by Ciro Bustos
Some very important and relevant things had happened during our first year in prison. In January 1968, three Cuban survivors of Che’s guerrilla group made it out to Chile, with the help of some of Inti’s old contacts in the Communist Party. Six guerrillas had escaped the dragnet, but one of the three Bolivians, Ñato, was badly wounded and begged his compañeros not to leave him alive in the hands of the army. Inti and Dario stayed in Bolivia while the Cubans were welcomed to Chile by the left-wing senator and presidential candidate, Salvador Allende. Also in the first few months of 1968, Che’s diary, and the hands with which he wrote it and held it on his knees, were suddenly taken to Cuba by an unexpected messenger. He was an old acquaintance of mine, a Marxist and former leader of the MNR: Victor Zanier, friend of Amarú Oropeza, my Bolivian potter friend in Buenos Aires.
The operation was organized by Antonio Arguedas, minister of the interior in President Barrientos’s government, an ex-Communist and self-confessed CIA agent during the previous six years. On orders from the CIA, his last order as it turned out, he phoned his ex-fellow traveller Zanier, a former assistant to Hernán Siles Suazo, political leader of the 1952 MNR revolution, and arranged to meet him on a certain corner in La Paz, where Arguedas himself picked him up in an official government car. (I learned this from Zanier thirty years later.) With no more than a laconic greeting after all those years, he handed him a package saying: ‘You’ll know what to do with this’, and dropped him off at the next corner. In it, Zanier found photocopies of Che’s diary and a jar of formaldehyde with two white hands floating in it.
Not knowing exactly ‘what to do with this’, he began by leaving it in the safe house of a friend. Then he organized a trip to Chile, where he contacted the journalist Hernán Uribe of Punto Final, the weekly journal of the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), a left-wing group with links to Cuba. The MIR helped him continue his journey to the island with another of its journalists, Mario Díaz, and deliver the microfilmed diary to the Cuban leadership, and – some time afterwards – Che’s hands.
The laurels went to the CIA agent, Antonio Arguedas, who had previously been unmasked as the ‘photocopy thief’ by the Bolivian Army High Command. They had asked to borrow three pages of the Ministry’s only copy; pages which were missing from the edition published in Cuba. Now without the backing of his former boss, Barrientos, who also had links to the CIA, Arguedas had to go on an international pilgrimage with his CIA minders, to try and explain the psychological motives behind his strange conversion from being the head of anti-guerrilla repression to sympathizer of the Revolution.
The global Left, however, was united in its devotion and saw only what the central committee wanted it to see, not what was obvious. And it saw in this agent of imperialism a solitary hero who risked his life and his lucrative lifestyle as a spy for love of the Revolution. Arguedas lived in Cuba for a time (like Ramón Mercader, Trotsky’s killer), was showered with honours, received the honorary title of ‘compañero’, attended 26th of July ceremonies in the Plaza de la Revolución in the government box, and returned to Bolivia two coups d’état later. He was killed in a bomb explosion in La Paz in the 1990s.
But the question is: Why did the CIA tell its agent to give Che’s diary to the Cubans? My answer, after much reflecting alone in the darkness of my cell, has the logic of the simple: the diary had to be edited by a source that was above reproach since the masses of avid international readers needed to be satisfied it was authentic. There had to be no doubt about a single comma in the book, which would have been impossible had it been edited by anyone but the Cubans, and in particular if it had been done by the Americans. For the US, the diary represented the incontrovertible confirmation of the failure of a particular line of action, as told by its principal prophet and exponent. But the diary had a different, imperishable, value: the value of honesty itself as the identity of a revolutionary.
The following year, Inti, the Bolivian guerrilla leader, reappeared to proclaim: ‘Let’s go back to the mountains.’ But it was not long before he was found in La Paz and killed by Colonel Quintanilla’s secret police. The Peredos’ youngest brother, Chato, led another guerrilla attempt in the 1970s in Teoponte, in the Yungas, with a group of Catholic students who, as usual, proved more idealistic than tough practical fighters. Most of them lost their lives to the jungle. The army rescued the survivors.
