Che Wants to See You

by Ciro Bustos

  During the day I could see a lot of troop movements and US officers talking to Bolivians in a kind of pidgin cowboy-Caribbean. They seemed to be the technical directors. We only spent a couple of days there, but it was clear we had been abducted clandestinely because even going to the WC had to be done when no one was about.

  We were eventually taken in a US military helicopter to La Esperanza, an old sugar mill to the north of Santa Cruz. A prison had been improvised in a dilapidated house in the old administrative quarter, surrounded by a covered verandah in the best tropical colonial style, with a corridor separating the rooms where we were quartered. Debray was to the right, and I to the left in a corner room, with boarded up windows and torn mesh mosquito netting. I don’t remember where Roth was.

  Debray suggested we exaggerate the strength of the guerrilla contingents to more than a hundred fighters, of which we had only met two or three small groups, the ones they already knew about. This coincided with what I had been telling my interrogators. The idea was to dissuade the army from searching for them because that would be dangerous for the small groups of guerrillas in their present state. In the short term, exaggerating their size could be favourable. I was not sure how many men the army could mobilize. The US general staff theory was: more troops, less mobility, but greater ability to encircle the enemy. In practice, the poorest army in the southern cone relied on its human resources to multiply its activities.

  We did not know it at the time, but, for the first time in Latin America, the Bolivians were using a theory that was both new and appropriate: creating their own guerrilla groups acting independently and simultaneously. The strategy of isolating the guerrillas was decisive in the struggle. The US-trained troops did not join the action until the very end.

  Two things happened in this peaceful place which gradually brought an end to the interrogations of Roth and Debray, though they continued with me. The first was that Dr González was replaced by another Cuban exile, Gabriel García, also a CIA agent. He was more energetic, more obviously an employee of the ‘Company’; he tried to control everything. He told me that Dr González had finished his work and returned to the US, my interrogation was only just beginning; it would depend on me how long it lasted, and whether it would have a happy ending.

  He was mainly interested in my contacts in Argentina, and in the links between them and La Paz. My line of ‘collaboration’ was clearly defined. They seemed receptive to my arguments since everything seemed to fit the political preconceptions the CIA had about local and regional left-wing politics: the Communist Parties were openly against the armed struggle in Latin America, and Argentina was no exception. Young people there were abandoning the party ranks and the political scene was dominated by the power of the Peronist labour organizations. The masses had not supported the Cuba-backed guerrilla experience in Salta for that very reason. The Left was only united through solidarity with their jailed militants, and I had been very active in that campaign. Nevertheless, someone had been behind the invitation I had received and that person must be the bridge to a continental-wide project, like the one now taking place in Bolivia. Gabriel wanted to know who it was.

  He asked me to provide a written statement, which I did. My mistake was to hope my statements would ‘make as much noise as possible’, but that I could keep my secrets at the same time. I more than achieved the second objective. But the CIA stymied my first objective by not publishing ‘my statement’ (a version appeared in English many years later). They used the figure of the defeated collaborator, that I had laboriously created through my drawings and my ‘lacking in content’ statements, added information to it gathered from other sources, and then finally presented it as a great work of CIA intelligence.

  Yet the work – of counter-intelligence – was done by me to protect the information I had accumulated: the direct implication of Cuba in ‘continental subversion’, the complicity of other states, and the safety and freedom of all the members of our organization in Argentina.

  I pretended to be on the sidelines politically, even against the project I worked for, ceding a little information each day, until I ‘broke’ and delivered the names and drawings of the two contacts crucial to the CIA investigation: Isaac Rutman in Argentina, and Andrés in La Paz, neither of whom existed.

