Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Guevara’s presence in the area was not suspected until March 1967, when his group of guerrillas first engaged Bolivian soldiers in combat. The fight was premature. Originally, Guevara had planned to use Bolivia as a training base and staging ground for guerrilla operations in neighboring Argentina, Peru, and possibly Brazil. His vision was a continentwide revolution. The Bolivian Amazon, particularly the Bení region, was chosen because it was remote from roads, yet straddled the Peruvian and Brazilian borders. Mario Monje, leader of the Central Committee of the Bolivian Communist party, was supposed to coordinate “the matter of Brazil with [Lionel] Brizola, the brother-in-law of deposed Brazilian president João Goulart.”20 Peruvian leadership was to be provided by Juan Pablo Chang, a Peruvian of Chinese lineage called “El Chino,” who had participated in the planning of the 1965 guerrilla campaign of Héctor Béjar’s National Liberation Army in the Andes, but not its ill-starred execution. Of the three, only El Chino actually ended up involved in Guevara’s campaign, first as an observer and trainee and then as a fighter.

  Monje withdrew after learning that Guevara was to lead the guerrilla war without being subject to Monje’s political control. The same formula—independent leadership of the guerrillas by the guerrillas—had worked in Cuba. But there, Fidel Castro was already a famed rebel, if not national hero, the young lawyer who had stormed Batista’s Moncada Barracks. Guevara, although a legend in his own time, was not Bolivian. The older Bolivian Communists felt offended, and Monje would not follow up on his earlier pledge to participate; rather, young Communists who elected to join Guevara were expelled from the party. From then on, Guevara was doomed. Monje’s rejection effectively isolated Guevara from his closest political base of support in Bolivia’s cities and mines, where the Communist party was the most efficiently organized political force on the Left. The arms-supply link with Peru across Lake Titicaca never materialized. Neither did any link to the restless Indian miners in the mountains, despite their suffering that June some of the worst massacres by the army since the 1952 revolution.

  But the greatest disaster for Guevara was his own second and final choice for an area of operations: a rugged range of hills located between Santa Cruz, the eastern capital of Bolivia, and the oil town of Camirí to the south. The area was penetrated by two familiar American interests. Gulf Oil had a large concession near Camirí. American Protestant Fundamentalists had a concession there, too, but theirs was of souls and minds. The area was home to 15,000 Guaraní Indians, who were long acculturated to oil wars since the 1932–1935 Chaco War drove many of them to flee to Argentina. Any armed revolt in an area where American oil companies had interests was bound to draw the local CIA station’s early attention—and Washington’s concern. Guevara must have known this and, indeed, seemed to relish Barrientos’s admission in July that the legendary Che was leading the fight.21 And Che also should have known that the Indians probably had grown accustomed to the presence of Bolivian soldiers (mostly also Indians) in their midst and would not see troops as a shocking invasion to be resisted. But he could not have known that another force was aggravating the fear and suspicion of local Indian peasants: the German-Bolivian community in nearby Santa Cruz. Vehemently right wing, and probably the most powerful influence on La Paz’s military high command, the German Bolivians were becoming deeply involved in turning the Indians’ peaceful coca-leaf trade into a plague of violence through the processing and trafficking of cocaine.

  Bolivia’s Indians and SIL (1978)

  Sources: Forjando un Mañana Mejor, 1955–1975 (La Paz: Ministerio de Educacion y Cultura and Instituto Linguistico de Verano, 1975); Walter Dostal, ed., The Situation of the Indian in South America, pp. 417–19.

  Bolivia Oil (1978)

  Sources: International Petroleum Encyclopedia, 1983 (Tulsa, Okla.: PennWell Publishing Company, 1983); Peruvian Times, 1952.

  The cocaine trade, in fact, was already so widespread in the guerrillas’ area of operations that Guevara’s training camp was first discovered by police looking for a cocaine-processing plant, not for revolutionaries.