In April 1969, the helicopter in which President Barrientos was travelling, after attending a ceremony in an indigenous community, got caught in some electricity cables and crashed. Barrientos was killed, and was succeeded by his vice president, Jorge Siles Salinas, for a short time (presidential terms in Bolivia were never very long). He was succeeded by a woman, Lidia Gueiler, until the liberal-populist faction of the army (the Ovando-Torres line), finally took power again, with General Ovando as president.
Changes on the national political scene were felt only marginally in the cage. Our conditions improved slightly with the arrival of every new Divisional Commander and other officers: longer recreation periods, newspapers and all night light did not turn it into a three star hotel, but things were more relaxed. The plans for our transfer to La Paz did not materialize and I suspect that Mendizábal, our common lawyer, represented Debray legally at higher levels of negotiation. There was no fall in international press interest in the Frenchman, and he had become an illustrious protégé of North American and European intellectuals. Only once, quite unexpectedly, did a visitor ask to speak to both prisoners. A joint interview was arranged. For the first time, both our doors were opened. The officer in charge had instructions to take us into the divisional headquarter’s offices. We looked at each other in surprise; we had no idea what to expect.
A tall, round, sweaty Italian was waiting for us in a well-ventilated office, with big windows onto the garden. Our visitor turned out to be one of the world’s most important film directors. Fortunately, my passion for cinema meant I recognized him. We Argentines see films from many different international sources, but primarily American, owners of the distribution circuits; French, paladin of our cultural aspirations; and Italian, guardian of our emotional and artistic roots. We also saw Argentine films, and Russian, English, Swedish and German, but Italian maestros were far and away the most familiar and popular: Vittorio de Sica, Roberto Rosellini, Luchino Visconti, Cesare Zabattini, and another more universal genius, influenced by neo-realism, Francesco Rosi. I had seen his classic works of protest: Salvatore Giuliano, and Hands over the City, which dealt with the relationship between crime and the political system, the criminal and the power of the state.
Rosi had not come to ask us to tell our stories or to get a scoop. It was out of a profound respect for history in which, despite the marginal, secondary nature of our roles, we had a place. Continually mopping his sweaty bald pate, obviously disturbed by the presence of the head of Bolivian intelligence, but in a dignified manner, he told us in Italianate Spanish that he wanted to work on the epic tale of Che in Bolivia, with a view to eventually making a film. He wanted to know what we thought about the idea.
Debray gave me the floor – for a second time – though it would have been logical for him to do it, given his star quality. Taking a deep breath, I began with a few niceties. I don’t remember the exact words, of course, but I remember the sentiment. I said what an honour it was to be in the same room as the auteur of Giuliano. I said I knew his work and respected it, and for that very reason I thought a certain distance from recent events was needed, because what had happened was much more significant than a just cinematographic anecdote. And in any case, a complete evaluation would have to include Cuba, the genesis of Che’s project in Latin America. Rosi listened attentively, nodding. Debray spoke in the same vein, with more rhetorical precision. The Italian maestro thanked us, I think he was moved and really grateful, and suddenly the meeting was over. I never heard any mention of Rosi’s venture again.
My other three visitors, apart from Ana María, met me in that same room
for an hour. The first was my brother Avelino who accompanied Ana María when she brought our little girls Paula and Andrea, to help look after them while their mother was with me. The girls are not on my list of visitors because you don’t say ‘today I met my left arm’ or ‘I spent time with my legs’. I was worried about the possible effect the cage would have on them, but in the end they came for two days and each spent one night squashed up with me in the camp bed. I don’t know who was worst affected, them or me.
Avelino was the brother closest to me in age and political commitment. He was a doctor in a poor area of San Rafael. He would write his patients’ prescriptions and, chiding them, give them money to pay the chemist. I had told Ana María to warn him not to show his emotions in front of the guards. He behaved completely naturally, as if he were mainly concerned with the state of my health, and disbursed snippets of news about the family, my mother, my brothers and sisters, in front of the officer, who even joined in the conversation. Although he had to wait in Camiri for the whole group to return to Argentina, they did not let him visit me again.
