Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
The military men liked to take keepsakes from the dead guerrillas as personal talismans. Most of the captured documents, address books, and letters were forwarded to Army Intelligence, and to Interior Minister Arguedas and his CIA adviser, Gabriel García García, but many other items remained in the hands of individual military officers. Among those that found their way into Lieutenant Colonel Selich’s possession—along with snapshots of the bullet-riddled bodies of the guerrillas and photos of himself posing with prisoners—was a piece of paper with the handwritten lyrics to “Guitarrero” (Guitar Player), a melancholy Argentine ballad:
Don’t leave
, guitarrero
for the light in my soul goes out
I want to see another dawn
To die in the
cacharpayas.
*
Bedraggled, filthy, and with a long tangled beard, the young Bolivian Paco had been taken to Vallegrande along with the bodies of his comrades. He was paraded there like a trophy. Officers had pictures of themselves taken with him, looking like a wild man from the forest. Terrified and completely broken psychologically, Paco began to talk.
The Cuban-American CIA agents Felix Rodríguez and Gustavo Villoldo were now intimately involved with the antiguerrilla operation in the field. (In fact, according to Villoldo, he and Rodríguez had themselves participated in the ambush of Joaquín’s column with Vargas Salinas’s troops, camouflaged in Bolivian army uniforms.) Felix Rodríguez said he had immediately perceived Paco’s usefuless. Over the opposition of Paco’s initial interrogator, Lieutenant Colonel Selich, who wanted to execute him,
Rodríguez said, he was given custody of the prisoner. For the next few weeks, Rodríguez worked on Paco daily, gradually obtaining a clearer picture of life in the guerrilla ranks. From his information, Rodríguez said, he was able to learn who had died and who was still likely to be alive in the field, as well as their relative strengths and weaknesses, and their relationships with Che.
After a few days of trying to sort out what had happened to Joaquín’s column, Che and his men decided to head back north. On September 6, they left the Río Grande and began climbing into the mountains, out of the region that had been their home, and their graveyard, for the last ten months.
North of the Río Grande, the forested land rises massively toward the sky, climbing away in blue mountain eddies toward the brown lunar scree of the Andean highlands in the far distance. Above the tree line, the great denuded hills and chilly plateaus give way to swooping ravines, dotted sparsely with rustic hamlets linked to one another by footpaths and the occasional dirt road. The inhabitants, mostly Indians and mestizos, live by tending pigs or cows, their corn patches and vegetable gardens forming geometric patterns on hillsides around adobe houses. There is little foliage, and the natives can spot a stranger coming from miles away.
For two weeks, Che’s band climbed steadily upward, fording rivers, climbing cliffs, running once or twice into army patrols with tracker dogs. By now, the men were all showing symptoms of a breakdown of one sort or another. They squabbled over things such as who had eaten more food, accused one another of making insults, and, like children, came to tell Che their grievances and accusations. The most alarming symptom of all was displayed by Antonio—Olo Pantoja—who one day claimed to see five soldiers approaching; it turned out to be a hallucination. That night, Che made a worried note about the risk this troubling apparition of war psychosis might have on the morale of his men.
Che continued to listen attentively to the radio. Barrientos had now put a price on Che’s head—a mere $4,200—while at the same time announcing his belief that Che was dead. Debray’s pending trial, which was attracting international media attention, had been suspended until September 17. “A Budapest daily criticizes Che Guevara, a pathetic and apparently irresponsible figure, and hails the Marxist attitude of the Chilean Party for adopting practical stands,” Che recorded. “How I would like to take power just to unmask cowards and lackeys of every sort and to rub their snouts in their own filth.”
Perhaps because of his powerlessness to alter the course of events, his acid humor returned. Radio Havana reported that “a message of support had been received from the ELN” at the recently convened Organización Latinoamericana de Solidaridad conference in Havana, a message, Che noted, that must have been received through “a miracle of telepathy.” At the conference, Che’s emblematic visage had dominated the proceedings in huge posters and banners, and he was spoken of as a hero by Fidel.
