Che Wants to See You

by Ciro Bustos

  At around nine the next morning Coco Peredo arrived, all agitated, with the news that the army had fallen into our ambush. A provisional report indicated there were several dead, some injured, and a major, a captain and many soldiers taken prisoner. It looked like a big military victory. Che, sitting on a log in the kitchen, banged his thighs with both hands, and getting to his feet, stated, as if he’d just been told he’d won the lottery: ‘The war has started. I’m going to smoke a pipe of the best tobacco.’

  The statement sounded a little untimely, but it was no doubt said to lift the spirits of the new recruits, all waiting for something to happen. Personally, deep down inside, I knew a chapter of my life had closed, that I had to leave behind those precious things: love, life and the mere curiosity about man’s fate. Another chapter had begun, one fraught with dangers, with no option but to fight or die. My plans had been knocked sideways, and what should have been a mission of huge responsibility for me – tied to the Argentine project – had been stymied by harsh reality. I had some experience of getting out of a conflict zone against the odds, like someone transplanted from one century to another, completely removed from the social and geographic context. But crossing the lines of an army thirsting to revenge some unexpected deaths was something altogether different.

  A synchronized buzz of rapid activity began. Messengers came and went. A couple of doctors left to attend to the injured soldiers and a group of porters went off to fetch captured equipment and bring it back to camp immediately. Che called Alejandro, one of the Cubans in the sick bay, and told him to take charge of interrogating the captured officers. Looking at me, a useless spectator just standing there, he said:‘Go with him and listen to what is said. I’m afraid there may be some confusion because of the way Bolivians speak. But don’t open your mouth or they’ll immediately know you’re Argentine.’

  With his brown beard and light eyes, Alejandro was an impressive figure. His real name was Gustavo Machín, a Cuban comandante, Che’s deputy at the Ministry of Industry, and now our camp’s head of operations. He was wearing a coffee-coloured fedora he had no doubt worn on the flight to Bolivia and had not yet resigned himself to jettisoning. It gave him a romantic air, which tied in nicely with his amiable manner. His legs were very swollen and the difficulty he had walking meant we didn’t get to where the prisoners were being held until after midday. It was in a sort of gully, where the river was boxed in by crags and cliffs eroded by the current which had uncovered the roots of huge trees and left them hanging in the air, ready to fall at any time. A scene of chaos greeted us. The sonorous reality of nature, rhythmic and secret, was broken by the groans of the injured and fearsome voices of the victors.

  Alejandro established his ‘interrogation room’ in a clearing. We agreed I would play the role of assistant and look after security. Some fallen logs were arranged a bit like an open-air tribunal and he sat down on one of them. He told me to bring in the prisoners one by one. We started with the major – major not only in rank but in age and girth – who suffered from depression and tachycardia. In my efforts not to say anything, I communicated with him by signs, helped by grunts and the barrel of my gun, to indicate the way he should behave and what he had to do. But the method had too many police connotations and I disliked it more than he did. Alejandro inquired after his health, since he seemed about to suffer from apoplexy, and talked to him very calmly, as if reprimanding him for taking a wrong turn at his age and keeping bad company. The good man agreed, and promised to leave the army. He swore his mission was surveying land for road construction. Alejandro scolded him gently: ‘In the river … ? And since when have mortars been used to build roads?’ The major ended up explaining the army’s operational plan. Accumulated reports of sightings and denunciations had indeed confirmed the presence of guerrillas at Ñancahuazú.

  ‘Take the major away and bring the captain’, ordered Alejandro. I returned with the latter, younger and thinner, also more frightened, and manifesting a disposition to collaborate fully, which he proceeded to do because, he said, he had a brother studying in Cuba and he himself was a member of the Communist Party. He allowed himself a critique ‘between friends’. We had been very careless, he said: ‘Caramba, Fourth Division command knows all about the armed bearded men who dry their clothes on the river bank, and had begun sending search patrols out on a war footing.’ He gave details that in no way contradicted the major. Wailing, fainting, and swearing sympathies, they told us more than they knew. I was witness to it all, something that would have unexpected repercussions later on.