My second visit, which I more or less expected, was from one of our lawyers in Córdoba, my friend Horacio Antonio Lonatti. He came on behalf of my old compañeros in Salta who had almost all been released by then, except for Héctor and Federico, who were serving longer sentences. It was bound to be a very emotional meeting given Lonatti’s exceptionally compassionate nature, the mutual affection we felt for each other, and the difficulty of passing on greetings from each compañero under the ridiculous regulations and the censor’s watchful eyes and ears. There was no time for full details of all their lives but they sent words of solidarity and encouragement, even though they had had to keep silent during my trial.
The third and last visit was unexpected, although I had intuited something a couple of days earlier. The cinema, now on the opposite side of the road from us, doubled as a loud speaker in the afternoons, with deafening publicity for its own films and a variety of popular entertainment: dances, festivals or bands passing through Camiri. For the past few weeks it had been announcing the forthcoming visit of a ‘great Argentine folk quartet’ who would be playing on a specially built stage on the football pitch. It was none other than Los Chalchaleros, my friends from Salta. They negotiated permission to see me. Only one of them got the permit, and only because it was them. Once again I was taken to the office in command headquarters only to find my dear friend Ernesto Cabeza being very well looked after by several officers, who were staunch admirers. I had not seen them for many years, and had avoided their seeing me in Montevideo airport when I was working clandestinely. Accustomed to international fame, Cabecita was not impressed by the military fawning, but he was moved by our meeting. ‘What a fuck-up, Che!’ he said over and over again, ‘what a fuck-up!’ He offered to buy me whatever I needed in the way of clothes, radio, TV, which we couldn’t get in Camiri, and he paid my food bill in the Marietta where they were staying. We chatted about a range of unconnected things until our time was up, he said goodbye with a big hug and went off to a night performance in a nearby town. We never saw each other again.
General Ovando taking power meant a substantial change in Bolivia’s political scenario. He represented the army’s national-populist sector that wanted to resuscitate the worker-peasant government of the MNR, of which the officers had nearly all been supporters. The opposition was the reactionary pro-imperialist sector to which Barrientos had belonged, and of which General Banzer was later the heir. Ovando gathered around him a team comprised of some notorious old lefties and other younger ones who set out a clearly nationalist programme. In the cage we quickly detected changes, starting with the new Fourth Division Commander who, unlike his predecessors, never came to stare at us in the zoo. Instead, he appointed his aide de camp, a certain Lieutenant Ortiz, as his personal representative in charge of the prisoners. He came to see us every day, cordially inquiring about our complaints and needs.
The cell doors stayed open during the day and sometimes even until the main door was locked for the night. The priest from the church next door – Camiri Cathedral, no less – was authorised to visit weekly but for the sake of political coherence I courteously refused the first, and last, occasion he came to see me. Debray accepted, however, and received him on Sundays after Mass. Meanwhile, the foreign oil companies were nationalized. In charge of this particular task was the most revolutionary member of the civico-military government, Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, minister of mines and petroleum. From his parliamentary seat as a young deputy – together with the poet Héctor Broda Leaños, both coming to socialism from the Socialist Falange – he had defended our cause.
Several measures were taken that made us think things would change for us. In the medium term, the Ovando–Debray relationship forged in May/June of 1967 at La Esperanza sugar mill started to function again. A journalist-cum-adviser to General Ovando – Gustavo Sánchez, brother of Major Sánchez, detained by the guerrillas on 10 May 1967 – began visiting the Frenchman in his cell. Halfway through this last year, 1970, Debray was on a good mood day and he told me he was writing an essay on the measures needed to transform a bourgeois army into a popular revolutionary force for President Ovando. To my surprise, he asked me to read it.
