The insurgents wandered aimlessly through this barren landscape, often lost, usually thirsty, sometimes starving. Che’s tactics were curiously passive: instead of attacking vital infrastructure, like the oil fields in nearby Camiri, he staged small ambushes and then listened to the radio to see if the world had noticed. The high-water mark came when the guerrillas briefly seized a small town on the main highway through the region, sending the Bolivian government into a panic. In La Paz, they didn’t know that Che had ordered the attack only because he hoped to steal some asthma medicine from the town pharmacy. His condition had become so severe by then that he could no longer walk; he was leading the revolution from a lame mule.
When he learned from the radio that a Budapest daily had criticized him for engaging in guerrilla warfare, Che’s frustrations finally exploded. “How I would like to rise to power just to unmask cowards and lackeys of every sort,” he wrote, “and squash their snouts in their own filth.”
The New Man was running out of hope.
The road dropped for a while and then off to the right you could see the Río Grande, far down in the valley bottom. I had to refocus my eyes before I realized what I was looking over: there, a half mile down the hillside in the same vista, was a meadow filled with tall white and yellow crucifixes. They were death markers. This was where the final battle had taken place—the guerrillas trapped in a shallow ravine without cover as the army rained bullets on them from above. The crosses marked where Che’s men had fallen. Che knew that the only way out of an ambush is to attack, not retreat, and he tried to push his few remaining soldiers up the hill to a position with better cover. But the time of theoretical tactics was over. Che had been hit once already in the leg, and was wounded again when the rifle was literally shot out of his hands, burying splinters in his arm. A loyal guerrilla named Simón Cuba tried to lead his commander to safety, but the army troops charged down the hill. Wounded, disarmed, and defeated, the “world’s No. 1 guerrilla” was captured. In the confusion, three guerrillas crawled through the underbrush and escaped, led by Benigno, the same man who had recently defected from Cuba and denounced Castro for abusing Che’s image.
It was a sad spot, and I fled it, but I had bounced no more than a hundred yards down the road when I came over a small hill and there he was, Che himself, alive and well and a little shorter than I had imagined. Also his beard was red, but other than that it was definitely him. He was marching up the hill toward me, the jaunty beret cocked on his head, the little star clearly visible on his brow. I pulled to a halt, convinced that the moonshine was responsible for this vision, but the figure only grew more solid with each step. Che approached steadily, and as he came closer I noticed he was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. I sat on the motorcycle, frozen in fear.
“Hallow!” he said in an approximation of English, and then burst into tears and handed me fifty dollars. The fellow’s real name was Jans van Zwam, and he was a Dutch tourist in his forties. He was just returning from a morning in La Higuera. He shoved the two twenties and a ten in U.S. currency at me and said, “Please, you will take for the doctor in the town,” and then burst into tears again.
When all the crying was over I asked him what he was doing here. “For twenty years I dream of coming to Bolivia,” he said. He had passed through four airports in two days, jumped into a taxi and come straight to La Higuera. Against his driver’s advice—which Jans did not fathom, since he did not speak any Spanish—he dismissed the taxi. He had planned on catching a bus back to Vallegrande, but there were no buses or taxis on this road, so now he was walking.
He had about fifty kilometers to go. With the exception of Pucara, five kilometers up the road, there was no shelter along the route, nor any place to find food and water. I told him to flag down any trucks that passed, although there would almost certainly be none, and promised to pick him up on my return if he was still afoot.
He rolled up his sleeve and showed me his left biceps. There was a tattoo of Che on it. When he made a muscle Che’s face bulged a bit and the eyes of the “world’s No. 1 guerrilla” surveyed the future even more intensely than usual. I asked him how to get to La Higuera.
“You will see it easy,” he said. I pulled away, and indeed, the route wasn’t missable. Downhill a half mile the road forked. A tall pole stood at the divide with a crude hand-lettered sign attached.
CHE, it said; 10 KM.