  We requisitioned documents showing the enemy’s plans. They coincided with the detained officers’ statements and, in short, established the existence of two exploratory groups, one of them led by the two officers now our prisoners, and another that was following the same route in reverse, combing the river from above and descending it until the two groups met. This information represented an imminent danger so a messenger was sent to Che.

  By the time we returned to camp, the necessary measures had been taken on the opposite side of the river to repel troops, who were either very late or had already been alerted to the first confrontation. We had to set up our ‘reinsurance’ ambush in the river again, at the entrance to the camp, to compensate for our lack of numbers. We arrived back at nightfall like a pack of ravenous wolves, only to find we had to share our meagre portions with the prisoners; fourteen empty stomachs craving food.

  We spent all of the next day bringing up the weapons and ammunition harvested in the ambush. Twenty soldiers carry a lot of heavy equipment, when you take into account their machine guns, mortars, grenades, ammunition. The ‘visitors’ had to do their bit to help, mitigating the lack of effort and negative attitude of the slackers.

  Che made Inti Peredo the ‘Bolivian leader’ of the guerrillas. He was Coco Peredo’s brother, and he made his debut visiting the prisoners to tell them they were being released and giving them a deadline, within the terms of a ceasefire, to take away their dead. The major and the captain left in full uniform. Not so the soldiers; some left barefoot and in their underwear, although with their dignity intact. They had been persuaded that force majeure, the necessities of war, meant the guerrillas had to dispossess them in order to equip themselves.

  The war had begun with the deaths of five soldiers – ‘almost children’ as Che wrote in his diary – a lieutenant and a civilian guide. They were representatives of the poorest sectors of society, in whose name, paradoxically, the struggle was being waged. Another forty would die.

  The logic of any war, including a revolutionary war, is constructed on behalf of the victims: victims of exploitation, victims of hunger, victims of tyranny, and victims of liberation struggles. Without victims, there is no reason for the struggle. Without the struggle, there are no victims, nor liberation. The local population saw events from a different angle, and political resonance mediated the impact it had: first, horrified rejection; then, heroic mythology. But the army’s losses in the first battles were bound to affect the guerrillas adversely. The state propaganda apparatus used it to the hilt, to their advantage: ‘the deaths of innocent conscripts were caused by criminal hordes of alleged foreign liberators, come to disturb our peace and national development’.

  The military government, facing the chronic crisis all Bolivian regimes throughout the century have faced, affirmed itself through violence. What people on earth did not support a regime, no matter how bad, when their frontiers were breached by a foreign invader and their sons killed fighting for an army that had a populist discourse and used land reform to prove its good faith to the dispossessed? Bolivia was the only country in South America where (in 1952) a nationalist revolution had introduced agrarian reform, giving land rights back to its peasant farmers, descendents of the ancient Inca empire. The miserable inhabitants of the area where the guerrillas were fighting actually owned their shacks and strips of land – with more bugs than fruit on it, but nonetheless theirs. At the slightest sign of o
utside interference or latent threat to their possessions, they would inform the army.

  31

  Bombardment, Che Calls a Meeting, and a Night March

  A furtive peace had descended on the camp. Everything appeared to be working according to a new rule of efficiency and division of labour.

  Part of the advance guard had accompanied the released prisoners the previous afternoon, and on Che’s instructions had set up a forward ambush on the hill almost directly in front of the Casa de Calamina. The officers’ statements had revealed that the army might approach from both directions, so another group was positioned upriver, a few hundred metres from where the stream flowed into the river. Men from the rearguard and the centre columns would occupy the existing fixed positions in the lines of trenches and access to the hidden pathway leading from the river to the camp.

