by Ciro Bustos
I told her she must urgently inform the Cubans of the dire situation the guerrillas were in – no food, medicine, no radio – and that, in my opinion, they could not survive six months in that state. Given that I was describing what I had seen in April, the prediction was terrifyingly exact. I said: ‘Remember these words and repeat them to me tomorrow: go to La Paz, find Dr Rea … and give him the instructions Che had given me.’ I can’t remember the exact words but in essence it was to warn the urban network’s Rodolfo (Saldaña) or Renán Montero to find a safer place for the money, and get the Cubans to send any available volunteers to the area between the Cochabamba–Santa Cruz road and the guerrillas’ zone of action, and somehow miraculously try to regain contact with them. Our time was up and they took her out.
The following day we had another half-hour visit. Ana María and I went over the instructions. She had remembered them correctly. She also brought the news that Debray’s mother had arrived in La Paz and apparently declared that I was a CIA agent while her young son was a renowned philosopher with an inquiring mind. This slanderous remark had not helped Ana María get permission to travel to Camiri, but it was finally granted by General Torres who told her she had the misfortune of being married to ‘the most dangerous’ of the prisoners. This was intriguing. What did he really know and what was guesswork? Or was he just playing executioner?
When they first landed in La Paz, Ana María and Ricardo Rojo, with whom she travelled from Buenos Aires, had contacted a prestigious Bolivian socialist intellectual, Sergio Almaraz Paz, leader of the opposition PIR (Party of the Revolutionary Left) and founder of the Grupo Octubre. The contact was made through another Argentine, Gregorio Selser, a historian who worked with the group in La Paz. Almaraz offered Ana María moral support in the hostile environment created by the police, and practical support in negotiating the arbitrary obstacles the army was putting in the way of anyone associated with their Argentine prisoner.
The Grupo Octubre tried to help Ana María contact the guerrilla’s urban network but Dr Rea was no longer in Bolivia, and without him it was impossible to use the passwords, valid only for him, to reach Rodolfo and Renán. Not only had Dr Rea gone into exile in Chile, but Cuban Intelligence had recalled their man Renán Montero (aka Moleón in Bolivia or Iván when the EGP were training in Havana) from his post in La Paz in March, immediately after the first combat. He was not replaced. I only learned this extraordinary information many years later.
Ana María returned to Argentina and prepared the textual reports to send to Cuba. The EGP leadership in Córdoba asked a Pasado y Presente reader without a political/police record – who I knew only as Gordo – to go immediately to Havana. When he reached Havana airport, he was interrogated by Cuban intelligence. They took Ana María’s report from him and dispatched him back to Prague on the same plane, without a word of explanation. Havana had decided to side exclusively with the international figure of Debray. They never tried to make contact of any kind with the EGP in Argentina, the grass-roots organization founded by Che.
In La Paz, Almaraz suggested hiring a trusted lawyer, Dr Jaime Mendizábal, to take on my defence. I had always hoped to have an Argentine lawyer but it did not prove viable. From then on, there was a clear intention, and not only inside Bolivia, to isolate my real political ‘persona’ – to which I contributed initially for reasons of general security – by denying me any contact with the press. Over the next three and a half years, this developed into an elaborate political manoeuvre in which I was not allowed a single interview. Camiri became a focal point for the world’s press; journalists of all nationalities converged there, to the joy of local commerce, pensions, hotels and brothels. But, although many journalists – not only Latin Americans – were interested in seeing me, none of them managed to break the cordon sanitaire around me. Bolivian Intelligence prohibited it and, worse still, concocted false statements. At the same time, articles appeared presenting me as the counterpart to the main figure Debray: the brilliant European intellectual, ‘revolutionary in the revolution’, versus the obscure unknown South American.
To understand this more clearly, we would need to know what went on behind the scenes when General Ovando and Debray made their pact at the sugar mill and what happened in government-to-government negotiations. It does not seem quite correct to say De Gaulle and Barrientos; perhaps De Gaulle and the Bolivian Army.
