Che Guevara (124 page)

At 12:30 a radio message for Colonel Zenteno Anaya came from the Bolivian high command in La Paz, and he relayed the order to Selich. According to Selich’s notes, it was to “proceed with the elimination of Señor Guevara.” He pointed out to Zenteno that it was Major Ayoroa’s duty to take charge of the executions, since he was the commanding officer of the unit that had captured Guevara. In Selich’s words: “Ayoroa then ordered the fulfillment of the order.”

Immediately afterward, leaving Ayoroa and Rodríguez behind, Selich and Zenteno Anaya boarded a helicopter to fly back to Vallegrande with their booty of captured documents and weaponry. Upon their arrival at about 1:30
P.M.
, they were advised from La Higuera that the execution of Che Guevara had been carried out.
*

In his version, Felix Rodríguez claimed it was he, not Zenteno Anaya, who had received the coded message ordering Che’s death, and that he had taken Zenteno Anaya aside to dissuade him. The U.S. government, he claimed, wanted to “keep the guerrilla leader alive under any circumstances.” He said that U.S. aircraft were on standby to evacuate Che to Panama for interrogation. According to Rodríguez, Zenteno Anaya said that he could
not disobey the order, which had come directly from President Barrientos and the joint chiefs of staff. Zenteno Anaya said he would send a chopper back at 2:00
P.M.
and wanted Rodríguez’s word of honor that Che would be dead by then, and that he would personally bring back his body to Vallegrande.

After Zenteno and Selich left, Rodríguez pondered his options. He had relayed word to the CIA that morning after positively identifying Guevara, asking for instructions, but no reply had come, and now it was too late. He could disobey Zenteno and spirit Che away, but he knew that if he did, he might be making a historical mistake of huge proportions; at one time Fidel Castro had been imprisoned by Batista, and that obviously hadn’t put a stop to him. In the end, he wrote, “It was my call. And my call was to leave it in the hands of the Bolivians.” While still debating, Rodríguez heard a shot from the schoolhouse. He rushed first into Che’s room. Che was alive and looked up at him from his place on the floor. Rodríguez went into the next room, where he saw a soldier, his gun smoking, and beyond, Willy “collapsing over a small table.” “I could literally hear the life escape from him.” The soldier told Rodríguez that Willy had tried to escape.

Rodríguez then went to talk with Che again and at one point took him outside to take his picture. Those photos, kept secretly by the CIA for years, have survived. In one, a youthful-looking and plump-faced Rodríguez stands with his arm around Che, who resembles a wild beast brought to heel, his emaciated face grimly turned downward, his long hair tangled, his arms bound in front of him.

Rodríguez took Che back inside the schoolhouse and they resumed their talk, only to be interrupted by more gunfire. This time the executed man was reportedly Juan Pablo Chang,
*
who had been captured, wounded, and brought in alive that morning; by now the bodies of Aniceto and Pacho, who had been killed in the ravine, were also there. “Che stopped talking,” Rodríguez recalled. “He did not say anything about the shooting, but his face reflected sadness and he shook his head slowly from left to right several times. Perhaps it was at that instant that he realized that he, too, was doomed, even though I did not tell him until just before one
P.M.
”

The Cuban-American CIA agent Félix Rodríguez took Che outside the schoolhouse in La Higuera so that they could have their picture taken. Soon afterward, Rodríguez told Che that he was about to die.

According to his chronology of events, Rodríguez then went outside. He was shuffling documents and “postponing the inevitable” when the village schoolteacher came up to ask when he was going to shoot Che. He asked her why she wanted to know, and she explained that the radio was broad-casting the news that Che had died of combat wounds.
*

Rodríguez realized that he could stall no longer and went back into the schoolhouse. He entered Che’s room and announced that he was sorry, he had done everything in his power, but orders had come from the Bolivian high command. He didn’t finish his sentence, but Che understood. According to Rodríguez, Che’s face turned momentarily white, and he said, “It is better like this. ... I never should have been captured alive.”

Rodríguez asked if he had any messages for his family, and Che told him to “tell Fidel that he will soon see a triumphant revolution in America. ... And tell my wife to remarry and to try to be happy.”

At that, Rodríguez said, he stepped forward to embrace Che. “It was a tremendously emotional moment for me. I no longer hated him. His moment of truth had come, and he was conducting himself like a man. He was facing his death with courage and grace.”

Rodríguez then left the room. A man had already responded to Major Ayoroa’s request for an executioner, a tough-looking little sergeant named Mario Terán, who waited expectantly outside. Rodríguez looked at Terán and saw that his face shone as if he had been drinking. He had been in the firefight with Che’s band the day before and was eager to avenge the deaths of his three comrades who had died in the battle.

“I told him not to shoot Che in the face, but from the neck down,” Rodríguez said. Che’s wounds had to appear as though they had been inflicted in battle. There was to be no evidence of an execution when the body was displayed to the press. “I walked up the hill and began making notes,” Rodríguez recalled. “When I heard the shots I checked my watch. It was 1:10
P.M.
”

There are different versions, but according to legend, Che’s last words, when Terán came through the door to shoot him, were: “I know you’ve come
to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.” Terán hesitated, then pointed his semiautomatic rifle and pulled the trigger, hitting Che in the arms and legs. As Che writhed on the ground, biting one of his wrists in an effort to avoid crying out, Terán fired another burst. The fatal bullet entered Che’s thorax, filling his lungs with blood.