In mid-September, news came of the arrest and attempted suicide in La Paz of Loyola Guzmán. During a pause in her interrogation session on the third floor of the Interior Ministry, Guzmán had hurled herself out of the window to avoid being forced to betray her comrades. She was badly hurt but survived.
On September 21, the group reached an elevation of more than 6,000 feet, the highest altitude they had yet experienced. Walking along a dirt road under bright moonlight, they headed toward Alto Seco, an isolated hamlet of fifty houses perched on a great rocky dome of a mountain. As they marched toward it the next day, Che noticed that “the people are afraid and try to get out of our way.” When they reached Alto Seco that afternoon, they were received with a “mixture of fear and curiosity,” and discovered that the local mayor, or
corregidor
, had gone off the day before to tell the army they were approaching. In reprisal, Che seized the food supplies in the man’s little grocery store and was deaf to his weeping wife’s entreaties that she be paid something in return.
Instead of leaving immediately, Che and his men stayed in Alto Seco that night, organizing an assembly in the little schoolhouse, where Inti gave a speech explaining their revolution to a “group of 15 downtrodden and silent peasants.” Only one man spoke up, the schoolteacher, who asked provocative questions about socialism, and whom Che profiled as “a mixture of fox and peasant, illiterate and guileless as a child.”
The bearded, dirty, and armed men who appeared in their midst were bewildering to these isolated people. Some even thought they were super-natural creatures. After a visit by the guerrillas, who were looking for food, a peasant woman who lived near Honorato Rojas told the army that she believed they were
brujos
, sorcerors, because they seemed to know everything about everyone in the area. When they paid her with paper money for her food, she thought the money was enchanted and would become worthless in her hands.
The government had been doing a good job of psychological warfare. In addition to its large-scale “civic action” program, which consisted of building roads, distributing antiguerrilla propaganda, granting land titles to peasants, and handing out school supplies in rural areas, the army and
police had been actively ferreting out intelligence from the peasant communities for months. Even before the guerrillas began moving away from Ñancahuazú and operating north of the river, the town of Vallegrande, with its civilian population of 6,000 and its military garrison, had been put on a war footing. In April, the military had declared the entire province an emergency zone, imposing martial law and advising the population that “groups of Castro-Communist tendency, mostly foreigners, have infiltrated our country, with the sole objective of sowing chaos and halting the Progress of the Nation, carrying out acts of
bandolerismo
, pillage, and assault against private property, especially among the peasantry. ... The Armed Forces, conscious of its specific obligations, has been mobilized to detain and destroy the foreign invasion, as malicious as it is vandalous.”
Since late summer, Vallegrande had become the main base for the army’s counterinsurgency operations, and an atmosphere of war hysteria had taken over. A public megaphone blared out antiguerrilla information in the public square, the few local leftist students were arrested, and foreign-looking strangers were detained and questioned. On August 23, according to Lieutenant Colonel Selich’s daily log, the entire population of Vallegrande had been “mobilized in the face of a possible Red attack.”
On September 1, when the army command in Vallegrande had made radio contact with Captain Vargas Salinas after his ambush of Joaquín’s column the night before, there was euphoria—and confusion—at his initial list of
exterminados
, for it included the name “Guevara.” As the assembled chiefs of staff of the armed forces listened in from La Paz, there was palpable excitement in the voice of army chief General David La Fuente as he pressed Vallegrande for clarification: “Does he mean
Che
Guevara?” They soon discovered that the dead man in question was Moisés Guevara, not the legendary
comandante guerrillero
.
It was now known that Che was hungry and sick, with a greatly reduced force of men. A soldier, Anselmo Mejía Cuellar, one of three taken prisoner by the guerrillas for a five-day period in August, told Selich that they walked little and moved slowly, gradually cutting their own path through the bush with machetes—and that they were “very dirty.” He described their weapons and each of the guerrillas’ duties, and made some interesting observations about Che. “The
jefe
travels by horse ... and the others serve him like a God, they made his bed and brought him
yerba mate
. He smokes a pipe, of silver ... and travels in the center of the column with the wounded man [Pombo, recovering from a leg injury]; he has green trousers and a camouflaged shirt with a coffee-colored beret ... and wears two watches, one a very large one.” Cuellar’s fellow ex-prisoner, Valerio Gutiérrez Padilla, said that although Che never complained, he
was obviously “bad off” because his men had to dismount him from his horse.