General de Gaulle began by changing the staff in the French Embassy in La Paz, and it was no routine change. From his still quite recent confrontation with the colonialist generals of the French Army – leaders of the OAS in the case of Algeria – he rescued his closest collaborator, Dominique Ponchardier, a colonel in military intelligence. He had appointed him as the ambassador to Bolivia in 1964. A few years earlier, in Vietnam, at the fall of Dien Bien Phu, one woman had come to symbolize the honour of France, discredited by the paratroopers who had literally been killing each other to get on the escape helicopters. She was the last official representative to board the last helicopter after helping the last of the wounded. She was a nurse, Genevieve de Galard-Terraube. Her fame and photo had circled the globe under the nickname of ‘the Angel of Dien Bien Phu’. Now she was appointed by De Gaulle as the French Consul in La Paz, with the specific mission to attend to the safety and well-being of the beloved French prisoner. As soon as the ‘Consulesa’ got her accreditation, she rushed down to Camiri for the first of a series of visits over the next few months, and periodically during the three years after the sentence.
However, it was not only the French government that showed concern for Debray. The No. 1 enemy of a Bolivian government at war with ‘Cuban’ guerrillas, the revolutionary government of Cuba to be precise, hastened to maintain a legal and press presence to support Debray, a personal friend of Fidel. The task fell to an interpreter at the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, a Venezuelan woman called Elizabeth Burgos, with whom Debray had a relationship. They had to obey strict rules that the Bolivians imposed, but then frequently modified. Money seemed to be no object.
Up to this point, everything was more or less what I expected: ‘Deny everything, chico! We don’t know you!’ Iván had told me in Havana. At the same time, there was sustained coverage of the famous prisoner by the international press, at its height during the trial but continuing afterwards to a point where ordinary Bolivians started to find it sickening. They didn’t see why, as well as bearing the brunt of the fatalities, their own victims, the soldiers, should by contrast be anonymous. And the army used all its resources to maintain that anonymity.
The molar at the very back of your teeth is called a ‘wisdom tooth’ because it appears when you mature, becoming ready for responsibility, ready to settle down. Its only purpose is to cause you pain. The swelling became so noticeable that they decided to send me a dentist. This could only happen in Bolivia. That idea that the dentist was an honorary army officer did not make me very happy, especially since it was our resident psychopath Major Echeverría who had authorized the treatment. However, the captain who arrived – with soldiers to help install a huge great pedal-manipulated chair in my room – was none other than Dr Zamora, brother of the secretary of the pro-Chinese Communist Party. He was a thin, careful man who was not only very friendly and dissipated my fears immediately but also worked with delicacy and absolute professionalism, without X-rays, breaking the molar to extract it from the gum, and causing me no unnecessary pain or any subsequent complications.
The farce of the military tribunal had now been decided. The first measure was to transfer us from divisional command headquarters to somewhere more user-friendly to facilitate legal access for both the preliminary investigation and the defence. I was told to collect my few belongings and, leaving by the tradesmen’s entrance, cross the road to the Officers’ Club. Roth and Debray were waiting with their guards at a table on the verandah beside the dining room. We were offered coffee, and while Doña María, the club manager, was serving us, a perfectly orchestrated mob of young �
��students’ (soldiers in civvies and a few real students) ‘broke through’ the military police barriers, surged through the dining room and onto the verandah in a furious ‘demonstration of repudiation of the foreign criminals’, and attacked us.
The scene was set up to demonstrate to the international press both the extent of local hostility and the protection afforded us. The officer in charge, a certain navy captain called Hurtado (a largely symbolic rank in Bolivia), was trying to usher us away quickly through another door. He pulled Debray and Roth with him, but I stayed seated drinking my coffee, waiting for the ‘irate crowd’. The attackers did not know what to do with this unexpected about turn of the script and came to a halt. The eventual outcome was that Debray was allowed to hold his first press conference, in which he debated with the ‘student’ representatives. By then, I had been locked in the room that would be mine for the rest of the year, until after we had been sentenced.