  Manning all three positions meant using every single available person, including the visitors. So although we might rotate tasks, positions and compañeros, we were always engaged in some furious activity or other, from collecting wood for the cook, to helping the officers in charge of the mortars or machine guns. All of them Cuban, of course. Added to which, we had to carry the booty seized in the ambush back to camp, classify the equipment, guard it and prepare new caves to store it.

  The person in charge of the arsenal was the efficient Ñato, veteran of the Puerto Maldonado disaster, on the Peruvian-Bolivian border, where many Peruvian guerrillas were killed in 1963. He was a man of little humour, but with a great capacity for hard work and multi-tasking. Coming from the region of the Beni, gateway to the Amazon, he could do all the jobs typical of a man from the tropical jungle, from hunting an animal and dissecting its carcass, to making wearable shoes from its skin, like the pair Che was wearing when he was captured. He had an amazing ability to organize his time and play to his own strengths and was, right from the start, the person the guerrillas turned to for resolving practical matters. He was not intimidated by the Cubans and their propensity to omnipotence, a reciprocal quality which led to friction.

  While exploring the hills, Ñato had found a good spot for a new cave to hide equipment. The digging would be done under the technical supervision of Moisés Guevara who was a miner, but the job of moving the equipment fell to the so-called ‘resaca’ (the dregs), the group of Bolivians who were to be expelled for lack of ‘firmeza’, revolutionary fortitude. We involuntary tourists would help them, but in case something came up that meant Debray and I would have to leave immediately, we were only asked to carry the supplies to a particular point upstream, and Ñato’s men would take them on from there.

  The coffee ceremony in the mornings was our daily communion. Gathered round the oven, wiping sleep from our eyes, seeking warmth against the dawn cold, and smoke to banish the insects of the day, it was the only moment of spontaneous gossip, an expectant audience monitoring any slip of the cook’s attention, the concretion of the only daily privilege Che required. While each man readied his tin cup, the cook placed a measure of coffee in it before adding the sugar. Che drank his coffee bitter.

  One morning, Debray and I were sent to the guard post at the entrance to the camp, on the line of trenches. Our lot, and this included work, seemed linked to our abnormal situation of visitors passing through. Hence, we often went together. On this occasion, an old Hunter fighter plane flew over the river, machine gunning the forest, firing blindly at any possible site for a camp, still very far from ours, but not so far from us. When the plane passed overhead, we could hear the taca-taca-tac of the impact on the tree trunks, and afterwards, the dull sound, like distant thunder, of the guns they were firing. I quickly ducked into a trench, urging the Frenchman to do the same, and we both ended up flat on our stomachs. The plane did another couple of turns then flew off. The habitual silence, broken by the frantic cheeping of the birds, gradually returned.

  Food is a crucial subject in guerrilla life. Men have different reactions to the lack of food and giving in to pangs of hunger is an indicator of the level of moral weakness. Some, despite physical weakness or flagging energy, were disgusted by rotten meat, floating insects or other particular taboos. For example, veteran fighters in Algeria told us that Boumedienne used to have to threaten to execute men in order to get his troops to eat whatever was available, even if it were pork. Even then some pretended to swallow it and spat it out as soon as no one was looking. Personally, I refused to drink milk. I don’t like milk. And I always took out bits of horse fat. Oddly enough, the taste reminded me of the smell of the blood in the hammock of our victim, shot in Salta.

  Papi, a crafty conspirator who did not miss a trick, had noticed my selective manoeuvres, and began sitting beside me. He would threaten under his breath: ‘Give it here or I’ll tell on you!’ As compañeros from Salta days, our relationship went very deep: for him I was not an honorary visitor, but a link between a dramatic past and an uncertain future. He had proclaimed himself heir to my private guerrilla belongings, like the boots I had bought before coming in Grimoldi, a shop in Buenos Aires. They were not special army boots, which since I had come by plane in tourist class, I avoided, but he liked them and we wore the same size. Whenever we were assigned to the same task, we would talk non-stop. He asked insatiable questions about the compañeros in our Argentine network whom he had met: especially the EGP girls who had accompanied him when he travelled; and families who had put him up for the night. But mostly about the political progress we had made, the contacts with other organizations, those I had established and could tell him about in detail. His passion for conspiracy was total, and that was precisely why he was upset when his preparatory work in La Paz had been questioned, and Che had criticized him. For his men, being criticized by Che was humiliating.

