Chasing Che (40 page)

I spent the afternoon looking for Che memorabilia, but there was none. No postcards, no T-shirts, no lapel pins, no books of any kind. I marched from one general store to the next, but the merchants all said that they had never seen such things and asked if it would be a good way to make money.

That night the village was stilled by a soccer game between Bolivia and Argentina. The Argentines were heavily favored, but when Bolivia scored early the streets of Vallegrande erupted. You could hear people screaming, car horns tooting, and teenagers running around the plaza whooping. In the end the Bolivians were crushed by their neighbors. They’d lost their empire to the Spanish, their coastline to Chile, and their soccer game to the
ches
. That’s how it went in Bolivia. They were used to losing. In Latin America there are many things worse than defeat.

O
n the morning of the third day I drove south out of Vallegrande, through the dusty fields, heading for La Higuera to see the last of what Che had seen. It was a dry, clear morning. Calixto had drawn me a little map on a cocktail napkin. It showed two intermediate towns, and all I had to do was make a right, a left, and then another left.

The first right was ten miles down the road, and following the new track I climbed up and over a series of ridges, each higher than the next, until I had left the flatlands far behind. The ridges ran in long parallel lines, as though Pachamama, the Earth Mother, had dragged the tines of her golden rake across the face of the world. There was not a house or a line of smoke as far as the eye could see, just dark green and brown hills rippling off toward the curve of the earth.

There was supposed to be a town along here somewhere, and when I came to a house I asked the sole resident—a shirtless teenage boy—where El Cruce was. He looked about him. “This is it,” he
said. The road branched right and became even thinner. Snarling up and down the hills for another half hour, I came up a particularly steep set of switchbacks and entered Pucara, a village made entirely of stone. I circled once around the cobblestone plaza, counterclockwise, looking for the exit, but by the time I had come back around to my entrance point a lean young man in blue jeans was standing in the road, arms folded, blocking my path. I stopped.

“First of all,” he said, handing me an envelope, “take this letter up to La Higuera. Second of all, I heard what you said on the radio yesterday, and you are wrong.” He turned out to be the local schoolteacher, which also made him the postmaster and village administrator. He invited me inside and produced a mason jar full of moonshine that we passed back and forth across a desk while debating socialism, the New Man, and the Bolivian political scene in 1966.

After half an hour I left drunk. I flailed at the kick starter for a while before realizing that I had forgotten to turn the key on, and no sooner had I veered out of the plaza and bumped a few hundred yards down the road than an old man in a straw hat came running out of a shack, flapping his arms with excitement.

“You must be the gringo on the radio!” he shouted toothlessly. “I talked to Che Guevara right on this spot thirty years ago!” I sat astride the bike, chatting with him. He recalled—suspiciously well—how he and some other peasants were rounded up by the guerrillas and Che gave a talk about the coming revolution. The man claimed that he had given food to the guerrillas, but as I departed after ten minutes, leaving the thrilled fellow in the middle of the road, I recalled that Che had complained bitterly in his diary about how the peasants were overcharging him for supplies.

Relations between the guerrillas and the peasants they had come to liberate were terrible. The expected support “does not exist,” Che confided in his notes. “Not one person has joined up with us.” There were all too many reasons for the failure that was now enclosing him. Unlike in Cuba, many peasants in Bolivia had plenty of land and identified with the country’s president, a brown-skinned military
strongman who spoke Quechua. Although Che had been careful to “Bolivianize” the struggle by recruiting a slim majority of Bolivian guerrillas before starting his operations, casualties and desertions quickly whittled his force down to a hard core dominated by Cuban combat veterans. Instead of swimming through the peasant sea, these guerrillas flopped about like fish out of water. None of them could speak the local dialects, and some of the Cubans were black, a skin color most Bolivian peasants had never seen before. Perhaps even more important, the guerrillas were led by a white man, and an Argentine to boot—exactly the kind of person who had been exploiting brown-skinned peasants in this region for centuries. Che’s skin marked him in a way no ideology could: he was what rural Bolivians call
la rosca
, a bitter term for a white outsider with power and wealth. With typical realism, the peasants often fled whenever this motley band of foreigners and sun-burned city boys appeared. Morale in the guerrilla column plunged. Once, they seized the town of Alto Seco, just up the road from here, and Che gave a propaganda lecture on Yankee imperialism and Marxist liberation, and then asked for volunteers. Only one local man stepped forward, but he was told quietly by one of the guerrillas, “Don’t be silly; we’re done for.”