Twenty-nine years too late, I followed a grassy path over the hills. Aside from a weekly truck no vehicles came this way. A tiny bridge of rotten logs spanned a dry creekbed, and then the road went up and over one last ridge line and there it was, down below me.
La Higuera was not a town or even a village, but just a hamlet, a cluster of brown, one-story buildings draggled along the sides of the only street. The settlement sat on the slopes of a vast, gentle valley, guarded on the left and at the far end by a steep, brush-covered ridge. Below it were sloping fields of tall, golden grass, some trees, and far, far below that the Rio Grande. I powered slowly up the main street, looking into the empty houses. A coupe of immense pigs slept against a wall beneath a slogan in red paint that said EL CHE VIVE.
The letter I had been handed in Pucara was addressed to the most substantial house in La Higuera. The building was made of cement and had a chain-link fence around it to keep out thieves. The schoolteacher lived inside. She was a rather elegant white woman with dark hair down to her waist, and she made me tea. She did not ask why I was there, since there was only one reason foreigners came to La Higuera. She talked for a while about life in the village, which had no electricity. There were only twenty-two families left now, she said, about half the number who lived here when El Che came. They mostly raised cattle and were slowly going broke. About half the people in the area had Chagas disease, the heart-eating condition spread by beetles. I left the letter with her and set off on foot to find the doctor Jans had mentioned.
His office was in a long, low hut at the top of the hamlet. This was the same building where Che had been murdered. In 1967 the army had carried its wounded captive to La Higuera and put him in the hut, which was then a schoolhouse. At one point several Bolivian soldiers took Che outside and posed for a picture with their trophy—he looks wildly disheveled, and his captors are leaning in toward him like guests squeezing into the frame at a party. A local woman was allowed to feed him some soup. He sat on the floor, his back to the wall, his wounds bleeding but not fatal.
Via radio, the soldiers received a coded order from headquarters in La Paz: “Fernando 700.” Decoded, this meant “Kill Che Guevara.” The Bolivian government did not want to risk a show trial full of posturing and speeches. The date was now October 9, 1967. A sergeant was given two cans of beer to fortify his courage and was then sent into the schoolhouse where Che was waiting. There are various accounts of what Guevara did or didn’t say at the end. Supporters claimed that his final words were “Shoot, coward, for you kill a man!” Enemies said it was “I am worth more to you alive than dead.” There were also claims that he denounced Castro, or refused to speak at all, or sent a farewell to his family, or cried out “Long live the revolution!”
It doesn’t really matter what was said; the sergeant put an end to words by shooting nine bullets into Guevara.
Now there were a few children standing outside the door of the former schoolhouse, which had been fixed up and whitewashed. They were brown-skinned boys with ratty sweaters and shorts. They loitered, listening to the screams of agony coming from inside. The doctor had his hands in the mouth of an old peasant woman in a black-and-blue poncho. She sat in a chair, her head tilted back. The doctor was prying at her teeth with a set of sharpened pliers like those used to pull nails out of horse hooves. He gave a great heave, and a bloody tooth came sliding out while the old woman twitched in her chair and pleaded for mercy. “Dios mío!” she cried out in a muffled, wet voice. The doctor added the tooth to a collection of saliva-damp molars in his left hand. There were five of them glistening there in
his palm. “Well,” he said to the woman, after spotting me, “why don’t we get the rest in a few days?”
The doctor was a barrel-chested, handsome young man, dark in skin, eyes, and hair. He rhapsodized about the man he called “el Guerrillero heroico” and said plainly that he was in this village, providing care to the poor, because he wanted to Be Like Che. His medical education and salary were both funded by the Cuban government. This, too, was a legacy of Che.
The walls in the little room were decorated with posters about polio and inoculations. There was a plaque above the spot where Che died with a bad poem about him, and below that a framed pop art collage that showed his face and a section of the Argentine flag.
