Che Guevara (123 page)

In Vallegrande, the three new dead guerrillas had been brought in by mule and jeep and laid out in a bloody row in the Nuestro Señor de Malta Hospital. On September 27, Selich noted that “the astonished people of Vallegrande dared to look at them only from a distance.” The next night, the troops who had carried out the ambush returned to base and were “rendered tribute” at a special party given by Colonel Zenteno Anaya. After a government commission arrived from La Paz to identify the bodies, Selich once more performed burial duty. At eleven o’clock on the night of September 29, he noted, “In absolute secrecy and in some place, the remains
of the Red mercenaries killed in the action at [La] Higuera were buried.”

On September 30, bringing with him a large retinue of officials and the press, President Barrientos returned to Vallegrande to share in the latest triumph. That same night, only thirty miles away, an exhausted Che and his men stole from cover and began making their way cautiously into the canyon below, careful to avoid contact with any of the peasants whose little farms dotted the area. The radio carried news of the large military mobilization under way; one report said 1,800 soldiers were in the zone; another said that “Che Guevara is surrounded in a canyon”; still another gave the news that when Che was caught he would be “brought to trial in Santa Cruz.” Then the capture of Camba and León was reported. Both men had obviously talked, even telling their captors that Che was sick. “So ends the tale of two heroic guerrillas,” Che remarked disgustedly in his diary.

By October 7, the guerrillas were in a steep ravine near La Higuera, where a narrow natural passage leads down toward the Río Grande. Their progress had been slow because Juan Pablo Chang, whose glasses were broken, was almost blind at night, and he held them back considerably. Still, Che was reasonably upbeat, beginning his diary entry that day with apparently intentional irony, for their circumstances were now truly desperate: “We completed the 11th month of our guerrilla operation without complications, in a bucolic mood.”

At midday, they spotted an old woman grazing goats and seized her as a precaution. She said she knew nothing about soldiers—or anything else, for that matter. Che was skeptical and sent Inti, Aniceto, and Pablo with her to her squalid little farmhouse, where they saw that she had a young dwarf daughter. They gave the woman fifty pesos and told her not to speak to anyone about their presence, although they did so, Che noted, “with little hope that she will keep her word.”

There were seventeen of them left now. It was, coincidentally, the same number of men that his and Fidel’s original band of guerrillas had been reduced to in the hard days after the catastrophic landing of the
Granma
, a little less than eleven years before. That night they set off downhill again, under a “very small moon,” walking through a narrow stream gully whose banks were sown with potato patches. At two in the morning they stopped because of Chang, who could not see well enough to walk farther. That night, Che listened to an “unusual” army report on the radio that said army troops had encircled the guerrillas at a place between the “Acero” and “Oro” rivers. “The news seems diversionary,” he observed. He wrote down their present altitude: “2,000 meters [about 6,500 feet].” It was the final entry in his diary.

Early the next morning, October 8, a company of freshly trained Bolivian Army Rangers led by a tall young captain, Gary Prado Salmon, took up positions above Che and his men. They had been alerted to the guerrillas’ presence by a local peasant. As daylight broke, the guerrillas spotted the soldiers on the bare ridges hemming them in on either side. They were trapped in a brushy gully called the Quebrada del Churo, which was about 1,000 feet long and not more than 200 feet wide, in places much narrower than that. Their only possible escape was to fight their way out. Che ordered his men to take up positions, splitting them into three groups. Several tense hours passed. The battle began at 1:10 in the afternoon, when a couple of the guerrillas were detected by the soldiers as they moved around. The soldiers opened up on the men below with mortar and machine-gun fire, and the Bolivian Aniceto Reinaga was killed.