  When I lived in Buenos Aires in the 1950s, I met a guy who later became my best friend in the city. We met in the ‘Chamberi’, a café-bar on the corner of Córdoba and San Martín, where in the late afternoon artists and literary people gathered in a peña. In fact, there were various peñas going on simultaneously. The peña next to ours centred round film and socialism, and at the table alongside us sat a film critic called Leo Salas who was always banging on about Ingmar Bergman, in the years when the Swedish director was more famous in Argentina than in his own country. Leo’s friend, who became mine too, was called Isaac Shusterman – or Isaquito – a Jewish socialist who dreamed of adventures, faraway and improbable rather than political, and managed to join the crew of an Argentine merchant marine ship going down the Atlantic Coast to the south. On his return, sailor’s bag over his shoulder, Isaac came straight from South Dock to our peña in the Chamberi. We spent many enjoyable times. I did not become friends with the critic, because for me the film genius in those days was Orson Welles, not the remote Viking, and that particular heresy was unacceptable to his ears.

  My friend Isaquito came to mind the first time I mentioned someone called Isaac in Buenos Aires in my interrogation. When the moment came, broken by my ‘defection’, I gave his face to Isaac Rutman, so I could draw a Jewish face properly. The name, Rutman, came from another Jewish friend, from Mendoza, called Roitman, but I changed the spelling. Next I drew the Bolivian contact created to help Debray, who we ‘knew’ only as Andrés. These two people became famous at my expense, despite never having been born.

  One day I was writing the résumé of my statements that Gabriel García had asked for. I was trying to clarify what I had really said, and divest it of the rubbish other people had said that García wanted me to approve. There was sudden agitation at the entry checkpoint when a couple of vehicles passed the barrier and drove down the avenue of jacarandas in front of our house. A jeep, followed by an army truck full of soldiers, advanced slowly until it passed the house and stopped a little further on. In the jeep sat General Ovando Cándia, Commander in Chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces, whose photo we had seen on scraps of newspaper in the bathroom, or in magazines the soldiers on guard duty had lent us. It was an unmistakable image, and the reactions to him confirmed it.

  Changing windows, my eyes followed the reception committee as they came to greet him at the next-door house. Shortly afterwards, they called for Debray and took him to the general. No doubt about it. The commander of the Bolivian Armed Forces wanted to talk to the Frenchman. A couple of hours later, they came back with Debray, while the general went off the way he had come. The Frenchman told me nothing about the meeting. He behaved as if nothing had happened and as if I was some idiot who could know about his visits to the bathroom but not about his posh outings. From then on, Debray was not interrogated further, while García kept pressing me for details about my contacts, etc.

  One morning, I was told to collect my belongings and the three of us, including Roth now, assembled at the door to the house. We were handcuffed and taken to a clearing where an enormous US army ‘banana’ helicopter was waiting. We were pushed in through a sliding door in the side, together with a group of Green Berets carrying automatic rifles.

  The flying mastodon flew over the jungle. It was impossible to tell in which direction, or how long the journey took, but it was over an hour, in any case. It was all too obvious, however, that wherever we landed in that desert of short flat jungle, we would never ever get out. And that was the idea. We eventually landed in a clearing in the carpet of vegetation. There was a three-sided thatched adobe house with a central patio and a pond; the fourth side was enclosed with barbed wire. It was deep in t
he jungle.

  The living part of the house with wooden windows was at the front, the right-hand side seemed to lodge the guards, and on the left were chicken coops and corrals. A tall, thin middle-aged man in a captain’s uniform came out to greet us, followed by a pathetic female figure and a couple of children. The officer in charge of the transfer operation handed over his prisoners, inspected half a dozen soldiers who appeared from nowhere, and ordered them to unload supplies from the helicopter. He said goodbye like someone in a hurry to leave hell, leapt aboard the whistling monster, its blades already whirring, and disappeared into a cloud of dust.

