Che Guevara (121 page)

An attempt to send a friendly peasant youth out from the mountains as a courier with messages to fetch help ended in failure. Che’s tape recorder was lost in a skirmish, so he could no longer decode the messages received via Radio Havana. He also lost his notes on Debray’s book and a volume by Trotsky he had been reading, and he rued having given the army another propaganda tool to use against him.

What remained of Che’s support network had crumbled. In March, Piñeiro had evacuated Renán Montero from La Paz because his passport had expired, and no replacement for him had been sent.
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This left the tiny urban cell that included Loyola Guzmán, Rodolfo Saldaña, and Humberto Vázquez-Viaña without a means of communicating with Havana—or with the guerrillas in the field. They were uncertain what they should do, and had resorted to listening to commercial radio in the vain hope of hearing a message from Che. They even considered, then abandoned, an idea about posing as itinerant merchants and traveling into the war zone, hoping to bump into the guerrillas. Under pressure from Fidel, Monje’s comrades in the Communist Party had adopted a more conciliatory attitude toward the cadres who had joined Che’s efforts, but their aid did not go much beyond rhetorical expressions of solidarity and offers to help the urban cell in printing propaganda leaflets.

In Cuba, a second group of several dozen guerrillas was in training, but with Che out of contact, there was no point in dispatching them. “After we lost contact with Che, we felt a tremendous uncertainty,” Piñeiro said, “but we were also confident he would pull through.” The confidence was misplaced. By the summer of 1967, Che’s Bolivian guerrilla operation was fragmented into four groups, each incommunicado from the other: Che’s group, isolated and on the run, out of contact with Havana and the city; Joaquín’s group, wandering separately from Che’s column and equally cut off from the outside; the urban group, which had no idea what was happening anywhere; and finally, Cuba itself, where the security apparatus was reduced to monitoring events in Bolivia through news reports.
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Whenever possible, Che traveled on mules or horses, which the guerrillas took from the army or bought from peasants, but the
campesinos
for the most part remained frightened of them. Already sick and emaciated, Che had begun suffering from asthma in late June, with no medicine to treat it. Once, he became so ill with vomiting and diarrhea that he lost consciousness and had to be carried in a hammock for a day; when he awoke, he found he had defecated all over himself. “They lent me a pair of trousers but without much water my stench extends for a league,” he wrote. Despite the stench, Che had reverted to his nonbathing Chancho days. On September 10, he would record a historic moment. “I almost forgot to mention that I took a bath today, the first in six months. It is a record that many others are attaining.”

Fatigue, hunger, and vitamin deficiencies had weakened all of them, and the pressing concerns of food and health gradually began to dominate the men’s thoughts and Che’s diary entries. Once, after they had eaten some pork bought from a peasant, Che wrote, “We remained completely immobilized, trying to digest the pork. We have two cans of water. I was very sick until I vomited, and then I felt better.” The next day, he called an assembly to discuss the “food situation”: “I criticized Benigno for having eaten a can of food and then denying it; Urbano for having eaten jerky on the sly.”

They even slaughtered and ate their own horses and mules. At one point, the men were so hungry that they began coveting Che’s mount, a jack mule, but he refused to kill it. Their hopes were given an unexpected boost one day when the mule took a spectacular head-over-heels tumble down a steep incline. The men held their breath, hoping it would break its neck in the fall, but to their disappointment, and Che’s relief, it survived.

The strain of command and Che’s disabilities showed up in dramatic form another time, when he stabbed the mare he was riding because she was
moving too slowly. He made a big gash in her side, and afterward Che assembled the men and spoke about the incident. “We are in a difficult situation,” he told them. “... I am a mess and the incident of the mare shows that there are moments in which I lose control of myself; that will change, but we must all share alike the burden of the situation, and whoever feels he cannot stand it should say so. This is one of those moments in which great decisions must be made, because a struggle of this type gives us the opportunity to become revolutionaries, the highest step in the human ladder, and also allows us to test ourselves as men.” Some of the guerrillas remained silent, but most announced their willingness to continue.