  Papi told me a lot about their African adventure. He had been one of Che’s stalwarts in the Congo, especially in their few successful military operations. In his opinion, the Congolese experience had been negative in more than one sense, and the only good thing about its failure was that it speeded up Che’s return to his main project which, with a bit of luck, would take him back to Argentina. For a Cuban veteran of the Sierra Maestra, the recalcitrant passivity of the so-called African revolutionary fighters, with no combat morale or discipline, enveloped in a mixture of voodoo and corruption, dependent on leaders who were never present, had meant there had been no option but to leave. Che never managed to be in total command and, therefore, could not use his military skills. African internal political contingencies bore no resemblance to solidarity and internationalism. These were Papi’s own conclusions; he never attributed a single opinion to Che.

  Che was not very explicit on that subject either. Although we had sometimes talked informally about the Congo, and he recalled anecdotes about this or that, or such and such a situation (no resemblance to what was happening now), with a certain nostalgia.

  Our conversations were not very numerous and occurred on the spur of the moment. More than once Che called me over to his hammock just to chat, and once to play chess, although I had to confess I didn’t really know how to play, only how to move the pieces. On other occasions, he appeared when I was on guard duty, at night, and settled himself against a tree, ‘So there’s no danger of you falling asleep’, he said. It was not so much a conversation as him asking questions about Argentina, not specifically about politics, but about things in general, from the humidity in Buenos Aires to what comments people in the street were making about newspaper headlines, magazines, television programmes, jokes. All mixed up with anecdotes about what ordinary people were thinking and the judicious opposing analyses of the prolific Argentine intellectual class. I told him of an interview with Lobo Vandor of the metal workers’ union, in those days the strongest union in Argentina. The journalist asked him, apropos Che’s disappearance from public life in Cuba and the rumours which put him in different places on earth, in heaven (or in hell), something like this: ‘Do you think Che could fill the gap in leadership of the masses left by
the General?’

  Vandor grimaced sceptically and answered: ‘There’s only one Gardel.’ It was one of our rare funny moments, and Che laughed heartily. Our country was Peronist.

  Che did not want me to include any Peronists in my recruitment plans. He said: ‘It’s too risky, they’re too infiltrated.’ But I already had contacts with grass-roots Peronist groups on the left of the labour movement. We had a cordial relationship, respectful of security norms, and they did not give me any trouble. I could not say the same about the socialist groups, who questioned everything and wanted to take us over, or of certain Trotskyists, who demanded permanent assemblies. In any case, proposing a project at some imprecise future date is not the same as saying: ‘Want to fight? OK, buy a pair of boots and off we go.’ And that is what I would be doing if I ever got back to Argentina. The scenario was not very clear from where we were sitting on the steps of the ‘auditorium’ built for the classes Che gave to his legionnaires. ‘You were only supposed to spend a day here. Now everything has changed and you’ll have to stay until we figure out some way of getting you out.’

  Che’s rage when he came back from his exploratory trek and found the Base Camp evacuated and chaos reigning – the intensity of which could still be measured in the anxious glances of the guilty parties – had calmed down, and in our intimate conversation (more of a monologue, with me as the mirror) was more like bitter resignation at the turn of events. There were now no precise plans, only hypotheses. No clear decisions could be taken on how new recruits would come, or how we would bring in supplies. Che gave me the name of an alternative liaison in La Paz, a certain Dr Rea, whom I should convince to put me in touch with Rodolfo Saldaña. Rodolfo already knew me and together we could try to re-establish links with the guerrillas unilaterally. Aspirant recruits could converge in the area near the Cochabamba–Santa Cruz road and in some magical way, guided by news of events on the radio, move south to join the guerrilla forces.