Che Guevara (118 page)

On December 31, Tania accompanied Monje to Ñancahuazú, and at long last the two rivals had their showdown. They sat in the forest to talk. Two very poor photographs have survived as evidence of the encounter. In one, Che lies on the ground, looking archly toward the seated Monje, who is talking with his legs drawn up defensively.

Monje demanded overall leadership of the armed struggle in Bolivia for himself. He also demanded that no alliance be formed with the
pro-chinos
. Che said he could forgo an alliance with the pro-Chinese Communists, but on the question of command he was unbudging. He would be the military commander because he was better qualified. And he also thought he could handle political decisions better than Monje. But he offered to make Monje the “nominal chief” of the guerrilla operation if that would help him “save face.”

Afterward, Monje told the men in camp that he would resign his post as Party chief and come and proudly fight with Che—not as Party secretary, but as “Estanislao,” a simple combatant. He would now return to La Paz and inform the Party about the imminent guerrilla war so its members could take precautionary measures. He would return to join the band within ten days.

Either this was a bluff intended to provoke Che into making an additional face-saving gesture, or Monje was simply lying. The next morning, before leaving, he assembled the Bolivians and told them that the Party did not support the armed struggle, that they would be expelled if they stayed on, and that the stipends to their families would be suspended. Only four men—Coco, Saldaña, Ñato, and Loro—had the Party’s permission to be there, and that would be honored, but for the rest the choice now was between Party and war. They chose the latter. Monje left and did not return.

Rafael Segarra, a Communist Party official in Santa Cruz, said that Monje stopped to see him on the return trip from Ñancahuazú. “The shit’s going to hit the fan,” Monje warned. “This thing is going ahead and either we bury it or it’ll bury all of us.” He urged Segarra to lie low or to disappear. In the coming days, Monje gave the same advice to Party people everywhere.

Monje’s actions remain cloaked in the web of intrigue and suspicion that he helped create. Pombo insists that what Monje perpetrated was an
act of “conscious treason.” Thirty years after the event, Che’s widow, Aleida, still considered Monje—
“ese índio feo”
(that ugly Indian)—the man who betrayed her husband.

The meeting between Che and Monje had culminated in disaster, and Che’s tactlessness had played as great a part in the unhappy ending as had Monje’s duplicity and indecision. The die was cast. As of January 1, 1967, Che and his two dozen fighters were, to all intents and purposes, on their own.

Content that a number of young Bolivian Communists had remained loyal to him, and trusting in Fidel’s superior powers of persuasion to sort things out with the Party hierarchy, Che refused to allow the rupture with Monje to affect his vision of the future. In a coded message to Fidel, or “Leche” (Milk), as he was now referred to, Che told him what had happened in unalarmed tones.
*

Indeed, it seemed that things were progressing fairly smoothly for Che. He had dispatched Tania to Buenos Aires to summon Ciro Bustos and Eduardo Jozami—a young journalist, law student, and leader of a dissident faction of the Argentine Communist Party—with an eye to getting the Argentine guerrilla movement up and running. Meanwhile, his people were busy organizing his underground network throughout Bolivia. When Moisés Guevara came calling, Che told him that he would have to dissolve his group and join Che as a simple soldier, that there could be no more factional activity. At first taken aback, Moisés agreed. He would return to the Bolivian highlands and recruit some men before returning himself.

Che’s men were now patrolling the area around Ñancahuazú, and a semblance of military discipline had been achieved. The fighters did sentry duty, fetched water and firewood, and took turns cooking and washing. Regular porters’ missions, or
gondolas
, were organized to carry supplies into the camp. Some men hunted, bringing in turkeys and armadillos for the cooking pot, and Quechua classes began again. There were, of course, the discomforts of life in the bush—pernicious insects, cuts and scrapes, men falling ill with malaria—but Che took it all with aplomb. “Boron day,” he wrote on January 11. “Larvae of flies removed from Marcos, Carlos, Pombo, Antonio, Moro, and Joaquín.”

There were also the usual behavior problems, and Che returned to his old strict self in laying down the law. Loro was operating a little too freely, finding time to seduce women on his trips to buy supplies, and Papi was moping around, feeling he had fallen into Che’s disfavor. After scolding Papi for what he had called his “many mistakes” in the Bolivian advance work—including making unwanted advances to Tania—Che ordered him to stay with him in the field. The man he had designated his deputy, Marcos, had been abusive with the Bolivians, and Che publicly upbraided and demoted him, naming the oldest man, Joaquín, in his place.

Their neighbor, Ciro Algarañaz, was continuing to be an irritation. He and another man had been snooping around, and one day Algarañaz approached Loro, saying that he was a friend and could be trusted. He wanted to know what Loro and his companions were up to. Loro brushed him off, but a few days later some soldiers arrived at the forward camp, questioned Loro, and took away his pistol, warning that he and his friends were under observation. Clearly, the locals believed the guerrillas were contrabandists and wanted a piece of the action. After this incident, Che mounted lookouts to keep an eye on Algarañaz’s house.

On February 1, Che left a few men in camp and took most of the others off for what he intended to be a fortnight’s conditioning trek into the surrounding
chaco
. The fortnight turned into a grueling forty-eight-day ordeal. They got lost and endured torrential rain, hunger, thirst, and exhausting marathon hikes. They were reduced to eating palm hearts, monkeys, hawks, and parrots, and with the men worn-out and demoralized, there had been several quarrels. There was also tragedy. Two of the young Bolivians drowned in the swollen rivers—a coincidence, Pombo noted, eerily reminiscent of how their stay in the Congo had begun, with the drowning death of Leonard Mitoudidi. For his part, Che lamented the deaths, but also the loss of six good weapons in the second drowning incident.