In the the prolonged firefight that ensued, Arturo Tamayo and Olo Pantoja were both killed and the guerrillas lost track of one another. Partially concealed behind a large rock in the middle of a potato patch, Che fired his M-2 carbine, but it was soon hit in the barrel by a bullet that rendered it useless. The magazine of his pistol had apparently already been lost; he was now unarmed. A second bullet hit him in the calf of his left leg; a third penetrated his beret. Helped by the Bolivian Simón Cuba—Willy—he tried to climb up the bank of the gully in an attempt to escape. Some soldiers watched them approach. When they were a few feet away, a short, sturdy highland Indian named Sergeant Bernardino Huanca broke through the brush and pointed his gun at them.

A moment later, alerted by Huanca’s yells that he had captured two guerrillas, Captain Prado arrived. Without preamble, Prado asked Che to identify himself. Just as bluntly, Che told him. Prado pulled out one of Ciro Bustos’s sketches and positively identified Che by his pronounced brow and the bullet scar near his ear—from the accident that had nearly killed him during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Then he tied Che’s hands with his own belt. After sending out a radio message to Vallegrande, he told his men to guard Che and Willy closely, and he returned to the combat.

At 3:15
P.M.
, Lieutenant Colonel Selich was informed by radio of the “bloody combat” the Rangers were fighting with “the group of Reds commanded by
Che Guevara
!” Hearing that Guevara himself was a casualty, Selich excitedly boarded a helicopter and flew to La Higuera. When he arrived, he headed immediately for the battlefield.

Taking La Higuera’s helpful
corregidor
with him, Selich climbed down into the canyon where Che was being held as the fighting continued in different
parts of the
quebrada
between the soldiers and the rest of Che’s men. As they descended, they met soldiers bringing up a mortally wounded comrade, and Selich was told there were two more army dead still below. When he reached the place where Che was being held, Selich had a short dialogue with him, which he would later record in a confidential report. “I told him that our army wasn’t like he imagined,” Selich wrote, “and he replied that he had been wounded and that a bullet had destroyed the barrel of his carbine, and in those circumstances he had no alternative but to surrender himself.”

With night approaching and the combat continuing in the
quebrada
, Selich led his two prisoners, Che and Willy, toward La Higuera. By now, he had been joined by Captain Prado and his commanding officer, Major Miguel Ayoroa. For the steep hike out of the ravine, Che had to be helped by two soldiers because he could bear down only on his unhurt right leg. Bringing up the rear, some peasants carried the bodies of Arturo Tamayo and Olo Pantoja.

Later that evening, Che lay bound hand and foot on the dirt floor of a room in the mud-walled schoolhouse in La Higuera. Next to him lay the bodies of Arturo and Olo. In the other room, still alive and unhurt, Willy had been imprisoned. Because of the darkness, the army pursuit of the fugitive guerrillas was suspended until 4:00
A.M.
, but Selich took precautionary measures in La Higuera, posting guards in case Che’s comrades tried to rescue him. At 7:30
P.M.
Selich radioed Vallegrande, asking what to do with Che, and was told to “keep him in custody until new orders.” Then he, Prado, and Ayoroa went into the schoolhouse to talk with Che. Selich recorded their forty-five-minute dialogue in some abbreviated private notes.

“Comandante, I find you somewhat depressed,” Selich said to Che, according to his notes. “Can you explain the reasons why I get this impression?”

“I’ve failed,” Che replied. “It’s all over, and that’s the reason why you see me in this state.”

Selich then asked why Che had chosen to fight in Bolivia instead of his “own country.” Che evaded the question but acknowledged that “maybe it would have been better.” When he proceeded to praise socialism as the best form of government for Latin American countries, Selich cut him off. “I would prefer not to refer to that topic,” he said, claiming that in any event Bolivia was “vaccinated against Communism.” He accused Che of having “invaded” Bolivia and pointed out that the majority of his guerrillas were “foreigners.” According to Selich, Che then looked over at the bodies of Arturo and Olo.

“Colonel, look at them. These boys had everything they could want in Cuba, and yet they came here to die like dogs.”

Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Selich’s photograph of the schoolhouse in La Higuera where Che was held and then executed.

Selich tried to elicit some information from Che about the guerrillas still on the run. “I understand Benigno is gravely wounded since the [September 26] La Higuera battle, where Coco and the others died. Can you tell me, Comandante, if he is still alive?”