  The captain, depressed looking but with courteous manners, a wrinkled face, reddened eyes and Chaplin-style moustache, thought it opportune to inform us that we were all in the same boat, isolated from the outside world by 200 kilometres of jungle. The best thing to do, he said, was relax, keep out of the sun, be on the lookout for snakes, and try to make the best of things. His wife would cook, and the food would be the same for the family, prisoners and guards, providing we did not threaten his family or question his duties as head of this outpost. He then took us to our ‘rooms’: the chicken coops on the left-hand side, of course, emptied of their former inhabitants. The geese, ducks and hens, having been transferred higgledy-piggledy to the tumble-down shack at the end of the line, were flapping noisily together in the patio round the pond. Soldiers were sweeping the chicken shit off the floor with branches, trying to make room for some recently arrived camp beds, with straw mattresses and blankets. They put one in each room. Debray took the nearest to the house; Roth the one in the middle, and I was in the last one which, judging by the grey feathers, had housed the geese.

  The doors, mere symbolic structures to protect the fowl from mountain foxes, let in the sun’s rays like shiny metallic sheets. At night, stearic acid candles threw sinister shadows onto the spider’s webs. There was no real need for padlocks but they still used planks to bar the doors. It was early June, deep winter, though it made no difference in those latitudes. The next day, the captain invited us to inspect the property after an excellent breakfast served devotedly by his good wife. Away from the house on the left, a couple of hectares had been cleared for maize and vegetables. Staring into the jungle, we could see just how thick and tangled it was, low but impenetrable.

  The days went by slowly and peacefully. Chatting in the shade on the patio every morning, a strange friendship formed between Debray, Roth and me, although limited by natural reserve and some taboo topics. Roth was the friend in common, and apex of the trio, and he brought optimism and good humour. One day he said he had a confession to make, and lowering his eyes admitted: ‘I’m a member of the army.’ We looked at him calmly, as if it was not beyond the realms of possibility, and he went: ‘… the Salvation Army, ha, ha’. He told us of his adventures in New York while he was training for the Peace Corps, when it was fashionable for students to carry knives and whip them out on the slightest pretext, especially to girls. He was a good sort, and just wanted to strike it lucky some day as a freelance photographer.

  During the month, we received two visits. We were locked up as a small helicopter landed and, to my surprise the visitors came to my cell. It was Gabriel García and the Argentine policeman, not a very high level visit, but exclusively for me. Opening his briefcase, the Argentine said in a policeman-like voice: ‘There are two Isaac Rutmans in Argentina: one is 75 and lives in Buenos Aires, and the other, a cripple, is in Rio Gallegos, Patagonia.’ He took out a file of photos, as if they were of underworld villains, and asked me to identity the fugitive Rutman among the notorious criminals of the Argentine Left. From the police photos, I honestly could not have even recognized Codovilla (secretary of the Communist Party) even if I had wanted to. They left me a carton of cigarettes and a vaporizer. My bronchial infection had deteriorated in Choreti and I had asked for one. When they had left and normality returned, Debray said to me cryptically: ‘Carlos (he still called me that), lies have short legs!’ ‘Depends on the boots the cat wears’, I replied.

  The second visit was at the beginning of July. The roar above suggested the marines were landing but in fact it was the enormous ‘banana’ helicopter. We saw the dust storm briefly before we were locked up. The visitor was an important figure, significant for the three of us. He was Monseñor Kennedy, Bolivian army chaplain and US citizen. We were politely invited from our cells to be introduced to the ecclesiastical dignitary, who professed interest in our health in the name of the Christian faithful who had been praying for us and would be pleased to know, via him, that he had found us alive and well.

  We each had our photo taken with the priest, and the committee of Gabriel García and Major Quintanilla took their leave. We waved them goodbye as a family, as if they were leaving a happy party. It was clear they were granting us ‘among the living’ status.

  The helicopter returned a couple of days later and we were told to pack our toothbrushes. There was an emotional goodbye from the captain and his wife, whom we were abandoning. We looked down on them from the air, waving furiously, in the middle of that great solitude, their children clutching their legs, surrounded by the ubiquitous fowl.

