Che’s Execution Still Haunts Bolivian Village
LA HIGUERA, Bolivia — Irma Rosales sat with a box full of photos and remembered the stranger who was shot in the local schoolhouse 50 years ago.
His hair was long and greasy, she said; his clothes dirty. And he said nothing, she recalled, when she brought him a bowl of soup not long before the bullets rang out.
October 9 marked a half- century since the execution of Che Guevara, the Argentine doctor, named Ernesto at birth, who led guerrilla fighters from Cuba to Congo. He stymied the United States in the Bay of Pigs invasion, lectured at the United Nations and preached a new world order.
This region now faces a reckoning with the same leftist movements that drew on him for inspiration. Bolivia is one of its last democracies where leftists remain in control.
After overseeing the firing squads that followed the Communist victory in Cuba, and after a stint running the country’s central bank, Guevara vanished in 1965, sent by Fidel Castro to organize revolutions abroad.
“Back then, people said he had been killed by Fidel, others that he had died in Santo Domingo, that he was in Vietnam,” said Juan Carlos Salazar, who, in 1967, was a 21-yearold Bolivian reporter.
Loyola Guzmán, a Communist youth leader in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, received a message one day calling her to Camiri, a small town near the border of Paraguay. Ms. Guzmán is 75 now, but a photo in January 1967 shows her in the flush of youth, in fatigues, sitting on a log at a jungle camp — and next to her is Guevara.
“He said he wanted to create ‘two or three Vietnams,’ ” said Ms. Guzmán, with Bolivia a base for a revolution not only there but in neighboring Argentina and Peru, as well.
In March 1967, Mr. Salazar learned that fighting had broken out between the Bolivian army and an armed group, leaving seven soldiers dead. He went to the area to investigate.
Word began to leak out that the leader might be Guevara. Ms. Rosales recalled being stunned one day in La Higuera when one of his guerrillas walked into where she was working and asked to use the phone. The town’s mayor, Ms. Rosales recalled, informed the authorities that the guerrillas had come to town. The army started closing in on Guevara.
Gary Prado, then a young officer, admitted the army was unprepared. But it was soon aided by American training and agents from the C.I. A.
Guevara wrote a manual, “Guerrilla Warfare,” that is still used as a guide by insurgents around the world. But he was making mistakes, said Mr. Prado: setting up bases that couldn’t be defended, splitting up his forces and leaving behind photos.
“He was a master of guerrilla war,” said Mr. Prado, now 78 and a retired general. “He got here and did everything to the contrary.”
In his last diary entry on October 7, Guevara writes that he ran into an old goatherd. “They gave her 50 pesos with instructions not to say a word, but we have little hope she would keep to her promise,” he wrote.
On October 8, a firefight began between soldiers and a group of fighters. As one of the guerrillas surrendered, he called out, “I am Che Guevara, and I’m worth more to you alive than dead.”
Julia Cortés, now 69, remembers hearing the firefight in the distance as she approached La Higuera, where she taught in the local school. It was there that the army brought Guevara, and he could barely speak when Ms. Cortés entered the schoolhouse the next day, October 9. She said she had just returned home when the shots rang out.
“There haven’t been classes there since,” Ms. Rosales said of the site, which is now a small museum. “The children didn’t want to go there.”