I handed over the fifty dollars, making sure that the boys at the door heard me explain that the money was a gift from the Dutchman for the medical care of the villagers. The doctor held the bills in front of him and then smiled—and then laughed. I asked him what he was going to spend it on. “Medicine,” he said at once. “Or supplies. We need bandages, and scalpels, and antibiotics. And needles. Also a battery for the radio.” He showed me the radio. It was a ratty two-way model, the only connection between La Higuera and the outside world. Some German leftists were raising money to install a solar panel to power it, he said. The Cubans were even talking about paying to bring electricity to the village. He took me outside and showed me a red 125 cc dirt bike that he used to make his rounds. It was in terrible shape. He said he needed new tires—but that could wait, since the dry season was here. With the Dutchman’s money he could stock up on some medicine. He would worry about tires later.
I gave him another twenty out of my own wallet. It was one of the last bills in there, but still, it is amazing how cheaply we can value our debts.
Che came to La Higuera twice. The first time had been three days before the end, not as a captive but as a fighter. His column was half the size of when he started, but the men were still on the offensive. Arriving after dawn, they found the hamlet eerily calm and the mayor missing. Despite these bad omens Guevara ordered the column to move forward. The advance guard walked up the main road toward Pucara while Guevara and the others waited in town.
“The army started shooting from that ridge line up there,” the doctor said, pointing to the hill I had crossed to enter town. We were walking in the same direction that Che’s men had been moving when the shooting broke out. The vanguard was decimated. Three of Che’s most able men—“magnificent fighters,” he wrote in his diary—were killed at once. Two others were wounded, and two Bolivian rebels took the opportunity to desert to the enemy. The survivors retreated into the center of town, to where we now stood.
The doctor made a left down a narrow lane, signaling for me to follow. The path headed downhill and was shaded by overhanging trees and shielded by stone walls on each side. “It took some time to get the mules organized but then they came down here,” he said. “This was their route of escape.”
The ridge line was almost out of rifle range from here. The guerrillas had slipped down the lane, using the walls for excellent cover. I squatted down behind one and cocked a finger at the army troops who had been on the ridge that day. You would need a telescopic sight to hit anything from here. Following the path, laying down a barrage of covering fire from behind its walls, the survivors slowly worked their way out of the village, down the hill, into a ravine, and then eventually disappeared with the arrival of darkness. They hid in the valley below the town for three days, almost dying of thirst. A new unit of Bolivian army rangers was deployed in the area. There were two hundred of them, freshly trained by American Green Berets. They had intelligence information gathered by the CIA, including Che’s photos of himself in disguise. Listening to his radio while hidden in the underbrush, Guevara heard a broadcast about the deployment of “hundreds” of troops to encircle him. “The news seems to be a diversionary tactic,” he wrote on October 7.
It was the last line in his last diary.
The good doctor took my picture while I stood next to the statue of El Che in the town plaza. La Higuera was too small to actually have a plaza, but that is what residents called the traffic circle in their one and only dirt street. There were a few trees inside the circle, and inside them a bust of Che on a white pedestal. It was the worst representation of him I had seen yet. Only the obvious adornments—the trademark beret with star and the word Che in red across the pedestal—made it clear who it was. In the photo my boots are streaked with oil, my jeans ripped from the crash in Chile, and my head sunburned by four months of travel. I look like I’m posing with Omar Sharif on the set of 1969’s Che. In that Warner Brothers production, Sharif played Guevara, of course; Jack Palance was Fidel Castro.
There had been a different and better likeness of Che in this exact spot, but one night in 1990 a jeep full of Bolivian soldiers pulled into town. They threw a lasso over the head of El Che, tied it to the back of the jeep, and then drove out of town as the bust bounced behind them like a tin can at a wedding. The replacement had been made by some art students of dubious talent. Neither the art students nor the soldiers were from around here. Nor were the young leftists who mourned here in La Higuera each October 8, just managing to miss the right date the way they just missed everything else about Che.
