Final Days of Che Guevara

Do you think that at present in Latin America, there are countries that are ready and ripe for a revolution like Castro's, like Cuba? There is already a struggle, it's not talked about here, but that struggle exists. It exists in Venezuela, it exists in Guatemala, and perhaps there are other countries where people are taking up arms.

You talk about Venezuela and Guatemala, but is Cuba helping the revolutionaries in these countries? Only morally, we consider that these struggles are just, but only to a certain point. April 15th, 1964.

With a smile on his lips, Ernesto Che Guevara dreams of other great nights in Venezuela or Guatemala. He was the embodiment of the Cuban Revolution and an inspiration to communists the world over. He wanted to change the world.

Yet, on October 10th, 1967, his world ended as the Bolivian army posed before their trophy, a sordid and undignified mass for a red Christ. This pitiful display of triumph, however, could not rid the corpse of all its aura. The Bolivian army offered the deceased immortality.

November 3rd, 1966. La Paz Airport in Bolivia. Passengers descend from a plane.

Among them is a Uruguayan commercial representative, Alfredo Mena Gonzalez. He presents his passport. A fake passport.

The man's real commerce is revolution. Who could suspect that the balding, squinting face of this middle-aged man masks one Ernesto Guevara de la Serna? Son of a wealthy bourgeois family, Guevara was born in Argentina in 1928, infected with the virus of revolt.

It would prove to be incurable despite his medical training. He would be known as Che. In 1958, he was operating at the heart of the Cuban Revolution alongside Fidel Castro and an army of barbudos.

Their moment of glory was the taking of Havana in January 1959. However, this was not the end. The guerrillero became a tireless traveler for the cause of revolutionary Marxism.

He took part in a tentative coup d'etat in the Congo but the operation was a dismal failure. On returning to Havana, he sought an arena for his Second Crusade and decided on Latin America. In November 1966, El Che left Cuba in the utmost secrecy.

Apart from Castro and a few apparatchiks, no one knew his real destination, Bolivia. Internationally recognized as a revolutionary, he was completely transformed by the Cuban secret services. The top of his head was shaved, glasses were prescribed, and false teeth changed the shape of his jaw.

His shoe heels were hollowed out to make him look smaller. The beard was trimmed. He became a banal nonentity but driven by an obsession, to set Bolivia on fire.

He had already conceived his plan. He explained that we were going to Bolivia to bear the standard of freedom. He said that a selected handful of Cubans' finest revolutionaries would have to be sacrificed to liberate the oppressed.

Che was intending to lead a vast operation aimed at fomenting rebellion in Latin America. Solidly planting the seeds of Marxist revolution in Uncle Sam's gigantic backyard. His choice of terrain stunned many, and yet Bolivia appeared to be an ideal subject.

Success here in the heart of South America could lead to a veritable nightmare for the United States, forming a strategic base and hub for further development across the continent. A continent where Bolivia was one of the poorest countries, and poverty has forever been fertile ground for revolution. The country was controlled by a former soldier, President René Barrientos.

With American backing, he had come to power in the South American way, a coup d'etat in 1954. The regime would ultimately be legitimized by purportedly democratic elections. This is an important element.

If we refer to Che's book on guerrilla warfare, he clearly says that armed struggle cannot succeed in a country where there have been elections, even if they were fraudulent, as there is a way of attaining revolution through peaceful means. El Che should perhaps have reread his own writings, as the remaining chapters would only last another 11 months. At dawn on November 5th, he left LaPaz by jeep for Ñancahuazú an isolated forest area in the southeast, where he had a plan to set up base.

He arrived on the night of the 6th and 7th of November. For the moment, Ernest Guevara was identifiable only by his codename, Ramon. All the time I was with him, I never knew he was El Che.

He was introduced to me as our leader Ramon. I was very impressed. He had a quite remarkable presence.

He was very different from the others. Not because he imposed himself, but because he was very charismatic. He had been hoping for at least 150 companeros, but on arriving, Che found barely 50 fellow combatants.

As he waited for hypothetical reinforcements, he began setting up the main camp, digging underground hideouts in the forest to hide equipment, documents, and food supplies. It was a zone with oil fields and with very low vegetation. There were no animals because of the lack of water and no agriculture.

There was no means of communication. There was nothing. You see the panorama here.

There's little vegetation or forest to hide in. If we made a fire, we'd easily be seen at night, and any soldier with binoculars could spot us from far away. Two weeks before Che arrived, they decided on this region.

You can't prepare a guerrilla warfare zone in two weeks. There were no political contacts, and nobody knew the region. Nobody had been on a scouting mission.

Che thought he had one trump card. As he left Cuba had Castro not guaranteed the support of the Bolivian Communist Party? The party was supposed to organize food and weapons supplies and enlist new combatants from the ranks of young communist activists, but the Bolivian communists would never help him.