In his diary, Che wrote coldly and with little sympathy for his men, but the facts were clear even to him. The Bolivian volunteers were deserting. One guerrilla drowned while crossing a river. The rear guard got lost, wandered through the hills for weeks, and was then wiped out in an army ambush. By July, Che was down to twenty-two fighters, “three of whom are disabled, including myself.” In August their base camp was uncovered, cutting them off from supplies, including the last doses of precious asthma medicine (“A black day,” he wrote). They were surviving on rotten anteater carcasses and horse meat—eating Rocinante, rather than riding her. Two diary entries for August use the word
desperate
in their opening sentences—August was “without doubt the worst month we have had so far in this war.” But then September proved even worse. The situation on the ground was “a big mess,” Che conceded to himself.

The insurgents wandered aimlessly through this barren landscape,
often lost, usually thirsty, sometimes starving. Che’s tactics were curiously passive: instead of attacking vital infrastructure, like the oil fields in nearby Camiri, he staged small ambushes and then listened to the radio to see if the world had noticed. The high-water mark came when the guerrillas briefly seized a small town on the main highway through the region, sending the Bolivian government into a panic. In La Paz, they didn’t know that Che had ordered the attack only because he hoped to steal some asthma medicine from the town pharmacy. His condition had become so severe by then that he could no longer walk; he was leading the revolution from a lame mule.

When he learned from the radio that a Budapest daily had criticized him for engaging in guerrilla warfare, Che’s frustrations finally exploded. “How I would like to rise to power just to unmask cowards and lackeys of every sort,” he wrote, “and squash their snouts in their own filth.”

The New Man was running out of hope.

T
he road dropped for a while and then off to the right you could see the Río Grande, far down in the valley bottom. I had to refocus my eyes before I realized what I was looking over: there, a half mile down the hillside in the same vista, was a meadow filled with tall white and yellow crucifixes. They were death markers. This was where the final battle had taken place—the guerrillas trapped in a shallow ravine without cover as the army rained bullets on them from above. The crosses marked where Che’s men had fallen. Che knew that the only way out of an ambush is to attack, not retreat, and he tried to push his few remaining soldiers up the hill to a position with better cover. But the time of theoretical tactics was over. Che had been hit once already in the leg, and was wounded again when the rifle was literally shot out of his hands, burying splinters in his arm. A loyal guerrilla named Simón Cuba tried to lead his commander to safety, but the army troops charged down the hill. Wounded, disarmed, and defeated,
the “world’s No. 1 guerrilla” was captured. In the confusion, three guerrillas crawled through the underbrush and escaped, led by Benigno, the same man who had recently defected from Cuba and denounced Castro for abusing Che’s image.

It was a sad spot, and I fled it, but I had bounced no more than a hundred yards down the road when I came over a small hill and there he was, Che himself, alive and well and a little shorter than I had imagined. Also his beard was red, but other than that it was definitely him. He was marching up the hill toward me, the jaunty beret cocked on his head, the little star clearly visible on his brow. I pulled to a halt, convinced that the moonshine was responsible for this vision, but the figure only grew more solid with each step. Che approached steadily, and as he came closer I noticed he was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt. I sat on the motorcycle, frozen in fear.

“Hallow!” he said in an approximation of English, and then burst into tears and handed me fifty dollars. The fellow’s real name was Jans van Zwam, and he was a Dutch tourist in his forties. He was just returning from a morning in La Higuera. He shoved the two twenties and a ten in U.S. currency at me and said, “Please, you will take for the doctor in the town,” and then burst into tears again.

When all the crying was over I asked him what he was doing here. “For twenty years I dream of coming to Bolivia,” he said. He had passed through four airports in two days, jumped into a taxi and come straight to La Higuera. Against his driver’s advice—which Jans did not fathom, since he did not speak any Spanish—he dismissed the taxi. He had planned on catching a bus back to Vallegrande, but there were no buses or taxis on this road, so now he was walking.