On October 9, 1967, at the age of thirty-nine, Che Guevara was dead.

During the night of October 8, 1967, as Che lay trussed on the floor of the schoolhouse in La Higuera, Aleida awoke suddenly with a feeling that her husband was in grave danger. For several months, the news from Bolivia had made Aleida anxious. On October 8 she was staying in the Escambray mountains, where she and Che first met, doing field research for a social history project. After Che had left for Bolivia, Aleida had gone back to school and was studying at Havana University. It was something Che had urged her to do, to “keep herself occupied.” Fidel had been coming to her home regularly to update her about Che’s situation, which she knew was bad. So she was almost expecting the men who appeared at her doorstep late in the day on October 9. Fidel had sent them.

For weeks, Fidel had been reviewing the news reports coming out of Bolivia with both suspicion and mounting concern. On October 9, Che was reported to have been captured, then to be “dead of his wounds.” When the first photograph of the body said to be his came over the wires, there was some resemblance, but it was hard for Fidel to imagine that the emaciated corpse was that of the man he had last seen eleven months earlier. After Aleida arrived in Havana, she and Fidel pored over the reports and the new photographs that came in. At first, neither wanted to believe the worst, but soon there was no doubt.

On the afternoon of October 9, Che’s blood-drenched body had been placed on a stretcher, tied to the landing skids of a helicopter, and flown over the bleak hills to Vallegrande. Felix Rodríguez, wearing his Bolivian army
captain’s uniform, accompanied it. Soon after they touched down, he melted into the waiting crowds and disappeared. Within a few days, Rodríguez was back in the United States for debriefings with his bosses at the CIA. He had brought some relics from his trip, among them one of several Rolex watches found in Che’s possession, and Che’s last pouch of pipe tobacco, half-smoked, which he had wrapped in paper. Later, he would put the tobacco inside a glass bubble set into the butt of his favorite revolver. The strangest legacy of all, though, was the shortness of breath he developed soon after arriving in Vallegrande. “As I walked in the cool mountain air I realized that I was wheezing, and that it was becoming hard to breathe,” Rodríguez wrote twenty-five years later. “Che may have been dead, but somehow his asthma—a condition I had never had in my life—had attached itself to me. To this day, my chronic shortness of breath is a constant reminder of Che and his last hours alive in the tiny town of La Higuera.”

Slung onto the concrete washbasin of the laundry house in the rear garden of Vallegrande’s Nuestro Señor de Malta Hospital, Che’s body lay on view that evening and throughout the next day. His head was propped up and his brown eyes remained open. To prevent decomposition, a doctor had slit his throat and injected him with formaldehyde. As a procession of people including soldiers, curious locals, photographers, and reporters filed around the body, Che looked eerily alive. Some of the hospital’s nuns, the nurse who washed his body, and a number of local women surreptitiously clipped off clumps of his hair and kept them for good luck. Later, the military ordered a doctor at the hospital to perform an autopsy on Che. The doctor’s report detailed the nine bullet wounds Che had suffered “in combat”—in the area of his collarbone, chest, and ribs; in both legs; and in his right arm—and stated that the cause of death was “wounds in the thorax and the resulting bleeding.”

Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Selich and Major Mario Vargas Salinas posed for photographs next to the body. Along with Che’s leather portfolio, Selich kept and one of his watches, as did Captain Gary Prado.
*
The executioner, Mario Terán, kept his pipe. Colonel Zenteno Anaya claimed Che’s damaged M-2 carbine as his personal trophy. He allowed Prado to distribute the money found in Che’s possession—several thousand American dollars and a large quantity of Bolivian pesos—among his junior officers and soldiers.

Che’s body lying on public display in the laundry house of the Nuestro Señor de Malta Hospital in Vallegrande.

By then the decision had been made to deny Che a burial site. His body, like those of his comrades who had died previously, would be “disappeared.” To counter the initial reactions of disbelief coming out of Havana, General Alfredo Ovando Candía wanted to decapitate Che and preserve the head as evidence. Felix Rodríguez, who was still in Vallegrande when this solution was proposed, claimed to have argued that it was “too barbaric,” and suggested that they just sever a finger. Ovando Candía compromised: they would amputate Che’s hands. On the night of October 10, two wax death masks were made of Che’s face, and his fingerprints were taken; his hands were sawed off and placed in jars of formaldehyde. A pair of Argentine police forensic experts arrived to compare the fingerprints with those on file in Buenos Aires for Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. The identification was positive. In the early morning hours of October 11, Che’s body was disposed of by Lieutenant Colonel Selich, with a couple of other officers, including—according to him—Vargas Salinas, acting as witnesses.

Che’s brother Roberto arrived in town later that morning, hoping to identify the body and retrieve the remains, but it was too late. General
Ovando Candía said he was sorry: Che’s body had been “cremated.” It was only one of several versions of the story of his remains that would circulate in coming days as the Bolivian generals contradicted one another. The real whereabouts of Che’s body would remain an unsolved mystery for the next thirty years.

For Roberto, grim-faced, wearing a dark suit—looking very much like his famous brother, and yet so different—there was nothing to do but return home to Buenos Aires, where his father, brothers, and sisters waited. Now they too accepted the sad news, although Che’s aunt Beatriz refused ever to acknowledge her favorite nephew’s death or even discuss the matter.