  “They only looked over the house and observed some strange things, such as calcium carbide bought for our lamps, which had not been taken to the caves,” Guevara wrote in his diary. The policemen, mistaking the camp for the factory, collected a few jars of chemicals “and withdrew with the warning that they knew everything and [we] had better take them into account.”22

  In Bolivia, as anywhere, drug smuggling quickly corrupted all levels of society. The $450,000 that Gulf Oil admitted giving as “political contributions,” mostly to El Presidente Barrientos between 1966 and 1969,23 played its role, but left few roots in local villages. Cocaine did, making for networks of informers everywhere.

  Cam Townsend’s SIL missionaries had entered the area in 1957, just as Gulf Oil was also moving in to exploit a huge 1.1-million-acre concession granted by the government of Victor Paz Estenssoro. Three years later, Gulf struck oil and gas at Caranda, west of Santa Cruz and just north of where Che Guevara’s guerrillas would end up making their last stand. SIL remained farther south, near Camirí, where Guevara’s march to his death began.

  THE STING OF ISOLATION

  On May 28, 1967, Che occupied the village of SIL’s Guaraní translator, Harry Rosbottom, but found no American presence, at least not physically. SIL’s translator and his family had been withdrawn “on furlough.”

  Called Caraqatarenda, Guaraní for “place of the cactus,” the village lived up to its name: Guevara got no recruits. The Guaraní did not appreciate the usual military practice of detaining civilians to prevent them from warning that a village was being advanced upon. The town was taken without much difficulty, but not the Indians’ evangelized hearts. Using commandeered oil trucks, Guevara then moved north from one Indian town to the next, writing IOUs for store merchandise he seized and distributed to the peasants. But still there were no recruits.

  Advancing north along the “oil road” that connects Santa Cruz with the Camirí oil field, Guevara defeated an army detachment that was sent to stop him. Then, when his vehicles failed and planes appeared overhead, he decided to swing west toward the mountains and melt into the forest.

  Despite these bold early victories, the political war was going badly. The Guaraní proved more conservative than Guevara had anticipated. “Complete lack of incorporation of the peasants,” he wrote in his diary, “although they are losing their fear of us, and we are succeeding in winning their admiration. It’s a slow and patient task.”24

  The army was doing everything it could to make the task impossible. Unable to rout Che’s guerrillas, it turned on the Indians. “The army issued the communication about the detention of all the peasants who collaborated with us in the zone. Now comes the period when both sides shall exert pressure upon the peasants but in different ways; our triumph will mean the qualitative change for a leap in development.”25

  But it was not to be. Part of the reason Guevara himself discovered in the town of Espino: “It is a Guaraní community whose members are very shy and speak or pretend to speak very little Spanish.”26 The Indians were unwilling to join a revolution that was not yet their own. And Che lacked the linguistic talents of SIL’s Harry Rosbottom to give them more confidence in him; Quechua lessons taken in training proved useless.

  Military victories, Che had written in Cuba, were not enough to ensure success; political victories were needed. Politically isolated, military victory, aside from a few local skirmishes, was fleeting. “The army goes on without being organized and its technique does not improve substantially,”27 he noted after defeating an army detachment in Guaraní country, but even then, so early in the campaign, powerful forces from the Colossus of the North were descending to remedy the problem.

  Already, thanks to Bolivian deserters, his training camp had been located “with absolute precision,”28 Che fumed. A week after his first clash with Barrientos’s troops on March 23, the Times of London’s Murray Sayle arrived. One of
the first reporters on the scene, Sayle was also spying for the United States. He had accepted “an unofficial assignment by the Americans who wanted to know whether these rebels really existed.” Sayle confirmed that they did and gave another startling piece of information: “Among the rubbish neatly raked from the [training camp’s] dormitory area, I found a picture of Dr. Che Guevara taken in a jungle and a copy of a speech by General Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese victor at Dien Bien Phu, translated into Spanish.”29 Only the previous year, Che had sent a message to Third World revolutionaries gathered in Havana for the Tricontinental Conference, pledging “two, three, many Vietnams.” If Vietnam had become a horror to the Vietnamese, it also had become Washington’s nightmare.

