Bolivia: Jail with All the Comforts

BOLIVIA Jail withAll the ComfortFor a man sentenced to 30 years in prison, French Intellectual Régis Debray enjoys many of the comforts of home. At the officers’ club in the south ern Bolivian town of Camiri, where he has been locked up for helping Che Guevara’s guerrillas in their abortive attempt to topple the Bolivian government, Debray’s jailers generously allow him to have a radio, his books, paper and pencils. Food is sent in from a restaurant. Last week the Bolivian army threw in the ultimate, if only temporary, comfort: a wife. In a private civil ceremony at the officers’ club, a government official married Debray, 27, and his longtime Venezuelan girl friend, Elizabeth Burgos, 25.

Diminutive, dark-eyed Elizabeth, who comes from a well-to-do Caracas family, first met Debray when he visited Venezuela in 1964 to film Castroite guerrillas in the hills for French television. Moving in the same left-wing circles in Caracas and sharing the same interest in philosophy, the two saw a lot of each other, began living together on and off in Paris and Cuba. When Réis left Cuba and went on to tie up with the guerrillas in Bolivia last year, Elizabeth stayed behind on the island, then flew to Paris after Debray’s arrest and helped organize the Defense for Réis Debray Committee.

A few weeks after his conviction, Debray approached the army about getting married; the French consul in La Paz handled the negotiations. Perhaps to make up for Debray’s harsh sentence, the army finally agreed to the marriage—on condition that no reporters cover the ceremony. At the wedding, the only witnesses were the French consul and Debray’s mother, Janine Alexandre-Debray. The couple spent their first night under guard in a cottage in Choreti, five miles from Camiri, and the next few nights in Debray’s room at the officers’ club.

The government insisted that the bride must leave the country, but Armed Forces Commander Alfredo Ovando promised that she could return to see her husband. “Let her go somewhere to wait for a while,” Ovando told the French consul, “but not too far up north.” By which he meant, of course, not to Cuba.