Che was too ill to walk for much of the time during the Bolivian campaign. He rode mules or horses whenever possible.

No rapport had been established with the locals, and the “lack of enlistment” was a problem. To expand, they needed to make their presence felt in a more populated area, but to do that, they needed more men. At the moment, Che had barely enough manpower to get through each day, much less engage in political tasks of consciousness-raising and recruitment. Civilians often reacted to their arrival with fear and panic, and to obtain food and information they frequently had to resort to coercion, adopting the practice of holding people hostage while a relative or friend was sent off on errands for them. A couple of times, they hijacked pickup trucks belonging
to the state petroleum company based in Camiri and were able to exult in the unaccustomed luxury of covering distances quickly, until either the gas or the engines gave out.

On July 6, six of Che’s men had hijacked a truck on the main road between Santa Cruz and Cochabamba and driven into the town of Samaipata. The site of an ancient Incan temple, Samaipata was a roadside way station for travelers, large enough to have its own hospital and a small army detachment. Paradoxically, their most daring mission to date did not have a military objective. It was to secure badly needed medicines for Che’s asthma, remedies for the other sick men, and some food and other supplies. They took over the garrison after some brief cross fire in which one soldier died; and then, before the stunned civilian onlookers, they went to a pharmacy to buy medicines. They left town with ten soldiers as hostages and, after stripping them of their clothes, left them at the roadside.

The action at Samaipata represented a propaganda victory for the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, but it had been a failure from Che’s point of view; the guerrillas had not found any asthma medicine. A few days later, he recorded that he had given himself “various injections in order to continue,” but worried that they might have to return to Ñancahuazú to retrieve his asthma medicine hidden there. Even this possibility was dashed in mid-August when the radio carried news of the army’s discovery of their remaining supply caches at Ñancahuazú. “Now I am doomed to suffer asthma for an indefinite time,” he wrote. “They also took all types of documents and photographs of every type. It is the hardest blow they have ever given us. Somebody talked. Who? That is what we don’t know.”

Inevitably, more men had died. On June 26, Carlos “Tuma” Coello, caught in cross fire, was shot in the stomach. Che tried desperately to save him, but Tuma’s liver had been destroyed and his intestines were punctured. Tuma died in Che’s arms. “I lost an inseparable companion of many years’ standing, whose loyalty survived every test, and whose absence I already feel almost like that of a son,” Che wrote. He took Tuma’s watch and slipped it onto his own wrist, planning to give it to the newborn son back in Cuba whom Tuma had never seen.

On July 30, José María Martínez Tamayo—Papi—was killed when an army patrol took the guerillas by surprise, practically walking into their camp before dawn. In the firefight that followed, one of Moisés Guevara’s men, Raúl, was also killed, by a bullet in the mouth. Pacho escaped with a graze across his testicles. In his diary, Che remembered Papi as “the most undisciplined” of his Cubans, but “an extraordinary fighter and old comrade in adventure.” As for the Bolivian, he wrote, “Raúl hardly needs to be counted. He was an introvert, not much of a worker or fighter.”

By the end of July, the new losses had reduced Che’s force to twenty-two, two of whom were wounded. Che’s asthma was “going full speed,” he noted. But he also observed with satisfaction that he had successfully internationalized the Bolivian conflict. Argentina’s military president, General Juan Carlos Onganía, had closed the border with Bolivia as a security precaution, and Peru was reported to be taking measures along its border as well. “The legend of the guerrillas is acquiring continental dimensions,” Che wrote in his end-of-the month summary for July. On the other side of the coin, he observed that some things hadn’t changed. Radio Havana carried news of a Czech condemnation of his Tricontinental message. “The friends [Czechs] call me a new Bakunin and deplore the blood that has been shed and that will be shed if there are 3 or 4 Vietnams.”

