FRANCE: Murder in Paris

It was a few minutes before 1 p.m. one day last week when the Bolivian Ambassador to France, Joaquim Zenteno Anaya, 55, left his Paris embassy at 12 Avenue du Président Kennedy for lunch. Strolling along the right bank of the Seine toward his blue sedan, he failed to notice two men wearing sunglasses, who picked up stride behind him. Suddenly, one of them, a husky six-footer in a beret, caught up. He pulled out a 7.65-mm. pistol and fired three shots at point-blank range, hitting Zenteno in the head and back. As the killers ran away, the ambassador fell dead to the sidewalk.

Two hours later an anonymous spokesman telephoned a French news agency to claim the assassination for a group calling itself the Che Guevara International Brigade. The killing, he said, had been timed to approximate the anniversary of the May 8, 1945 surrender of Hitler’s forces in Europe because Zenteno had supported Bolivia’s refusal to extradite Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief of Lyon, on France’s request. Furthermore, the caller added, the dapper ambassador was marked for death because in 1967, as a Bolivian colonel, he had supervised the CIA-trained forces that tracked down and killed Fidel Castro’s roving revolutionary Che Guevara, a martyr in many versions of leftist scripture. The gun used in the assassination, said the spokesman, was the same one used last October in Paris in an unsuccessful attempt on the life of a Spanish military attache. French ballistics experts tentatively confirmed the claim.

Little Fear. French police had never heard of the Guevara Brigade before, but then they have not been very diligent in keeping track of such things. Until recently, operatives belonging to all manner of terrorist groups had wandered through Paris with little fear of trouble from les flics; the French government had been trying to maintain friendly relations with all Arab countries and their many, often violent, political factions and had hoped Paris would become a kind of fire-free zone that would be spared the terrorism troubling other European cities.

The policy obviously failed. Including the Zenteno shooting, in the past 18 months there have been five assassination attempts on Paris-based diplomats, three of them successful. France is now cracking down on terrorists, but the task is likely to prove difficult. That much became clear when, two days after the Zenteno murder, Jacques Chaine, president of the Credit Lyonnais, France’s second largest bank, was shot and killed by a young French shipyard welder who then killed himself. Police said, however, the two incidents were unrelated.