Which is as close as I could come to explaining the miserable mood that had settled on me with my arrival in La Higuera. We didn’t belong here. Not the soldiers nor the art students. Not Jans, the Che tourist, not Che himself. We were all meddlers, outsiders who thought we knew better. Except for the doctor with his palms full of bloody teeth, we—Argentines, Bolivians, rightists, leftists, CIA agents, Cuban diplomats, journalists, pilgrims, and tourists—were all here as soldiers in some cause, imposing our wills on a group of people who needed rain and batteries, not a place in history.
It was mid-afternoon now, and conscious of how swiftly darkness would cover the country, I thanked the doctor and began a very long journey home. I rode slowly down through the houses, past the EL CHE VIVE scrawl and the pigs lying contentedly in the sun, and then went over the ridge. A few miles on the other side of Pucara I came around a corner and saw Jans striding purposefully along. When he heard the sound of my motor coming he turned and waved his arms over his head as though I might somehow miss him. I pulled over, lowered the rear foot pegs, and Jans climbed aboard. He put a stiff hand on my shoulder and sat bolt upright during the trip.
Because of the road we drove no more than fifteen miles an hour, and this made it possible to talk. I kept the visor of my helmet open to hear him better. Like all Che fans, Jans had a parable about the man, and he first apologized for his bad English and then launched into it. “I didn’t have no education,” he said. “At fourteen I am going to work. After much time I pick up a book. It is about Che Guevara. I see he is a doctor, from good family. He have everything, he could be a good life, but he give it up to fight for the poor. So I think he is a good fellow, and I read another book.” End of parable.
Jans knew everything about Che. As we rode along he mentioned Che’s birthdate, what he’d done in the Cuban war, his missions to Africa and Bolivia, what he’d said at the Tricontinental Congress, whom he’d written his farewell letters to, on and on. Back in Holland, Jans was a minor politician—a vice-mayor of a community of seventeen thousand people—and said he was known as the “Che mayor” because of his fascination with Guevara. He made me pull over long enough to show me some articles he kept in his jacket. They were from a Dutch paper and I couldn’t read them, but they showed Jans wearing a beret and a Che pin on his lapel as he stood in front of a Che poster in his home. According to Jans the first article said that Che Guevara was “the one who set Jans van Zwam right.” I recognized the Dutch word pelgrimage in the text of the second piece. When we started again I asked Jans if he had read about Guevara’s 1952 motorcycle trip.
“Ja,” he said. “This is the trip when he begin to wake up. He start to think about how people is living.”
&n
bsp; We didn’t talk much after that. We just rolled slowly over the ridges, one after another, and consumed the views. Somewhere that afternoon, while my eyes were busy, I passed through the ten thousandth mile since leaving Buenos Aires.
We flew up the valley floor and into Vallegrande, a long rooster tail of dust chasing our arrival. I slammed on the brakes seconds after we hit pavement at the outskirts. Jans tumbled forward onto my back. “It’s the hospital,” I said.
“Which hospital?” he asked.
“The one where they put his body.”
We left the bike at the curb and wandered up some stairs. It was just a small clinic, really, called Nuestro Señor de Malta, with the price of services listed on the front door. Guevara’s inert body had been lashed to the skid of a small helicopter and flown down from La Higuera to be put on display here. BOLIVIA CONFIRMS GUEVARA’S DEATH, read the lead headline in The New York Times the next day; BODY DISPLAYED. After the journalists were gone, a pair of wax death masks were cast, and then Che’s hands were sawed off so that his fingerprints could be verified later against Argentine records. Sometime before dawn on the eleventh he was stuffed into a grave dug at random near the airstrip.
The laundry shed was now surrounded by weeds and trash. It was open on one side, with a cement table in the middle that held a pair of shallow sinks with fine ridges laid into the sloped bottom. It had drains and a single dead spigot. There were rings of candle wax around the edges, and the blue plaster walls were covered with messages. The majority were in Spanish, but there were a few in Portuguese and others in German and French. Some people just left their names on the wall (“Charito 19/1/92”), but most of the space was taken up with very personal messages, letters to Che himself, often cast in the intimate “tú” tense rather than the respectful “Usted.”
Chasing Che Page 31