THE DEATH OF CHE' GUEVARA
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Collection:
Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST):
CIA-RDP69B00369R000200270022-1
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RIFPUB
Original Classification:
K
Document Page Count:
3
Document Creation Date:
December 15, 2016
Document Release Date:
August 26, 2003
Sequence Number:
22
Case Number:
Publication Date:
November 11, 1967
Content Type:
NSPR
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NEW REPUBLIC November 11
1967
The Death of Ch~ Guevara
by Bjorn Kumm
.}ey brought Che Guevara at five o'clock in the after-
r,,., a of October 9 to the airfield outside the small town
of Vallegrande in southeastern Bolivia. The fighting had
been fierce. Che had been among the first casualties
and his comrades had been fighting viciously to recover
the body. They failed. Most of them also fell, among
them Chc's Cuban bodyguards Antonio and Pancho.
The remainder, after 3o hours of battle, managed to
get away, pursued by the Bolivian army's tough, US-
trained Rangers.
Che's body was brought in tied to the landing shafts
of a helicopter, swirling gently down at the airport one
hour before dusk. A car was waiting at tht far tend of
the field; so were, it seemed, most of Vallegrande's io,-
coo inhabitants. Soldiers tried to keep the crowds
MR. KUMM, a reporter for Aftonbladet, one of Stock-
holm's leading dailies, was one of four correspondents
present when Guevara's body was brought to Valle-
grande, Bolivia, last month.
away, but as the helicopter touched down, they lost
control. Even the soldiers ran toward the helicopter,
and behind them came the crowds. When eventually
they came to their senses, the soldiers turned about and
pointed menacingly at the civilians, forcing them to
stay where they were. From the air it must have looked
like a gigantic chess game, with pawns frozen in absurd
positions, Meanwhile, the helicopter unloaded the body
into the automobile, and the car rapidly took off toward
the hospital of Vallegrande.
That is where, a few minutes later, I got my first
glimpse of Guevara. They had taken him to an out-
door morgue that looked rather more like a ?table dti
a small hill above the hospital. About 7o persons-
doctors, soldiers, nurses - were around the body, work-,
ing frantically. A nun dressed in white was standing at
the body's head. Now and then she smiled gently.
At first, I thought Che was still alive. It looked as
if the doctors were administering a blood transfusion.
Through two openings in the neck, they were injecting
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'r-IE NEW RrPUDLIc
liquid from a vessel being held by a soldier standing
with his legs wide apart above the body. Then 1 was
told they were filling the body with formalin to cm-
balm it.
It was a ghastly sight. Not so much because of the
corpse, whose face as the soldiers lifted its head seemed
rather peaceful. But there was the white-clad nun, smil-
ing encouragingly; and the laughing soldiers who were
slapping each others' backs; and a sturdy man in battle-
dress and an American T-shirt, with a.very modern
machine-gun, who seemed somehow to be in charge of
the whole performance. He saw to it that the finger-
prints were properly taken. He waved at the soldiers
not to disturb the doctors and nurses at work, and
above all he seemed bent on keeping journalists away.
Earlier in the day he had ejected two British journal-
ists from Vallegrande's airfield; as they were taking
pictures of the troops. He was overheard saying, "Let's
get the hell out of here," in a most American way. But
at this point he was taciturn, answered questions only'
in Spanish, and shied away from having his photo-
graph taken. His name is Ramos, one of the Bolivian
journalists told me. He is a Cuban refugee, employed,
the journalist said, by'the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Americans brought him and a half-dozen other
Cubans here to interrogate guerrilla prisoners.
This, then, was to be Che Guevara's fate: a slab of
meat tied to a helicopter, carried from the battlefield in
the jungle to a morgue in Vallegrande, laid out in front
of the press, and - to top it all - identified and inspected
by a refugee gusano from Cuba, whose pleasure and
satisfaction it was to check personally that his most
hated enemy, next to Fidel Castro, was dead.