Ever alert for news of Joaquín, Che listened closely for reports of skirmishes or rebel activity elsewhere. He had been searching for the lost column north of the Río Grande, assuming it had headed in that direction, but Joaquín had actually remained south of the river. Finally, in mid-August, the radio reported a clash near Muyupampa in which a guerrilla had been killed, and his name was divulged. It was a man from Joaquín’s group. A few days later, Eusebio and Chingolo, two Bolivians who had deserted from Joaquín’s column—and who had led the army to the Ñancahuazú camp—were produced in public by their government captors, and Che realized Joaquín had remained in the south. He began heading in that direction to find him. Coincidentally, Joaquín began heading north to search for Che.

At dusk on the evening of August 31, after reaching the home of one of their few peasant collaborators, Honorato Rojas, Joaquín’s group of ten, including an ailing Tania, waded into the Río Grande not far from its confluence with the Masicuri River, near a place called Vado del Yeso. What Joaquín did not know was that Honorato Rojas had been arrested, pressured, and “turned.” The man who now commanded his loyalties was Captain Mario Vargas Salinas of the Eighth Army Division. As Rojas led the unsuspecting guerrillas downriver, Vargas Salinas waited until they were within close range, then signaled his men to open fire.

It was a massacre. At the cost of one soldier dead, Joaquín’s column was wiped out. The dead included Tania; Che’s former vice minister of industries, Gustavo Machín; Moisés Guevara; and Joaquín himself. The bodies of the men were recovered and taken to the army’s field headquarters in the town of Vallegrande for public display. Tania’s body was found downstream, blackened and disfigured, some days later. The only visible survivors were a Bolivian, José Castillo Chávez—Paco—and Freddy Maymura, the Japanese-Bolivian medical student trained in Cuba. But
within a few hours Maymura was murdered by the soldiers.
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A third survivor, the Peruvian doctor José “El Negro” Cabrera, was caught and killed four days later.

When Che heard the news that an entire guerrilla column had been “liquidated” nearby, he refused to believe it, suspecting it to be army disinformation. Over the coming days, however, as the names and descriptions of the members of Joaquín’s group began to filter out, he knew it was true. Remarkably, the two groups had almost met up. On September 1, the day after the massacre, Che’s group had crossed the river, reached the house of the traitor Honorato Rojas, and moved on after finding signs of the army’s recent presence. Honorato and his family were gone.

The ambush meant the loss of a third of Che’s fighting force. But he was now released from the moral obligation of searching for Joaquín; he could concentrate on saving himself and his remaining men by escaping to a more populated area and making contact with his support network in La Paz and with Cuba. For the Bolivian military, meanwhile, the so-called Vado del Yeso massacre was a morale-boosting triumph, celebrated with parades and a visit to Vallegrande by President Barrientos and his top generals and their wives. Barrientos promoted Captain Vargas Salinas, the hero of the day, to major, and publicly congratulated the “civilian hero” of the episode, Honorato Rojas—an unwise move that the peasant would pay dearly for later on.
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After lying on gruesome display in the laundry house of the Nuestro Señor de Malta Hospital, the guerrillas’ bloated and ravaged bodies were secretly buried at night on the outskirts of Vallegrande under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Selich. A tall, thin mustachioed man of Yugoslav ancestry who was a dedicated anticommunist, Selich was the deputy commander of the Pando Regiment of military engineers, based in Vallegrande.

When Tania’s unrecognizable body was brought in on September 8, President Barrientos personally ordered that as a woman she be honored
with religious rites and given a Christian burial. For the devout Communist Tamara Bunke, Barrientos’s “honor” was ironic in the extreme. Her body was placed in a coffin and an army chaplain officiated at a small service that was held at the army post across from the graveyard. But Tania was not buried there, and it is probably safe to assume that Barrientos never intended her to be, despite his gallant public gesture. At eleven o’clock that night, Selich took charge of the operation to bury her secretly, as he had done with the others, carrying out the military’s secret decision to “disappear” the dead guerrillas, a morbid policy that endured to the end of the antiguerrilla campaign.