  Alarm bells rang in Washington’s inner sanctum. Barrientos already had dispatched his air force chief of staff to the Brazilian junta and to the regimes of neighboring Paraguay, Argentina, and Peru, to ask for their cooperation in sealing off Bolivia’s border. Peru’s President Belaúnde pledged his support, as did the military rulers of Brazil and Paraguay; Argentina did more, offering to intervene with troops if necessary.

  It was not necessary. Washington’s counterinsurgency machinery sprang into action. Twelve years had passed since C. D. Jackson, who had emphasized psychological warfare, was replaced by a man more sympathetic to covert military solutions, Nelson Rockefeller. Those dozen years had been wasted.

  Santa Cruz soon had visitors: Aurelio Hernández, one of the Cuban exiles the CIA had placed in Bolivia’s Ministry of the Interior, arrived with four military attachés from the U.S. Embassy in La Paz.30 C-130 transports from the Panama Canal Zone also began landing at Santa Cruz. They unloaded napalm; weapons; radios; and that most important mainstay of jungle patrols, medical supplies, something Guevara, a chronic asthmatic, would be denied after his supply caves were unearthed in August. A few miles south of Guevara’s abandoned training camp, two Green Berets were photographed training Barrientos’s soldiers.

  In Washington, on April 8, the secretary of state’s limousine pulled up to the Pentagon. Dean Rusk, his face tired from daily encounters over the Vietnam War, was meeting with counterinsurgency experts Walt Rostow and William Bowdler of Johnson’s National Security Council. This meeting, however, was not about Vietnam. It was a secret strategy session about Bolivia. Attending were CIA Director Richard Helms; General Robert Porter, chief of the Southern (Latin American) Command; and other top officials.

  These men pored over their options and ruled out massive U.S. military intervention. Che Guevara must not be given the “two, three, many Vietnams” he sought in his message “from somewhere in the world” to the Tricontinental Conference. Instead, covert action, the kind of strategy that would not rouse new concerns among an American public already alarmed by the increasing violence in the Vietnam adventure, was the chosen road.

  Yet the plan was straight Vietnam: isolate the guerrilla zone, offer a price on Che’s head to gain informants, use “interrogation” to force prisoners and suspected sympathizers to talk, employ sophisticated aerial surveillance to locate the guerrilla camps, and send in shock troops that were especially trained in jungle warfare on search-and-destroy missions. It had worked in Peru. It was supposed to be working in Vietnam. So why should it not work in Bolivia?

  And the propaganda value of Guevara’s presence outside Cuba could be enormous. From the start, it could be denounced to Bolivians and the world as a foreign invasion. In September, at the Punta del Este conference, Rusk would charge just that. He did not mention that the Green Beret leading the battle in Bolivia, Major “Poppy” Shelton, was a veteran of similar U.S. search-and-destroy missions in Vietnam. On April 12, 1967, the first group of what would be a sixteen-man Green Beret task force left Panama for Bolivia. By the end of the month, the embassy’s senior military attaché and the Berets’ leader had scouted the Santa Cruz area and picked out a sugar mill north of the city. The mill was called La Esperanza, Spanish for “Hope.” Shortly thereafter, 600 freshly drafted Indians arrived for the first drills that would teach them the pride of being “El Ranger.”

  In the years ahead, charges would abound of SIL’s complicity in the CIA’s hunt for Che. None would be proved. The closest were claims that an SIL agronomist in Colombia boasted of helping locate Che through Indian informants while he was in Bolivia. SIL denied these, as well as the claim that a JAARS pilot had participated in the CIA’s aerial search for the guerrillas. For many critics, it was not impossible, or even out of character, given charges of JAARS’s “transport” and mapping role during the CIA campaign against the MIR in Peru (a claim subsequently denied by one SIL official), or SIL’s own pride in being of service to governments, maintaining military Helios, leasing Helios, even SIL’s own uncritical reference in 1961 to the Peruvian military’s assuming SIL was willing to engage in “espionage” along the Peru-Ecuador border.31 But it was not necessary, either, for the CIA to recruit JAARS to hunt Che. Because of the presence of oil and mining companies in the area, there were plenty of bush planes and military planes. These planes were not very effective, though. Guevara was unconcerned about the frequent bombing and strafing by Bolivian propeller fighters. As Vietnam was demonstrating, such attacks were fruitless against guerrillas who were on the move beneath the jungle canopy.