Did they receive instructions to abandon the guerrilla? From who? From Big Brother, the Soviet Union, at the time totally opposed to armed revolt in Latin America.

The two superpowers were sharing the world. It was a time for peaceful coexistence. The Kremlin had another problem, too, of a more personal nature.

For years, Moscow had been suspicious of Che, a hardline revolutionary who was much too popular. The elimination of the exploitation of man by man, of which the most obvious example is imperialism. The definitive advent of communism, a society without class, the perfect society.

At a meeting with Castro, someone said that Che was a perfect man. Castro replied: "Almost perfect. " The other man said: "How's that?

" Castro said: "He lacks cunning. " Che was not cunning enough. He was incapable of subterfuge.

His forthright nature led him to commit an irreparable error. On February 24th, 1965, during a speech in Algiers, Ernesto Guevara accused the USSR of imperialism on par with the United States. He spat in the eye of the Soviet big brother.

It was a declaration of war. The Russians accused Che not only of Maoism but above all of Trotskyism, a sin at the time graver than any other. He was crucified.

He was finished. Fidel and the others met him when he returned from Algiers. They holed up for talks that lasted almost 40 hours.

After this meeting, Che decided to give up his official duties to release Cuba from any responsibility. However, today, we know that Che Guevara was forced to abandon everything. What was said during those 40 hours?

Did Che pay the price of his intransigence and his idealism? Nothing has ever emerged, but perhaps as they discussed life and politics, their friendship dissolved. One thing is clear, after his talk with Castro, Che orchestrated his first death, a political suicide.

He wrote a farewell letter renouncing his official duties, saying he intended to leave Cuba and export the revolution. Castro publicized the letter on October 13th, 1965, two years almost day for day, before Che was killed. He was eliminated.

Castro eliminated Che on October 13th when he made the letter public. His execution was only a matter of time. In Bolivia, Che thought he was once more becoming a guerrillero but he would soon become a desperado.

His Soviet big brother had gone, as had his Cuban little brother, and there was no support from the Bolivian communists. He found himself leading a handful of rebels lost in the middle of the forest. Rebels who, apart from a few Cubans, did not even know that their chief was Ernesto Guevara.

Officially, he was merely Ramon. On the morning of January 1st, Che brought us all together. He told us we would have no support, that no one would come and join our armed struggle.

On top of that, we were stuck there. Not only because our papers were fake, but also because our visas had expired. We thought he was exaggerating, but in fact, he understood the situation much better than we did.

On February 1st, 1967, Che chose 25 men for a reconnaissance mission in the Rio Grande region. They attempted to enlist recruits but met only a handful of peasants, isolated and mistrustful. The escapade lasted over a month in dramatic circumstances.

The group suffered its first victims without even a shot being fired. Three guerrilleros drowned as they crossed the river. On March 19th, exhausted, Che and his men returned to base camp at Ñancahuazú.

They discovered nearly a dozen recruits, including a Frenchman, Regis Debray, a pro-Castro intellectual, and an Argentinean, Ciro Bustos, a painter and militant communist. I saw Ramon talking with these strange people, he spoke to Danton, the Frenchman, Regis Debray, who in my view was like a gringo, like the others, and to the bald man, Ciro Bustos, who looked like a bourgeois. I said to myself: "What on Earth are these bourgeois doing here?

We're fighting against the rich, and now he brings them into the camp with us? " Che had another problem, he learned that two Bolivians had deserted. The time for betrayal had now come, condemning Che's revolutionary intentions and condemning Che himself.

[Spanish spoken audio] The desertion of Pastor and Rocabado practically destroyed the guerrilla. They had seen the Cuban presence that they were clandestine Communist Party members and that everything was illegal. On top of that, there was a German woman, a French man, a Peruvian, and an Argentinian.

It was too much. The first chance they had, they escaped and went to Laconia. They told me everything.

They went into the army to denounce the guerrillas. They thought that with the reward they could pay their way home. The army took them back by plane so that they could show the exact location of the base camp.

The information reached the presidential palace. Barrientos immediately put his troops on red alert, although he too was unaware that Ernesto Guevara himself was running the operation. They told us we were to carry out an operation in the southeast of Bolivia because the country had been invaded by foreign forces.

We set off very early at 6:00 in the morning. It was a two-hour flight. In the plane, we sang the national anthem, but the secret services had badly prepared the operation.

When we arrived on the scene, there was nobody there. They had all gone. The Bolivian Army made a second attempt two days later.

It was March 23rd at 10:00 the morning. The army began to climb the hill in our direction. We could see them climbing slowly.