As long as they were busy filling the body with
formalin, it was rather difficult to see who it really
was. The head was thrown back, the long hair was
dangling and almost touching the foor. The stench of
the formalin was almost impossible to stomach. Sud-
denly, one of the soldiers grabbed the body by its hair
and yanked it into a sitting position.
There was no doubt about it. It was Che, much slim-
mer than he used to be in the old photographs, smiling
at Punta del Este, cutting cane in Cuba. But that seemed
to be a normal consequence of half a year in the Bo-
livian jungle. He didn't look emaciated, as one had been
given to believe by Bolivian army reports that Che,
known as "Ramon" among the Bolivian guerrillas, was
a very sick man, suffering from asthma and rheuma-
tism, and finding it impossible to walk.
I recalled a picture that had been hanging in every
newsstand in La Paz during the last month. It was
originally from Paris-Match and showed Che delight-
fully stretched out on a sofa, like some kind of-male
model for a female edition of Playboy. That picture
was supposedly taken shortly before his disappearance
from Cuba in 1965. Crowds had stood around that pic-
ture in La Paz, reading eagerly. every: word about the
mysterious Number One Revolutionary of Latin
America. And now here, in the improvised morgue
which had been set up at Vallegrande, the picture had
its dreadful counterpart. -
They were washing the body. "Show some respect,"
a Bolivian army sergeant exhorted the journalists, "at
least don't take pictures of him in the nude." A captain
threateningly showed a film he had grabbed from a ,
bystander's camera and confiscated. The soldiers were
trying to dress the body. They got the trousers on, but
when they tried to put on the jacket, it turned out that
the arms were already getting stiff. And so they had
to give up their attempt.
General Ovando, chief of the Bolivian armed forces,!
was inspecting the ceremony in person. One-of the;
.radio reporters, representing a station in Santa Cruz,
talked into his tape recorder: "This is Vallegrande. T~el
leader of the Castro communist invasion of our father-;
land has fallen here, thanks to the effort of the Bo-
livian armed forces, commanded by the glorious Gen-:
eral Ovando." The general smiled a delphic smile.
How had Che died? He had been captured Sunday
night, the army said; he was mortally, wounded and
had died early Monday morning. Impossible, the doc~
tors said. Che died from wounds in the heart and both
lungs, around noon Monday, five or six hours before
he was brought to Vallegrande. What conclusion must
one draw? - that Che had been coolly executed after
his capture.
If the army officials had stuck to one story from the
beginning, they would have fared better. But while
Colonel Zenteno, chief of the Eighth Division in Santa
Cruz, who was directly responsible for the killing of
Chc, maintained Che had died immediately, officials
higher up talked freely of what Che had said and how
he had acted after his capture. I flew to Vallegrande in
a military transport plane from Santa Cruz, together
with Admiral Ugarteche, commander-in-chief of the
Bolivian navy, who said: "I have been told that Che's
last words were: 'I am Che. Don't kill me. I have failed.'
I have the impression he wanted to save his life. It's
very often like that. In battle, you don't feel fear, but
afterwards you become a coward."
The crowd outside the hospital had broken through
the gates and were now streaming upwards toward the
morgue. The soldiers kept them at a distance, but when
finally the body was brought out on a stretcher for the
benefit of the journalists, men, women, little girls came
forward and the soldiers carrying the stretcher dropped
it. For a short while, I thought the crowd was going
to tear the body apart. Then the soldiers once again
gained control and the body was brought back to the
morgue. That's where I threw a last glance at it. "The
forehead," I thought, "those very heavy, almost swol-
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OVEMDER 11, 1967
len iobes above the eyebrows, that ought to be one of
the surest ways to identify Che."
I looked at the body. The lobes were very heavy,
strongly accentuated. If this was not Ch6, it was his
twin brother.
We went by jeep back to Santa Cruz, and then on
to La Paz to tell the world Che was gone.
JAe had left Cuba in March 1965 because there was
no longer a place for him in the Cuban political leader-
ship and because the Russians on whom the Cubans
depend in order to survive the American embargo,
wanted Guevara out of the way. He was their enemy.