The two rooms allotted to Debray and me looked over the street on one side, and onto the tiled interior patio the size of a tennis court on the other. On its right was a covered verandah leading to the Club dining rooms and on its left an entrance for vehicles. On the opposite side of the patio was the toilet and we would walk over to it a couple of times a day. Debray was in the first room, I got the second. To my great surprise, it already had one occupant: Ciro Algarañaz, the Casa de Calamina’s inconvenient neighbour, who in his eagerness to join our ‘cocaine business’, had fallen between two stools and been arrested by the army on the day of the first battle. Legal proceedings had been brought against the two deserters, one of them called Salustio Choque; Algarañaz and one of his labourers; and us, the two foreigners. Roth, in a separate development, had by now been freed and expelled from Bolivia.
Algañaraz was a poor wretch, who felt superior to the Guaraní labourers he exploited. Engaging in illicit activity, the imaginary cocaine, was normal for his class. He kept to himself, and did not say much, out of respect. His family visited him every day with food and fruit, which he refused to share with me.
The defence lawyers arrived; each under his own steam. Jaime Mendizábal made a good impression on me. He was quite young, with experience defending workers from the Bolivian Labour Union (COB), linked to the Sergio Almaraz Paz Grupo Octubre. Our first interview was, however, rather difficult because of the restrictions the army wanted to impose. Jaime threatened to leave Camiri and return to La Paz if he was not allowed to exercise his profession unhindered. They wanted to reduce the interview time to a few minutes and even wanted our meetings to take place in front of officers from the army’s intelligence division. Jaime had to waste a couple of days in discussions and only had a few hours left to catch the last plane of the week and get back to La Paz with only a few documents available to him.
Getting funds for Jaime to travel back and forth to La Paz, or lodging in Camiri once the trial started, was difficult. In the end it depended entirely on the good will of the Grupo Octubre in La Paz and the solidarity committees mobilized by Ana María in Argentina. The Cubans did not contribute a cent, neither to the defence costs nor to support my abandoned family.
While we were still kidnapped, Debray’s mother and the French Embassy had hired a well-known La Paz lawyer, Dr Walter Flores Torrico. But things started to go wrong when the lawyer told the press that his client had interviewed Che in Ñancahuazú. Debray was angry because he had made a pact with the Fourth Division not to make this information public. So, the Frenchman swung from having the most famous lawyer in La Paz to not having one at all, and then taking on his own defence. This was not acceptable to the army and they provided him with an army lawyer, Captain Dr Novillo, who performed his duties adequately.
Meanwhile, Jaime and I were having problems too. He wanted to paint me as a militant figure, if possible a heroic one, which would lend a sparkle to what would be his most important legal role to date, possibly with international resonance. But I stubbornly refused to change the role I had assumed and tried to make him understand. What was the point of taking on the role of imbecile to protect myself and all those behind me, if only a month later I was going to put them all at risk for my own personal glorification? The clandestine Argentine network (albeit inoperative) had been safe so far, and I wanted it to continue that way. Onganía’s military dictatorship in Argentina had closed the borders with Bolivia and provided the army with new FAL rifles, a Belgian model manufactured in Argentina. Mendizábal did not like my idea, but his loyalty to his group and to me made him stick to his task, even though he could achieve not much more than providing moral support.
As the tribunal took shape, its members started appearing in the Officers’ Club and would come to ‘see the prisoners’ before sitting down for a few beers courtesy of Doña María. This custom extended to all high-ranking Fourth Division officers given that they lunched, dined and drank in the Club. One way or another, we got to know them all. One evening before dinner, Captain Hurtado fetched me from my cell and took me to the dining room to meet the tribunal’s prosecutor, Colonel Remberto Iriarte. He was an educated man who prided himself on his fluent French and English, acting as spokesperson for the foreign press.