It was a work that examined the basis of the Bolivian Army: its origin and its previous attempt at reform during the revolution of 1952. That attempt failed because it did not change the army’s mentality and hierarchy by incorporating the masses; it opportunistically and temporarily created workers’ militias in the mines instead. An army is born revolutionary, not created after workers’ massacres. It is the praxis of historical events that creates class consciousness; the armed wing of the masses that takes power by force. Officers should be trained to defend the interests of the masses, not those of the oppressors. They should be the vanguard, in the forefront of mobilizing task forces for emergencies, reconstruction, education and development. Written with dialectical arguments and expressed in a didactic manner, Debray’s essay suggested that the necessary requirement for bringing about this change might not be within the reach of the actual philosophy of the Army High Command, so the first thing to change would be that mentality.
This very interesting essay was handed over on the last visit of Sánchez, Ovando’s press secretary, who up until the end of 1970 used to greet me very amiably as he came in and out of the cage. His eyesight must have been as bad as his secret sources of information. Only a few years later, this same Sánchez wrote a book on the capture in Bolivia and extradition to France of the Nazi Klaus Barbie, in which he stated in passing that, at the Camiri trial, I had been given a light sentence of only a few years and released a few months later after collaborating with the army, commanded in those days by … the very same General Ovando whom they were helping with the above mentioned work.
This type of double game got the Frenchman into trouble because in his visible battles with the local military authorities on behalf of the press, Debray sometimes lost the plot. This happened to him with Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist who ‘interviewed history’. She arrived in Camiri to interview the young rebel philosopher for an article, and following the established practice with the Frenchman, the army gave her permission. Debray left the cage as usual, immersed in his lucubrations, and came back a couple of hours later with a certain air of triumph. A few days later, the interview came out in an Italian magazine announcing it had been syndicated worldwide, including in the Argentine magazine Siete Dias. In the interview, the Frenchman attacked the Bolivian army in extremely aggressive language, inconvenient for the negotiations taking place at that juncture, and coinciding with the Consulesa’s good news concerning the army’s intentions.
Debray lost his temper and, desperate to show that his words had been distorted, blamed Fallaci for the inflammatory passages claiming she had misinterpreted what he had said. I remember him asking me if I knew the address of Siete Dias in Buenos Aires. He copied the address from
a back issue I happened to have, and fired off a reply to be published with the article. The fiery Italian replied with an implacable letter reminding Debray that she had faithfully transcribed what she could hear on her tape recorder and that she found the erratic nature of his opinions contemptible. She finished with a scathing flourish: ‘One day, I’ll meet you coming out of the Paris Opéra, dressed in your black velvet suit, and I’ll give you the slap you deserve.’
40
Night Flight to Iquique: December 1970
Lieutenant Ortiz was a young Military School graduate, immaculately turned out, more like a professor than a soldier. His treatment of the prisoners was the best we could possibly have hoped for. He came early, between seven and eight in the morning when the sergeant opened the cells, but did not interrupt our favourite activity if by chance we happened to be asleep – not an easy matter because the noise of the locks was more efficient than any atomic alarm clock and woke us no matter how deeply we were sleeping. Before Ortiz came, we used to start dressing at the first sound of metal so that we weren’t naked when they came in. But at least it was normal noise. Our neighbour’s bell ringing for Mass was more annoying.
The lieutenant would come back at midday, like someone who had dropped into his club to read the papers. He kept us abreast of the news, and asked us if we needed anything. He brought things for León and took away requests for others; letters, books and communiqués all passed through his hands with no trouble. In short, he was prepared to do everything we wanted, except let us go. In this new liberal climate, we managed to get details of the latest military coup, an attempt by military hardliners under Banzer to oust Ovando from power. Although it was resisted by the workers La Paz and Cochabamba, it would have succeeded – they had already got President Ovando to resign – had it not been for the head of the army, General Juan José Torres, who decided to take power himself, with the support of the masses. So, victorious anti-guerrilla generals, proclaimed anti-communists, succeeded each other using pro-socialist language, talking about a ‘revolution’ of the people for the people. I even remember Torres saying on the radio: ‘Beloved people, my own beloved people …’, something that augured tragedies to come.