On his last official journey around the world, in the
spring of 1965, Che had caused a sensation in Algiers
when he made a scathing attack on the Russians. Then
Guevara returned home and disappeared. It did not
seem farfetched to assume he had been liquidated.
Only now is it possible to piece together Che's itin-
erary after his disappearance. He seems to have traveled
widely in Latin America, appearing now and then in
Guatemala, where guerrillas are active, in Peru and in
Brazil. He used various passports, some,of which the
Bolivian government found in a dead guerrilla fighter's
moclrila. He may have been in the Congo. He most
certainly at one time or another was in North Vietnam,
where the hard core Bolivian guerrillas were sent for
training as a kind of revolutionary counterpart to the
American Special Forces who get their training in South
Vietnam and use their knowledge to train highly ef-
ficient Bolivian Rangers. For a couple of weeks during
the spring of 1966, Guevara was in Paris; then in late
1966, he arrived in Bolivia.
His affection for Bolivia apparently began when, as a
young student in the fifties, he had bummed his way
around Latin America. Bolivia had had a glorious revo-
lution; its army had been completely wiped out in three
days of heavy battle in April 1952; the tin mines had
been nationalized, the large estates broken up. But the
army was recreated by President Victor Paz Estenssoro;
life for the miners was still bad; land reform did nothing
to improve agriculture; the peasants' trade unions soon
turned into armed gangs used by sindicato leaders for
their own ends.
It was easy for Ch6 Guevara to conclude later that
the Bolivian revolution had failed because it hadn't
gone whole hog as had the Cuban's. But he apparently
had no illusions that the Bolivians could repeat the
Cuban pattern. For one thing, the Cuban revolution
had taken place at a time when the Soviet Union was
favorably inclined to helping revolutions in the Third
World. This was no longer so, Che had observed; then
too, the Cuban revolution was at the outset at least
tolerated by the United States. But not even demo-
cratic liberal, "constitutional" revolutions, such as the
one in the Dominican Republic .in 1965, would any
longer be tolerated by the US, he thought. A success-
ful revolution in Bolivia would mean intervention on a
massive scale by US troops, Che believed, and this ac-
tually was what he was aiming for. In his 1967 message
to the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, written
when 'be already was in Bolivia, he exhorted revolu-
tionaries all over Latin America to create "two, three,
many Vietnams" and try to bleed the American military
forces to death. As he was writing that message, he
himself was actively training his men in lClancahuazu
in southern Bolivia to do just that.
It is now known that Guevara appeared at a secret
meeting in Prague in early May 1965, after his disap-
pearance from Cuba. At the meeting, a group of Bo-
livians, who were .later to become the nucleus of the-
guerrilla force, listened to Che explain that they had
to prepare themselves by studying the revolutionary
situation in Latin America, but above all by preparing
themselves militarily. One of those attending was Coco
Peredo, member of the Bolivian Communist Party's
Central Committee, and by profession a taxi driver in
La Paz, who immediately proceeded to North Vietnam,
where for the next year he and others were given train-
ing in guerrilla warfare. In late 1966, they resurfaced
in Bolivia, where a farm had been bought, and where
military training was taking place, much as Fidel and
Che io years earlier had trained their troops on a de-
serted farm in the state of Michoacan: in Mexico. But
things didn't go as planned. In early 1967, both the
CIA and the Bolivian army were aware something was
going on. A member of the original nucleus had talked,
and, it is believed, had done so for money. In March,
after a sudden battle with Bolivian troops in the area,
the guerrillas had to move on hurriedly.
They did fairly well up till August. Then the Rangers
encircled the main body of them. Joaquin, one of the
Cuban advisers, and Tania, an Argentinian girl who
served as liaison officer, and several others were killed
at a river pass in August. In late September, Coco Fe-
redo was killed. Less than two weeks later, Guevara.
COMING: Joseph Alsop
replies to critics of his
article. on schools
in the slums
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