He had about fifty kilometers to go. With the exception of Pucara, five kilometers up the road, there was no shelter along the route, nor any place to find food and water. I told him to flag down any trucks that passed, although there would almost certainly be none, and promised to pick him up on my return if he was still afoot.

He rolled up his sleeve and showed me his left biceps. There was a tattoo of Che on it. When he made a muscle Che’s face bulged a bit
and the eyes of the “world’s No. 1 guerrilla” surveyed the future even more intensely than usual. I asked him how to get to La Higuera.

“You will see it easy,” he said. I pulled away, and indeed, the route wasn’t missable. Downhill a half mile the road forked. A tall pole stood at the divide with a crude hand-lettered sign attached.

CHE
, it said; 10
KM
.

T
wenty-nine years too late, I followed a grassy path over the hills. Aside from a weekly truck no vehicles came this way. A tiny bridge of rotten logs spanned a dry creekbed, and then the road went up and over one last ridge line and there it was, down below me.

La Higuera was not a town or even a village, but just a hamlet, a cluster of brown, one-story buildings draggled along the sides of the only street. The settlement sat on the slopes of a vast, gentle valley, guarded on the left and at the far end by a steep, brush-covered ridge. Below it were sloping fields of tall, golden grass, some trees, and far, far below that the Rio Grande. I powered slowly up the main street, looking into the empty houses. A coupe of immense pigs slept against a wall beneath a slogan in red paint that said
EL CHE VIVE
.

The letter I had been handed in Pucara was addressed to the most substantial house in La Higuera. The building was made of cement and had a chain-link fence around it to keep out thieves. The schoolteacher lived inside. She was a rather elegant white woman with dark hair down to her waist, and she made me tea. She did not ask why I was there, since there was only one reason foreigners came to La Higuera. She talked for a while about life in the village, which had no electricity. There were only twenty-two families left now, she said, about half the number who lived here when El Che came. They mostly raised cattle and were slowly going broke. About half the people in the area had Chagas disease, the heart-eating condition spread by beetles. I left the letter with her and set off on foot to find the doctor Jans had mentioned.

His office was in a long, low hut at the top of the hamlet. This was the same building where Che had been murdered. In 1967 the army had carried its wounded captive to La Higuera and put him in the hut, which was then a schoolhouse. At one point several Bolivian soldiers took Che outside and posed for a picture with their trophy—he looks wildly disheveled, and his captors are leaning in toward him like guests squeezing into the frame at a party. A local woman was allowed to feed him some soup. He sat on the floor, his back to the wall, his wounds bleeding but not fatal.

Via radio, the soldiers received a coded order from headquarters in La Paz: “Fernando 700.” Decoded, this meant “Kill Che Guevara.” The Bolivian government did not want to risk a show trial full of posturing and speeches. The date was now October 9, 1967. A sergeant was given two cans of beer to fortify his courage and was then sent into the schoolhouse where Che was waiting. There are various accounts of what Guevara did or didn’t say at the end. Supporters claimed that his final words were “Shoot, coward, for you kill a man!” Enemies said it was “I am worth more to you alive than dead.” There were also claims that he denounced Castro, or refused to speak at all, or sent a farewell to his family, or cried out “Long live the revolution!”

It doesn’t really matter what was said; the sergeant put an end to words by shooting nine bullets into Guevara.

Now there were a few children standing outside the door of the former schoolhouse, which had been fixed up and whitewashed. They were brown-skinned boys with ratty sweaters and shorts. They loitered, listening to the screams of agony coming from inside. The doctor had his hands in the mouth of an old peasant woman in a black-and-blue poncho. She sat in a chair, her head tilted back. The doctor was prying at her teeth with a set of sharpened pliers like those used to pull nails out of horse hooves. He gave a great heave, and a bloody tooth came sliding out while the old woman twitched in her chair and pleaded for mercy. “
Dios mío!
” she cried out in a muffled, wet voice. The doctor added the tooth to a collection of saliva-damp
molars in his left hand. There were five of them glistening there in his palm. “Well,” he said to the woman, after spotting me, “why don’t we get the rest in a few days?”