Even before returning to camp on March 20, Che knew that something had gone awry in his absence. A small plane was circling the vicinity of Ñancahuazú. He soon learned why from an advance party that had come out to meet him. While he was gone, some of Moisés Guevara’s Bolivian recruits had arrived and had quickly become disenchanted with camp life. The Cubans left in charge had relegated them to menial chores. Two of the Bolivians had deserted, had been captured by the army, and had confessed everything they knew, including stories about Cubans and a
comandante
named Ramón. A few days earlier, Bolivian security forces had raided the Casa de Calamina. Nobody had been there at the time, but the army was rumored to be on the move in the area. The aircraft Che had seen circling overhead was a spotter plane; it had been up there for the past three days.

Walking on, Che was met by runners with more bad news. The army had just returned to the farm and had confiscated one of their mules and their jeep and captured a rebel courier—one of Moisés Guevara’s men. Che quickened his pace to reach the camp. When he arrived, he observed a mood of defeat, some more new arrivals, and complete chaos and indecision among his men. On top of everything else, Che had to attend to visitors. Régis Debray, Ciro Bustos, Tania, and Juan Pablo Chang were all there to see him. After bringing Monje to the camp on New Year’s Eve, Tania had been busy. She had traveled to Argentina on Che’s orders, she had ferried Chang and two Peruvian comrades to Ñancahuazú, and she had gone back to La Paz and picked up Debray and Bustos and brought them to the camp.

Che dealt first with Chang, who had been to Cuba and asked Fidel for help in setting up a new Peruvian guerrilla column. Fidel had told him to get Che’s approval. “He wants $5,000 a month for ten months,” Che wrote. “I told him I agreed on the basis that they would go to the mountains within six months.” Chang’s plan was to lead a band of fifteen men and begin operations in the Ayacucho region of Peru’s southeastern Andes. Che also agreed to send him some Cubans and weapons, and they discussed plans for maintaining radio contact.

As they spoke, Loro arrived. He had been doing forward sentry duty downriver from the camp and had killed a soldier he caught by surprise. Clearly, the war was about to begin, whether Che wanted it to or not. He hastened to polish up details with Chang, then conferred with Debray, who said he wanted to stay and fight, but Che told him that it would be better if he worked on the outside, promoting his cause with a European solidarity campaign. Che would send him out with news for Cuba and would write a letter for Bertrand Russell, asking for help in organizing an international fund in support of the Bolivian Liberation Movement.

It was Ciro Bustos’s turn. Bustos had been waiting for his “contact” in Argentina, and after five months it had come in the form of Tania. She had told Bustos to go to La Paz, thus giving him the first inkling that Che was in Bolivia. Bustos had begun to question the wisdom of Che’s theory of rurally based guerrilla war, and he sought out the advice of his most trusted comrades in Córdoba, who urged him to express his doubts, which they shared, when he saw Che. Using a hastily prepared false passport, he had flown to La Paz in late February. He was instructed to board a particular bus leaving for the city of Sucre, and when he got on the bus he spotted another European-looking man—Régis Debray, he would soon learn. As the bus was leaving the city, a taxi raced up, and out of it and into the bus came Tania. Bustos thought her actions and their form of transportation a reckless public display that could only attract notice. “There we were, the only three foreigners on the bus, like three flies, looking around but not talking to one another,” he recalled. “I wasn’t very pleased about things.”

Che and some of his fighters in the Ñancahuazú camp. From left, Alejandro, Pombo, Urbano, Rolando, Che, Tuma, Arturo, and Moro.

From left, Che’s Argentine emissary, Ciro Bustos; the Peruvian Juan Pablo Chang; Che; and the French writer Régis Debray, whose code name was “Dantón.”

According to Bustos, the rest of the journey was characterized by amateurish behavior on Tania’s part. She spoke loudly and used Cuban slang in the roadside restaurants they stopped in. She had hired a car in Sucre, and the driver was both drinking and driving too fast; Tania thought this was funny, but it made Debray and Bustos mad. When they arrived in the camp, Che and most of the Cubans were gone, still out on their trek. Almost immediately, Bustos said, Tania pulled out some photographs she’d taken on her earlier trip and had brought to show everyone. There they were, virtually all of them, posing with their rifles, hamming it up, cooking, reading, and standing around and talking. Bustos was incredulous. He spoke to Olo Pantoja, the Cuban left in charge of the camp, who quickly ordered the photos gathered up.

In Che’s prolonged absence, matters had slipped out of Olo’s grasp. The day after Tania, Bustos, and Debray arrived in the camp, two of Moisés Guevara’s men went out with their guns to hunt but did not return. Alarm bells rang. The two men had seen all the photographs and heard everyone talking openly about Cuba and other delicate topics. When a search party didn’t locate the men, Olo ordered the camp evacuated. They went to a hiding place farther into the hills. Within a couple of days, when the plane began buzzing around, it was clear their worst fears had been well founded. The deserters had been picked up by the army. It was then that the first men from Che’s expedition began returning.

Bustos was stunned when he saw Che. “He was torn apart,” he said. “His shirt was in shreds, his knee poked out of his trousers, and he looked really skinny. But imperturbable. He gave me an
abrazo
, which was very moving for me. There were no words or anything.” Bustos hung back, watching as Che simultaneously ate and took charge of the situation. He harangued Olo and the other men who had been responsible for the camp, using a degree of verbal violence that surprised Bustos. Later, he would see that it was a pattern in Che’s behavior. “Afterward, [Che] would become calm, he would go read, serenely, while the guys he’d punished went around hangdog, turned into shit.”