Latin America: End of a Legend

The Quebrada del Yuro, deep in the stifling Bolivian jungle 75 miles north of Camiri, is a steep and narrow ravine that is covered with dense foliage. There, early last week, two companies of Bolivian Rangers totaling more than 180 men split into two columns and quietly stalked a handful of guerrillas. Shortly after noon, the troops spotted their men, and both sides opened up with their rifles and automatic weapons at a withering, point-blank range of 150 feet. After a lengthy fight, four Rangers and three guerrillas lay dead, and four other guerrillas had been captured.

One of the prisoners was no ordinary guerrilla. He was Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara, 39, the elusive Marxist firebrand, guerrilla expert and former second in command to Fidel Castro whose name had be come a legend after his disappearance from Cuba 2| years ago. Since that time, much of the world had thought Che dead (perhaps even at Castro’s hands) until his presence in Bolivia was dramatically confirmed a short time ago (TIME, Sept. 29).

Messages from “Ariel.”

Dressed in a dusty fatigue shirt, faded green trousers and lightweight, high-top sandals, Che caught a bullet in his left thigh as he advanced toward the government troops; another bullet knocked his M-l semiautomatic carbine right out of his hands. In Che’s rucksack, the Rangers found a book entitled Essays on Contemporary Capitalism, several codes, two war diaries, some messages of support from “Ariel”—apparently Castro—and a personal notebook. “It seems,” read one recent notebook entry in Che’s tight, crisp handwriting, “that this is reaching the end.”

At Quebrada del Yuro, Che was loaded onto a stretcher and carried five miles to the town of Higueras. Informed of his capture, army leaders in La Paz, the capital, pondered what to do with him. Since Bolivia has no death penalty, Che, at worst, would go off to prison—perhaps only after a long, noisy trial, a propaganda outcry from the whole Communist bloc and the threat that other guerrillas might streak into Bolivia and make a cause of him. The next day, orders came down to Higueras to execute Che. He was shot two hours later.

Strapped to the runner of a helicopter, Che’s body was then flown to Valle Grande, a dirt-poor, two-centuryold town of 7,000 people set in rolling hills some 3,000 ft. high. At the airport, it was loaded into a truck and whisked down the narrow dirt and cobblestone streets to the town’s Señor de Malta Hospital, run by German Dominican sisters. There four men in white and a nun went to work on Che, opening an incision in his neck for embalming fluid and washing his body. A man in civilian clothes took his fingerprints. A medical examination by Drs. Moises Abraham and Jose Martinez revealed that Che’s body had seven bullet wounds, including one through the heart that killed him instantly. “An interesting fact,” said Abraham, “is that his feet were very well cared for.”

Air of Mystery. With the body prepared, the army permitted newsmen and thousands of curious townfolk to file past for a glimpse of the mysterious foreigner, laid out atop a long concrete sink. On into the night, the quiet, stone-faced peasants continued past the body, shining flashlights eerily into the dark, bearded, open-eyed countenance. Even soldiers who moved through the line stood and gaped until a guard barked at them to move along. Two days after his death, Che’s fingers were cut off for further fingerprinting, and his body was cremated—an unusual step in a Catholic country. The ashes were then secretly disposed of.

As it had been with Che in life, there was an air of mystery and confusion about him in death. The army denied reports of the execution; yet the doctors who examined him claimed that Che had died 24 hours after his capture. With a bullet in his heart, he could never have lived that long. Flying into Valle Grande from La Paz, Armed Forces Chief General Alfredo Ovando added to the confusion by claiming that Che had said after his capture: “I am Che. I have failed.” More likely, the cocky Che would have spit defiance or, if too weak from his wounds, simply remained silent.

Despite the army’s clumsy handling of the situation, few doubted that the dead man was Che, and the sigh of relief throughout Latin America was almost as audible as a breeze whistling down from the Andes. “Guevara’s death,” said Rio’s Jornal do Brasil, “is a dramatic warning to the planners of systematic subversion among us.” In Camiri, where he is on trial as a member of Che’s guerrilla band. French Marxist Regis Debray wept at the news of Che’s death. “I would like to be at his side,” he said, “and die with him.”

