few metres, we reached an almost invisible path, like an animal track, turning leftwards, and another hundred metres further up was a vantage point from which you could see how the river below took a right-angled turn to the left, and on the bend out of the forest appeared the crystalline waters of a stream. The path continued to climb steeply along the right-hand side of the stream, until it delved so deeply into the jungle that the roar of its waters disappeared. We noticed trenches had been dug there to control the passage up the path. There was also a sentry post that the column passed with brief greetings and jokes.
We came to the first installations of the Base Camp, set up on a kind of plateau between the hills and the stream. It comprised areas of cleared land, new ditches, a criollo bread oven mounted on tree trunk trestles, the outline of a corral, some pahuichis – rudimentary huts of poles tied together – and a wooden table and benches under an awning. A little further away was a kind of amphitheatre which served as an aula magna for meetings, and in between each bit of infrastructure the ground had been cleared of undergrowth, and hammocks hung from trees with room for rucksacks underneath.
There were not many people about, doubtless because of guard duty and the gondola itself, but those who were there gathered together, and introductions, via nicknames, were made. We became Danton (the Frenchman, obviously) and Carlos, the name on my passport. The caretaker’s name, Antonio, was the same as Olo Pantoja’s pseudonym, but two guerrillas could not have the same nom de guerre. So the real Antonio became León, because he had defended the finca bravely all this time, like a lion. As well as Olo, there was another Cuban, Arturo, the telecommunications man, who turned out to be Papi’s brother. Then there were old-timers, like Ñato and Camba, and some new arrivals who nobody knew anything about except that they all belonged to a pro-Chinese group led by another Guevara, Moisés, a miners’ leader; and a trio of Peruvian ‘internationalists’: a doctor El Negro, Eustaquio, and their leader El Chino. While food was being prepared, Ñato, the quartermaster, handed out hammocks, mosquito nets and blankets, and we made our nests.
After the meal, everyone bar the sentries got together on the steps of the amphitheatre for a bit of socializing, music courtesy of a portable radio tuned in to Radio Habana Cuba. The mood created by the rhythmic guarachas was a bit surreal, as if we had been transported to the gardens of the Tropicana. In the middle of this fantasy, Tania suddenly delved into her bag and brought out a packet of photos that she handed to Antonio (Olo), the camp commander. He handed them round to those present, most of them bewildered Bolivians, and the people in the photos were identified, as well as the time and place. When the photos reached me, I could not believe my eyes. There was Che in various guises, without a beard, with a few weeks’ growth, with his head shaven, with short hair. Also in the photos, all perfectly recognizable, were Papi and lots of others who were mostly not Bolivian, but also some rather inopportune Bolivians like Mario Monje, secretary of the Bolivian Communist Party, young Loyola Guzmán and Rodolfo Saldamña, our contacts in the city. Even some of those present were there – Antonio, Ñato, Arturo, Coco, and Tania herself – taken in the very places we had come through.
For me, acting instinctively was an occupational hazard. I was not a professional intelligence officer, but the little I knew about security and the responsibilities I had been given made me jump up immediately and take Olo aside (Olo did happen to be in Cuban intelligence.) I told him I thought what was happening was outrageous, a really dangerous mistake. I said there were would-be guerrilla recruits present, who should not have access to information like that, let alone pictures, and I wanted to register my disapproval. It amounted to a potential threat because if there were subsequent problems, nobody could say they didn’t know. Olo was petrified and ordered the photos returned immediately, making Tania responsible for checking they were all there – not an easy task because there were four or five rolls. Olo undertook an immediate public self-criticism. Debray confessed to having been astonished by a whole series of violations of the most elementary security norms, saying that the journey had been a comedy of errors, except when ‘Carlos’ (me) had intervened, then and now. He supported my intervention.
The next morning, during breakfast, hunting groups were organized. The Frenchman and I were in the same team and we set off upriver accompanied by Julio, a young Bolivian doctor. We went as far as a place called Pampa del Tigre and spent the whole day there without bagging anything; we returned, dying of hunger, in the late afternoon, to help with the evening chores. It was Tuesday the 13th, and if it had not already been an inauspicious date, it certainly deserved to be now. When we sat down to eat at six o’clock, some of the hunt
ers had still not returned. An hour later, we found disturbing signs indicating that Moisés Guevara’s men had deserted. They had left a note for another of their group to the effect that they were leaving. The two of them had been sent off alone with a special .22 calibre Winchester hunting rifle. Antonio was beside himself and yelled at Moisés, supposedly responsible for his people. After a few nervous deliberations with Ñato and Arturo, he ordered someone to return to the finca immediately – against the wishes of Moisés who wanted to go himself – and tell León to go to Camiri to warn Coco, unless he came across the deserters first, that is. Moisés would go with him as far as the Casa de Calamina and bring back news.
What on earth had gone wrong? How could something like this happen to a project of such magnitude, with such experienced revolutionaries? The explanation could be the one Moisés proffered, somewhat incoherently. During Carnival, people go missing and when the time came to leave for the jungle, he could not find the men he had organized to join up with. ‘Indians are like that’, he said. Moisés had replaced them with just anybody he could find, dragging them away from their traditional fiesta.
But you cannot deny other factors which turn political declamations into something closer to wishful thinking than reality. A wave of revolutionary dreaming and individualism swept away all vestiges of seriousness, because the political ‘struggle’ became a way of life that gave militants prestige. In many cases, the personal sacrifice was genuine and they paid for frustrating experiences with their lives, but their hopes and yearnings distorted reality. After the dazzling example of the Cuba Revolution, the tendency to imitate zoomed off into the realms of the absurd. Moreover, links to ‘the island’, ‘contacts’ and ‘revolutionary’ ties were flaunted – they brought invitations and other advantages – because the official Cuban connection was always with the Communist Parties. And to achieve these links, abilities, resources and offers were often embellished. When the time came to honour obligations, they had to show not only the purest of convictions, but also short-term promises of glory and immediate gratification. If principles failed, there was nothing for it but to recruit the unemployed in chicha bars, for money.