“Colonel, I have a very bad memory, I don’t remember and don’t even know how to respond to your question.”

“Are you Cuban or Argentine?” asked Selich.

“I am Cuban, Argentine, Bolivian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, etc. ... You understand.”

“What made you decide to operate in our country?”

“Can’t you see the state in which the peasants live?” Che asked. “They are almost like savages, living in a state of poverty that depresses the heart, having only one room in which to sleep and cook and no clothing to wear, abandoned like animals ...”

“But the same thing happens in Cuba,” Selich retorted.

“No, that’s not true,” Che said. “I don’t deny that in Cuba poverty still exists, but the peasants there have an illusion of progress, whereas the
Bolivian lives without hope. Just as he is born, he dies, without ever seeing improvements in his human condition.”
*

The officers began going through the documents captured from Che and, finding the two volumes of his Bolivian campaign diaries, stayed up until dawn reading them.

At 6:15
A.M.
on October 9, a helicopter flew into La Higuera carrying Colonel Joaquín Zenteno Anaya and the CIA agent Felix Rodríguez. No doubt owing to their earlier clash over the custody of the prisoner Paco, Selich was not pleased to see the CIA man arrive and scrutinized him closely, observing that Rodríguez, who was wearing a Bolivian army uniform and was referred to as Captain Ramos, had come with a powerful portable field radio and a camera with a special lens for photographing documents. The group went into the schoolhouse, where Selich noted that Zenteno Anaya “chatted with the
Jefe Guerrillero
for approximately 30 minutes.”

Rodríguez recorded in detail the grim encounter with his archenemy. Che was lying on his side in the dirt, his arms still tied behind his back and his feet bound together, next to the bodies of his friends. His leg wound oozed blood, and to Rodríguez he looked “like a piece of trash.”

“He was a mess,” Rodríguez wrote. “Hair matted, clothes ragged and torn.” He no longer had boots; his mud-caked feet were encased in crude leather sheaths, like those a medieval peasant might have worn. As Rodríguez stood silently observing, “absorbed in the moment,” Zenteno Anaya asked Che why he had brought war to this country. He received no reply. “The only sound was Che’s breathing.”

Immediately afterward, as Selich watched suspiciously, “Mister Felix Ramos [Rodríguez] ... set up his portable radio set and transmitted a coded message ... to an unknown place.” Then Rodríguez began photographing Che’s diary and the other captured documents on a table set outside. Taking Ayoroa with him, Zenteno Anaya headed off for the
quebrada
, where the military operations had resumed, leaving Selich in charge of La Higuera. When they returned, at around 10:00
A.M.
, Felix Rodríguez was still taking photographs. By eleven o’clock, he had finished his task and asked Zenteno Anaya permission to speak to “Señor Guevara.” Selich was distrustful and, “considering my presence necessary in this talk,” went into the schoolhouse
with Rodríguez. Selich’s notes reveal only that the talk dealt with “diverse themes of the Bolivian Revolution as well as the Cuban Revolution.”

In his memoirs of the encounter, Rodríguez does not mention that Selich was in the room with him, but, like Selich, he noted Che’s proud defiance. When he first entered, Che warned Rodríguez that he would not be interrogated, and relented only when the CIA man said he merely wished to exchange views. According to Rodríguez, Che acknowledged his defeat, blaming it on the “provincial” mind-set of the Bolivian Communists who had cut him off. Whenever Rodríguez tried to glean from him information about specific operations, however, Che refused to answer. He especially refused to “speak badly about Fidel,” although Rodríguez tried to coax him.

Finally, Che asked Rodríguez a question. Rodríguez was clearly not Bolivian, he observed, and to judge from his knowledge of Cuba, Che guessed that he was either a Cuban or a Puerto Rican working for U.S. intelligence. Rodríguez confirmed that he was born in Cuba and had been a member of the CIA-trained anti-Castro 2506 Brigade. Che’s only response was, “Ha.”