Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Che now concentrated his efforts on rejoining Joaquín and the rearguard column, and exploring the route they would have to take to reach the Río Grande, beyond which lay the mountains of central Bolivia, their gateway to the Andes and, he hoped, escape from the army dragnet. Over the next few days, however, they ran into more enemy patrols and took more losses. In one clash, Loro disappeared. In another ambush, Eliseo Reyes (Rolando), a comrade since his days as an adolescent courier for Che’s sierra column, was mortally wounded. He died as Che tried to save him, and for the first time since his arrival in Bolivia Che’s diary reflected a real sense of loss. “We have lost the best man in the guerrilla band,” he wrote. “Of his unknown and unheralded death for a hypothetical future that may materialize, one can only say: ‘Your valiant little body, captain, has extended to immensity in its metallic form.’” (A line from Neruda’s “Canto para Bolívar.”)
The scouts Che had sent out to search for Joaquín’s group returned with more bad news. They had run into the army, losing their rucksacks in
a firefight, and still had no idea where the rearguard column was. Judging from where the skirmish had taken place, near the Ñancahuazú, Che concluded that their only two river exits toward the Río Grande were now blocked. They would have to go over the mountains.
Still desperate to find Joaquín’s group, Che and his band began moving north, cutting their way with machetes through the dense brush of the mountains. At the end of April, his summary presented an overwhelmingly bleak outlook. After describing the deaths of Rubio and Rolando and Loro’s still unexplained disappearance,
*
he concluded, “[Our] isolation appears to be complete, sicknesses have undermined the health of some comrades, forcing us to divide forces, which has greatly diminished our effectiveness. As yet we have been unable to establish contact with Joaquín. The peasant base has not yet been developed, although it appears through planned terror we can neutralize some of them; support will come later. Not one [Bolivian] enlistment has been obtained.”
The hard-nosed use of force to gain a civilian constituency had always been a part of guerrilla warfare, and Che and Fidel had employed it in the sierra, although in Che’s public writings about the Cuban struggle he had never used the word “terror.” The alliance between guerrilla and peasant had been rendered as a kind of idyllic mass wedding, an organic symbiosis. But this was now bare-bones survival, and there was no time to wax poetic; Che would have to use whatever tactics seemed necessary in order to survive. On the bright side, he noted that the public “clamor” about the guerrillas’ activity was being matched by propaganda efforts in Cuba. Before he left Cuba for Bolivia, Che had written an undated call to arms addressed to the organization formed in the wake of the Tricontinental Conference. It had been published on April 16 in a special issue of what would become
Tricontinental
magazine. “After the publication of my article in Havana there must not be any doubt about my presence here,” he wrote. “It seems certain that the North Americans will intervene heavily.” (His references in the article to where “the struggle was going on” would have provided clues to where he was.) Che also noted in his journal that while the army was performing better in the field against them, it had not so far mobilized the peasants, but only some spies, who were “bothersome” but could be “neutralized.”
The capture of Debray and Bustos was a heavy blow. They had been his only chance to get word to the outside world, and he now had no means of contact with La Paz or Cuba. “Dantón [Debray] and Carlos [Bustos] fell
victim to their own haste, their near desperation to leave,” he wrote. “And to my own lack of energy to stop them, so the communication with Cuba (Dantón) has been cut and the plan of action in Argentina (Carlos) is lost.” Che and his men were truly on their own now. The enemy was alerted; Che’s forces were cut in half and on the run; he had no backup from Cuba or Bolivia’s cities, and no peasant support. Things could not be much worse. And yet, faced with this harsh reality, Che ended his April summary with a strangely optimistic conclusion. “In short: a month in which everything resolved itself in the normal manner, considering the necessary hazards of guerrilla warfare. The morale is good among all the combatants, who have passed their preliminary test as guerrillas.”
According to his former interrogators, it was Régis Debray who provided the final confirmation of Che Guevara’s presence in Bolivia.
*
At first, Debray claimed he was a French journalist and had nothing to do with the guerrillas, but after his interrogation became tougher, he succumbed, confirming that the guerrilla
comandante
known as Ramón was in fact Che. Debray could not have held out for long in any case, since his links to Cuba were already well known. Just a few months earlier, his book
Revolution in the Revolution?
had been published in Cuba, and it was circulating around Latin America, causing a storm of controversy in leftist circles.
Revolution in the Revolution?
—based on his notes from conversations with Fidel, on Che’s writings and speeches, and on his own observations from the guerrilla battlefields of the region—sought to give a theoretical foundation to Cuba’s argument for the “guerrilla option.” Debray’s position, which was more explicit than Che’s or Fidel’s, was that the rural guerrilla
foco
should be the elite vanguard of the revolutionary struggle, from which the future leadership would be born. (Debray had brought Che a copy of the book, and Che read it from cover to cover in one sitting, condensing it in his own notes, which he used to give a few classes to his fighters.)
Bustos, meanwhile, was pretending to be a traveling salesman with leftist leanings who had somehow gotten mixed up in things, but who knew very little about what was going on. After several weeks, however, his true identity was ascertained when Argentine police forensic experts arrived to take
his fingerprints for comparison with those on file in Buenos Aires. When the results came back and Bustos was confronted with his lie, he said, he confessed. Learning that he was an artist by profession, his interrogators asked him to draw profiles of the members of the guerrilla band. He did so, and also drew maps of the Ñancahuazú camps and cave complexes. Fortunately, however, his identity as Che’s Argentine guerrilla liaison was never revealed, so the people in his underground network in Argentina remained safe from arrest.
The Americans were now directly involved in Bolivia. The interior minister, Antonio Arguedas, was already on the CIA’s payroll.