  36

  On Trial in Camiri: October 1967

  Receptions do not always have red carpets. Awaiting us on the Choreti barracks airstrip was a Bolivian army combat unit: trucks, jeeps, officers and couriers shouting orders and scurrying from one side of the helicopter to another, all deployed in organizing a military detail with weapons at the ready, at the door of the machine. We got out to a patently hostile atmosphere as if we were aliens not even to be treated as human beings, because of the mantle of prejudice hanging over us. The key to this animosity was the accusation that we were foreign mercenaries; the guerrillas were portrayed as mainly Cuban, Peruvian and Argentine. The army played up its fatalities as an attack on the national honour of a people whose humblest of sons, mere conscripts, were being killed without anything to ‘justify’ the massacre.

  We were dragged handcuffed to one of the trucks and dumped in the back like parcels. There was a bench on each side and we were distributed along them with soldiers in between. I was at the back of the truck on the right, next to the officer in charge, who cocked a .45 pistol and leant the barrel on my left cheek, forcing me to look at him. It was a very disagreeable sight: his face oozed sadism and a line of saliva appeared to dribble from his obscene mouth. Major Echeverría, commander of Fourth Army Division’s intelligence section, proved to be a total psychopath.

  The truck drove off down what seemed to be a river-bed but was, in fact, the road to Camiri. The summer rains had caused the rivers to overflow and flood the roads in town, so that every crossroads was ploughed up and little channels of stones made our journey torture, and for me dangerous, because the gun barrel dug into my cheekbones and banged against my lower molar which had been aching for days. The threat of my head being blown off when we hit a pothole – ultimate odontological solution – hung over me until we stopped. We had arrived at Fourth Division headquarters, on the corner of Camiri’s main square, where on a Sunday night four months earlier, we had listened to the music of the military band.

  I was dragged off the truck and put in a small room. Later, when the situation calmed a little, I discovered what had been happening hierarchically within Fourth Division. Colonel Rocha, whom we had heard on the radio while we were still at Base Camp, had been replaced as commanding officer by Colonel Reque Terán. All the middle-rank officers were new, and there to wash away the humiliation suffered and avenge the dead.

  One morning, they took me from my room to an interior patio, which was like a garden. Roth and Debray were already there, each standing with a guard. On the other side of the lawn, behind some ropes like a boxing ring, was a crowd of journalists and photographers. We were introduced to them like some strange species. No questions were allowed and the ceremony finished with no contact except visual, and the popping of camera flashes. A photographer,
who identified himself as the correspondent of the Buenos Aires magazine Gente, asked if he could approach me to measure the luminosity on his light metre. Given permission, he jumped the rope, came up to me and, putting his apparatus purposefully to my chest, whispered: ‘Your wife is in La Paz.’ ‘Thank you’, I replied. At the end of the session, another journalist came up and managed to say a few words to me. It was Carlos María Gutiérrez, from the Uruguayan magazine Marcha. He said, as if we knew each other: ‘Don’t worry, Ciro, I’m going to Cuba to see about publishing Che’s “Congo Diaries” and I’ll stop them trying to frame you.’ I never heard from him again, and Che’s Congo book was not published for another thirty years. The army spokespersons announced to the press that, since we had been arrested under the Fourth Division’s jurisdiction, we would be tried in a military tribunal right here in Camiri.

  A couple of days later, I was told I would be receiving a visit of two half-hour sessions on consecutive days. The major withdrew, giving way to my wife Ana María. A soldier stood by the blank wall facing the bed, and a sergeant posted himself at the door. Ana María and I hugged each other in an interminable embrace that lasted the entire thirty minutes.

  The emotion of seeing each other paralyzed us, but the interior strength of the militancy we both tacitly shared – incredible as it sounds now thirty-two years later – meant we acted more like comrades than a loving couple with two little girls. The lump in my throat reflected my concern for my family but in Ana María’s ear I murmured details of my failed mission. I explained the core argument of my statement to the Bolivian authorities (and also, by the way, that she had no knowledge of my activities).