  On September 18, Che grew worried when “at dusk a small plane and the mustang [a propeller fighter] flew over the zone suspiciously.”32 The planes did not bomb or strafe, which bothered him. What were they doing?

  His instincts were right. The planes were “pinpointing every single heat source on miles and miles of winding infrared superfilm,” reporter Andrew St. George later explained.33 These heat sources were matched against small grids of the area’s rugged terrain mapped earlier by U-2-like camera operations. With the aid of informers, Guevara’s new area of operations was located, and the planes homed in on his group’s campfires. The planes easily tracked the men’s movements in the jungle because, contrary to many later reports, guerrillas who are innocent of such high-tech surveillance do cook; at least Che’s did, according to his diary.

  Guevara continued moving toward the more populated area, to the western mountains, hoping to recruit more politicized peasants and miners and to find medical aid for his group’s wounded doctor. Reaching Pichacho, “the peasants treated us very well,” he noted with relief. But at the next town, La Higuera, “everything had changed: the men had disappeared and there were only a few women.” An old man was questioned, and a merchant arrived “very nervous”; but “despite the lies they told us,” Che let them go, a trademark of the guerrilla strategy to win people over.

  The merchant was actually an army spy, one of many sown throughout the area as part of the CIA strategy, and the army had the town surrounded. Suspicious, Che had just gone out toward the summit of the hill to inspect the area when “shots from all over … announced that our men had fallen into an ambush.”34

  MURDER IN A SCHOOLHOUSE JAIL

  Disaster struck with a hailstorm of lead, killing some of Che Guevara’s most experienced men. Gathering his wounded, Guevara retreated into a narrow forested canyon that led down to one of the great tributaries to the Amazon, the Rio Grande. He hoped to move down the river valley and escape from the canyon after nightfall. But the U.S.-supplied helicopters had moved the 600 Rangers who had been trained by the Green Berets to strategic locations. The Rangers closed the knot. There was no escape. During the battle, Che was wounded in the leg, his rifle barrel smashed by a bullet, allowing the Rangers to take him alive. Other wounded guerrillas, including El Chino, were also captured and returned to La Higuera. In La Paz’s presidential palace that night, the lights stayed on. Barrientos and top officers of the junta, reportedly including Minister of Education General Hugo Banzer, deliberated over Che’s fate. Was he more dangerous dead or alive?

  In the darkness, the 400 Indians of La Higuera shared the military quarantine that descended like a pall over Che and his comrades. The town would rema
in quarantined for months, a futile effort to hide the decision the regime would make about Guevara’s fate. Inside the town’s two-room earthen-floored schoolhouse, Che, bound and seated, smoked a pipe lit for him and watched soldiers divide his belongings among themselves. His requests that his cuff links be given to his son were ignored; he remained calm. But when an officer grabbed his hair and tried to take his pipe, shouting “Ha! You are the famous Che Guevara!” he sprang to life. “Yes, I am Che. A minister of State too! And you’re not going to treat me like that!” and he kicked the officer into the benches. The Rangers’ commander intervened. Instead of being shot, Che won respect. A medic was brought in to examine his leg wound.

  When morning came, Guevara asked to speak to the schoolmistress. “I was afraid to go there,” the twenty-two-year-old teacher told a Catholic priest, “afraid he would be a brute. But instead I found an agreeable-looking man, with a soft and ironic glance.… It was impossible for me to look him in the eye.”

  As an introduction, Che mildly pointed out a grammatical error on one of the drawings on the wall, then spoke of the alternative he championed. He looked at the school’s dirt floor, its partly collapsed roof, its dim light. “You know that in Cuba there are no schools like this one. We would call this a prison. How can children of the campesino study here … it’s antipedagogical.”