Beheadings & Poetry. If Castro was the spearhead of Cuba’s revolution, Che was its philosopher. Born in Argentina, he grew up battling in the streets against Dictator Juan Peron, gave up a medical career to become a full-time revolutionary, and by the early 1950s was in Mexico City plotting a Cuban revolution with Castro. Like Castro, Che had a passionate hatred of the U.S., an emotional worship of the Communist world, an obsessive determination to succeed in all things. Unlike Castro, however, he was cool and pragmatic. The same Che who could calmly order a comrade beheaded for a breach of discipline would sit around a campfire for hours afterward, leading an avuncular discussion of Marxist doctrine or reciting his favorite Marxist poets.

With Castro in power, Che dabbled in Cuban politics, agriculture, finance and military training; at the same time, he shaped his own independent and pragmatic brand of guerrilla Marxism, even more violent than Mao Tse-tung’s. In contrast with Castro, Che was not afraid to put his theories above politics. In 1965, at a time when Castro was trying to draw closer to Moscow, Che went barnstorming around Africa and Asia, drumming up support for a bloc of small socialist countries to counteract the “imperialism of large socialist countries.” After Che’s return to Havana, the two revolutionaries had a falling-out and decided to go their separate ways. Che then dropped out of sight, and seven months later Castro announced that he had gone off to “other lands of the world” to help foment Castro-style revolutions.

A Basic Flaw. Che’s death illustrates how unsuccessful the attempt has been. In the eight years since Castro came to power, Cuba has spent $400 million on its “wars of liberation,” trained 5,000 young Latin American guerrillas and launched more than 15 different at tempts at revolution in twelve Latin American countries. All of them have failed, though small groups still operate in Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia. Even in these countries, guerrilla bands have been reduced to a fraction of their original strength, and are at best fighting only defensive actions.

The flaw in Che’s philosophy of revolution is revealed in his book Guerrilla Warfare, which sets down a step-by-step plan for organizing peasants for a Cuban-style revolution. What Che ignored was the fact that Castro did not really create a peasant revolution in Cuba. Though the peasants supported and sustained his forces during the early fighting in the Sierra Maestra, the real turning point came when Cuba’s urban middle class, which actually made up the bulk of Castro’s army, suddenly began deserting Dictator Fulgencio Batista and sent the jittery strongman fleeing into exile.

In practice, Che himself compounded the fallacy of his theories by breaking even his most basic rules. In Bolivia, he not only underestimated the army’s capability: he also misjudged the mood of the campesinos, who wanted nothing to do with his revolution. To recruit guerrillas, Che had to hire men off the streets with promises of jobs, then terrorize them into fighting for him. “The inhabitants of the region are as impenetrable as rocks,” he scribbled in his notebook. “You talk to them, and in the depths of their eyes it can be seen that they don’t believe.” The day before he was captured, Che wrote that his dwindling band had questioned a local woman about nearby troops and got nowhere. “She was given 50 pesos and cautioned to say nothing,” Che wrote, “but with little confidence that she would keep her word.” Che’s final, fatal error was getting trapped where he did. Though the steep, dense ravines provided ideal cover for his men, the army was able to command the mountains and finally surround him and seal off all exits.

Another reason for Che’s failure is that Latin American armies are them selves capable of more than just fighting. From Costa Rica to Argentina, the region’s armed forces are building roads, schools and hospitals in the long-neglected interior, stringing up lights and communication lines and bringing the peasant into the 20th century. To train the armed forces in both civic action and anti-guerrilla warfare, the U.S. has set up a counterinsurgency school in the Panama Canal Zone that has al ready turned out more than 1,000 graduates. The U.S. also sends advisers into the various countries to help. The Bolivian Rangers who captured Che were, in fact, trained by U.S. instructors.

Che’s death will hardly mean the end of Communist activity in Latin America. There are still deep-rooted conditions of poverty, neglect and hopelessness that subversives can feed on and exploit. But his departure from the scene takes away much of the mystery and romanticism that has been associated with that subversion.