Needless to say he was not inviting me for dinner, but for ‘a little chat’. We stood together in one corner of the lounge. He began with a nationalist preamble about the brotherhood of Andean nations, their common history, and their continual humiliation by arrogant Europeans. The Frenchman, he said, was an overbearing example of this, making statements attacking the army on every possible occasion. On top of the row with his lawyer, his arrogance had upset the Fourth Division commander, Colonel Reque Terán, who in a fit of pique, had made for Debray a convict’s suit of green striped ticking with huge numbers on the back and chest, which the psychopath Echeverría had forced him to wear. They shaved his head and exhibited him to the world’s press as the ‘French mercenary and war criminal’, unleashing an international scandal and irate protests from the French Embassy and the Consulesa, as well as prominent intellectuals, from Cortázar to Sartre, García Márquez to Bertrand Russell.
The prosecutor let it be known that they were studying the possibility of reintroducing the death penalty, and that the tribunal would ask for the maximum sentence; that my situation was as serious as the Frenchman’s without having the support he enjoyed. To prove it, he showed me – without letting go of the paper – a telegram from the president of Argentina which said ‘the government of the Argentine Military Junta which I preside, will not raise any objection to the decision taken by the Camiri military tribunal, and accepts the sentence it deems necessary, whatever it may be’, signed: ‘General Juan Carlos Onganía, President of the Republic’.
The prosecutor went on: given that the armed forces took a more tolerant view towards me as an Argentine, the government of General Barrientos and the Bolivian army, through him, offered me the chance to receive a milder sentence if I told the tribunal that Debray had borne arms like any other guerrilla and taken part in the battles. I replied that I could not say that, because we had been together the whole time and nowhere near the guerrilla’s military operations, and did not even know what was happening in the vanguard columns. It would be a false accusation, against my principles, and besides which, it would contradict my own earlier statements. ‘Think about it’, he said, bringing to an end our ‘little chat’.
A few weeks later, shortly before the trial began, the manoeuvre to take me from my cell quietly at night was repeated. This time Captain Hurtado was accompanied by a sergeant with a submachine gun; they took me to a little room on the other side of the patio. There, waiting alone in the dark, was General Alfredo Ovando, exclusive clandestine visitor to prisoners of varying degrees of fame. He told Hurtado to wait outside, and the sergeant to cover him with the submachine gun from the door. A sixty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling was the only light in this smelly room with peeling walls.
Ovando was tall and thin. He was wearing a uniform shirt, and h
is general’s stars gleamed on his shoulders. He talked in a low voice and, without any preamble, he said: ‘I give you my word as a man and as commander of the armed forces that, when the trial is over, you can leave Camiri for the country of your choice, with your wife and daughters, provided you state during the trial that Debray bore arms and took part in the battles. Only that.’
For a second time, I refused the offer point blank. ‘I can’t do that, general, because it isn’t true and it would be a contemptible thing to do.’ ‘Think of your little girls’, he added. ‘I am thinking of them’, I answered. He called the captain and told him to take me back to my cell.
It is useless to speculate about why the Army High Command wanted to accuse the Frenchman – either through proof or false statements – of having borne arms in combat. On the basis of things I remember or have read subsequently, I can suggest reasons but have no proof. To exchange him for technical and military equipment? Was it the only justification for a harsh sentence? Was the harsh sentence needed to negotiate a way out of non-negotiable positions? Did the French government not want to negotiate because they were convinced there would be a legally acceptable result? Did they have to increase the value added of the merchandise to be redeemed? In any case, their quarrel was not with me, according to another officer who used to try and chat, mostly in good faith and non-aggressively. The officers would begin arriving in the late afternoon, before dinner. They would sit at a table on the verandah beside Debray’s door, and depending how many the round was for, ordered a ‘metre’ or ‘half metre’ of Paceña beer. Bottles were ordered by the square metre and that determined the duration of the ‘session’.
Lieutenant Colonel Libera Cortez was a guy you could talk to. He was the officer commanding the patrol reconnoitring the Ñancahuazú river, after the oil workers had seen Marcos’s men but before the first ambush. He was one of the old guard from the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR). Depending on their degree of inebriation, the officers said theirs was a revolutionary struggle too, so they could not help but feel a certain admiration for Che and his guerrillas. In this war of propaganda and celebrities, he said, ‘you’re less arrogant, you’ve scored a point, earned our respect’.