*
Working closely with him was a Cuban-American agent who operated under the name of Gabriel García García and who was present during some of the interrogations of Debray and Bustos. After the news of Che’s presence in Bolivia broke, a group of American Special Forces Green Berets arrived in Bolivia to create a counterinsurgency Rangers Battalion, and the CIA began interviewing men on its payroll for a new mission: to find Che and stop him from getting a foothold in Bolivia.
One of those interviewed was Felix Rodríguez, the young Cuban-American CIA paramilitary operative who had been with the CIA’s covert anti-Castro program since the beginning. He had been working for its Miami station since his withdrawal from Nicaragua in 1964. Until the summer of 1967, the CIA had been frustrated regarding the issue of Che’s whereabouts. “As I remember it,” Rodríguez said, “there were some high-ups in the Agency who had reported that Che had been killed in Africa, and so ... when people started saying he was in Bolivia, well ... [there were those] who said ‘no, he’s not there.’ When the evidence was confirmed by Debray that he
was
there, that’s when they really decided to move forward and put out a maximum effort in Bolivia.” (According to Rodríguez, the CIA would have moved more quickly if not for the “Congo” theory, and he attributed this to the fact that the man who defended it was a senior CIA official who had staked his reputation on the story.)
Rodríguez got a telephone call from his CIA control officer in June 1967. He went to his office, where he was introduced to a CIA division chief who explained the project to find Che. Would Rodríguez be willing to go on the mission? Rodríguez immediately said yes. It was the mission of his life, and Rodríguez knew it. He also knew that the Agency had given it a
high priority. “It feared [what might happen if] Che grabbed Bolivia,” he recalled. “With a secure Cuban base there, they could easily expand the revolution to important countries like Brazil, Argentina.” Adding to those anxieties, he said, was the clear impression that Che’s operation was being directed out of Havana, and the language coming from there was all about creating “various Vietnams” in Latin America.
Indeed, Che’s “Message to the Tricontinental” had caused a sensation. He had appealed to revolutionaries everywhere to create “two, three, many Vietnams.” Opening with a quote from José Martí, “Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen,” Che questioned the validity of the so-called peace of the postwar world and demanded a “long and cruel” global confrontation to bring about the destruction of imperialism and a new socialist world order. In a litany of the qualities that would be required for this battle, he cited hatred as a prime element: “a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us above and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to, and transforming him into an effective, violent, seductive, and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”
It would be a “total war,” to be carried out against the Yankee first in his imperial outposts and eventually in his own territory. The war had to be waged in “his home,” his “centers of entertainment”; he should be made to feel like a “cornered beast,” until his “moral fiber begins to decline,” and that would be the first symptom of his “decadence,” and of victory for the popular forces. Che urged men everywhere to take up their brothers’ just causes, as part of the global war against the United States. “Each spilled drop of blood, in any country under whose flag one has not been born, is an experience passed on to those who survive, to be added later to the liberation struggle of his own country.”
We cannot elude the call of the hour. Vietnam is pointing it out with its endless lesson of heroism, its tragic and everyday lesson of struggle and death for the attainment of final victory. ... How close we could look into a bright future should two, three, many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of death and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all the peoples of the world!
If we, at a small point on the world map, are able to fulfill our duty and place at the disposal of this struggle, whatever little of ourselves we are permitted to give; our lives, our sacrifice, and
if some day we have to breathe our last breath on any land, already ours, sprinkled with our blood, let it be known we have measured the scope of our actions. ... Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, and a battle hymn for the peoples’ unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America. Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ears and another hand may be extended to wield our weapon and other men may be ready to intone the funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and victory.
Apocalyptic language had been present in Che’s manifestos before, but this one, which synthesized his true convictions implacably, was all the more chilling and dramatic for the fact that everyone knew Che was somewhere in the battlefield, trying to do exactly what he proposed: sparking another—and he hoped definitive—world war.
During a briefing in Washington, Felix Rodríguez was shown the pile of evidence that Che was in Bolivia, including the “confessions” made by Debray and Bustos, as well as Bustos’s drawings. Rodríguez left for La Paz, traveling undercover as a businessman, Felix Ramos. He arrived there on August 1 and joined another Cuban-American agent, Gustavo Villoldo Sampera (aka Eduardo González), a veteran of the CIA’s recent antiguerrilla operation in the Congo, who had been in Bolivia since March.
*
By August, Che was sick and exhausted, and so were many of the two dozen men still with him. On August 7, the nine-month anniversary of the guerrilla army’s birth, he noted, “Of the [original] six men, two are dead, one has disappeared, two are wounded, and I with a case of asthma that I am unable to control.” Since the capture of Debray and Bustos three months earlier, Che and his men had hacked their way with machetes through the brutal spiny bush of the southeast, alternately enduring searing cold winds, rain, and blistering heat, vainly trying to make contact with the rearguard column led by Joaquín. They often got lost and occasionally skirmished with army patrols. Radio Havana was their sole link to the outside world.
When they were bivouacked, Che spent much of his time reading, writing in his diary, and filling his notebooks with thoughts about socialist
economics, as if divorced from the reality around him. A new fatalism laced with dark humor appeared in many of his daily diary entries. He observed, from a curious distance, the continual bickering and petty thievery of food among his men; occasionally, he took charge and issued warnings and lectures. Much of the time, however, he was simply too weak to be stern anymore. Once, in early June, he had even let an army truck carrying “two little soldiers wrapped in blankets” go by without opening fire on it. “I did not feel up to shooting them, and my brain didn’t work fast enough to take them prisoner.” Another time, after capturing a policeman posing as a merchant, who had been sent out to spy on them, Che considered killing him but let him go with a “severe warning.” On June 14, his official thirty-ninth birthday, Che reflected, “I am inevitably approaching the age when my future as a guerrilla must be reconsidered. For now, I’m still in one piece.”