Latin America: Elusive Guerrilla

In the 30 months since Castro’s longtime second-in-command, Che Guevara, disappeared from sight, the question of his whereabouts has haunted Latin America. He has been reported executed by Castro, killed in the Dominican Republic’s 1965 civil war and fostering guerrilla warfare in half a dozen Latin American countries. Last week the Bo livian government presented “proof” that Che is, or at least was, in Bolivia, leading a Cuban-trained band of 60 guerrillas who have been operating in the country’s remote southwestern jungles since March.

The evidence, Bolivia said, was captured last month when an army patrol discovered the guerrillas’ main base on a 2,500-acre farm north of Camiri. Though the guerrillas managed to escape from the raid, they left behind a roll of undeveloped film, a book described as Che’s “war diary” and 21 forged passports from seven Latin American countries. The Bolivians found the evidence so impressive that President Rene Barrientos himself showed it off in La Paz, while his foreign minister presented it in Washington, where the Organization of American States was opening a meeting to consider new action against Cuba.

Remarkable Transformation. Two of the passports, both Uruguayan, show a jowly, balding man with heavy tortoise-shell glasses and a fringe of grey around his temples—not at all like the dashing, bearded Che of old. Then from the film came pictures of the same man in the guerrilla jungle camps. Gradually, in sequential frames of the film, a transformation occurs. He abandons the glasses, dons a rakish cap, sprouts a beard. Over a period of weeks he begins to look remarkably like Che when he came out of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra with Castro in 1959. The one element that makes the pictures current is a woman at his side; she was an Argentine guerrilla companion nicknamed Tania killed only three weeks ago in a skirmish with the Bolivian army.

From the passports, the government also took thumbprints and compared them with the prints from Che’s military records in Argentina. They matched. Carrying the names of Adolfo Mena and Ramon BenitezFernandez, the two passports show that Che —if it was he—came to Bolivia briefly in 1963, returned for a few days last October, and came back again last March. The government claims that he went directly to the farm, which had been bought by a Castro front man. Setting up headquarters in some caves on the ranch, the guerrillas laid in large supplies of food and ammunition, even added a small shoe factory since, as Che wrote in his handbook on Guerril la Warfare, “Good shoes are more important to a guerrilla than food or his rifle.” To clinch their case, the Bolivians produced the “war diary”; the handwriting in it is similar to that used in Che’s farewell letter to Castro, which was published in Havana’s Bohemia two years ago.

Tightening the Noose. The evidence was impressive, but there were still many nagging questions. Why would Che leave such incriminating documents and pictures lying around? And why would he even permit such pictures if he were trying to conceal his identity from the outside world? In the end, the only conclusive proof that Che is alive or in Bolivia would be to produce the man himself. The Barrientos government is not sure that Che is still in Bolivia, but if he is, it may soon be in a position to do just that. By last week, Bolivia’s 8,000-man army had confined the guerrillas to a 300-sq.-mi. area and was slowly tightening the noose. If Che is in the noose, he will need his wiliest guerrilla tricks to get out.