By the time the guerrillas reached Alto Seco, the army already knew they were coming and had began mobilizing to go after them. On September 24, the garrison in Vallegrande dispatched a regiment of soldiers to establish a forward base of operations at the village of Pucará, some ten miles northwest of the advancing guerrillas.
From Alto Seco, the guerrillas moved on, meandering for the next two days through the open landscape at a leisurely pace. Che, sick with what he called a “liver attack,” seemed almost in a reverie as he observed a “beautiful orange grove” where they stopped to rest. Approaching the next village, Pujío, he casually noted that he had bought a pig to eat “from the only peasant who stayed home. ... The rest flee at the sight of us.”
Reading these passages, one can’t help concluding that Che had become strangely detached from his own plight, an interested witness to his inexorable march toward death. He was breaking every rule sacred to guerrilla warfare: moving in the open without precise intelligence about what lay ahead, without the support of the peasants, and knowing that the army was aware of his approach.
*
Something Che wrote during his odyssey suggests that he knew his time was running out. It was a poem meant for Aleida as a last will and testament. He titled it “Against Wind and Tide.”
This poem (against wind and tide) will carry my signature
.
I give to you six sonorous syllables
,
a look which always bears (like a wounded bird) tenderness
,
an anxiety of lukewarm deep water
,
a dark office where the only light is these verses of mine
,
a very used thimble for your bored nights
,
a photograph of our sons
.
The most beautiful bullet in this pistol that always accompanies me
,
the unerasable memory (always latent and deep) of the children
who, one day, you and I conceived
,
and the piece of life that remains for me
.
This I give (convinced and happy) to the Revolution
.
Nothing that can unite us will have greater power
.
As peasants spread the news of their slow approach, the
corregidores
of the villages went ahead to alert the army. On September 26, reaching the
miserable little hamlet of La Higuera, in a bowl of land between two ridges, they found only women and children; all the men had left, including the
corregidor
and the telegraph operator. Che sent his vanguard ahead to scout the way to the next village, Jagüey, but when they reached the first rise of land leading out of La Higuera, they walked straight into an army ambush. Two Bolivians, Coco Peredo and Mario “Julio” Gutiérrez, and the Cuban Miguel Hernández were killed instantly. Two other Bolivians, Camba and Léon, seized the opportunity to desert. Benigno, Pablo, and Aniceto Reinaga survived and returned to La Higuera, but Benigno was wounded and Pablo had a badly hurt foot.
The soldiers who had struck the devastating blow were from Villegrande. At his base there, Lieutenant Colonel Selich listed the three dead guerrillas and then crowed that his soldiers “had not suffered a single death, or injury, or even a scratch. A crowning victory won by the Third Tactical Group for the Bolivian Army.” With the smell of victory in the air, different army units began to compete to see which would claim the ultimate prize. Colonel Joaquín Zenteno Anaya, commander of the Eighth Army Division; Colonel Arnaldo Saucedo, his intelligence chief; and the CIA adviser Felix Rodríguez had arrived in Vallegrande. Various army units patrolled out of bases both in front of and behind the guerrilla band, in Alto Seco and Pucará. Fresh from their weeks of training by the Americans, the new Bolivian Army Rangers now entered the field.
After the ambush outside La Higuera, Che and the survivors exchanged fire with soldiers positioned on the heights above them, then withdrew, escaping into a canyon. The next day they tried to find a way out of their predicament, climbing up to a higher elevation, where they found a small patch of woods to hide in. For the next three days, they remained there, anxiously watching the army pass back and forth on a road that cut across the hill just in front of them. Other soldiers were posted at a nearby house. When there were no soldiers in sight, Che sent out scouts to fetch water, gain a sense of the enemy’s movements, and find an escape route back down to the Río Grande. For the moment, though, they were surrounded.