There was a whole company. At that moment, someone shouted: "The war has begun! " "The army is coming, we need to be ready!

" Well, I didn't really know what to do. Comrades were trying to load the mortar, but they didn't even know how it worked. I told them to try and turn the handle to open up the tripod.

They said: "Oh, yes? How can you know that? " I said: "Well, I'm trying to figure it out.

" There were only eight of us and we managed to cause havoc among a whole company. We took a lot of prisoners. We captured most of the officers and collected quite a lot of weapons.

On March 25th, Che called a meeting. He congratulated the comrades who had taken part in the fighting. However, we had lost some crates of milk and Che declared that we were undesirable in the guerilla.

He told us to leave at the first opportunity. That never happened. We weren't entitled to the same rations as the others and couldn't use the same weapons as them.

It created a lot of tension. Che thought we were just the same illiterate peasants that he had known in Cuba. It was: "I say this, I give the orders, I want that.

" Whenever somebody made a suggestion, he would say: "What's your problem? "Shut up! " Looking back, that was a mistake.

Che's outbursts, however, did not prevent the guerrilleros from savoring their victory, but their triumph was short-lived. Just a few days later, they fell victim to a second betrayal. Once again, the stab in the back came from the guerrilla's own ranks.

Che entrusted the Frenchman, Regis Debray, with a mission to organize support from Europe. To do this, he had to leave the group, accompanied by Ciro Bustos. However, on April 20th, Debray and Bustos fell into the army's eager clutches.

Not only had Che lost his chance of obtaining outside help but the Bolivian authorities finally discovered the crucial truth that behind the codename of Ramon hid the notorious Ernesto Che Guevara. Someone had talked. Che Guevara was not yet a Christ-like figure, but his Judas had been designated in the shape of Ciro Bustos.

He drew us and it was with his drawings that the army came looking for us. They knew everything, what we looked like, our individual characteristics, how we talked, how we moved around, everything. How does the man defined as being the traitor who gave up Che Guevara, live with that burden of accusation?

We found him in Sweden, where he now lives in exile. I feel I have to reveal the way that things really happened. Otherwise, I would be an accomplice perpetuating a lie.

That's my motivation. Personally, it's of no importance to me. My life is coming to an end.

I've lived all these years with this lie, but perhaps my experience can benefit other people. Almost 40 years have passed, but Ciro Bustos is still marked and branded by this story. No doubt the reason why, after much prevarication, he agreed to present his version of the facts.

These are the drawings that were the basis of this constant calumny for this lie. My drawings were more or less of this size. I did them in pencil and on a paper pad.

They created an unbelievable euphoria among the soldiers. It was as if they had won a battle. They thought I had cracked and that I had given up everything.

They thought I had identified all the most important people. I'm proud of what I did because, in reality, the drawings constituted a perfect counterintelligence operation. My main aim was to defend the organization in Argentina.

My duty was towards them, not towards the guerrilla. The guerrilla could defend itself. I didn't even know where they were but the army knew.

I stopped knowing anything about the guerrilla the day I left. I was incapable of saying if they had gone this way, that way, or another way. I said that my chief in Argentina was a certain Rutman.

Rutman had given me fake ID papers, Rutman had done this, and Ruteman had done that so that Ruteman became very important. They told me to draw him and so I did, but Rutman didn't exist. Didn't they ask you anything about El Che?

They had asked me if I had seen El Che, but it was clear that they already knew he was in Bolivia. Not only because of the two deserters but also from the other prisoners. I realized this during the interrogations.

Debray's mother was allowed a ten-minute visit under the surveillance of an officer. Bustos, the Argentinian had his room where he did his painting. He got the daily newspaper and his wife came to prepare meals for him every day.

Debray wasn't even entitled to a paper. I'm not making this up. Everyone knows it's true.

It's an outrageous lie. It's exactly the opposite. His mother told everyone I was a CIA agent and that her son was a brilliant intellectual and blah, blah, blah, and that's how history came to be rewritten.

What and who can be believed? Even if what Ciro Bustos says is true, it is hard not to feel a certain uneasiness looking at the sketches he has drawn. Was his talent as an artist exploited in captivity to provide nothing more or less than identity portraits of the guerrilleros?

If for the past 40 years, Ciro Bustos has unjustly been fingered as a rat who betrayed El Che, how did the Bolivian authorities and their American friends discover his presence at the head of the guerrilla group? There was another troubling incident too. On April 15th, 1967, five days before Debray and Bustos were captured, the Cubans organized an international press conference where they presented an article written by Che calling for armed action in Latin America.

The article was accompanied by a series of photographs of him without his beard. The CIA and the Bolivian intelligence services now disposed of recent pictures of El Comandante. Moreover, for the first time, Bolivia was mentioned as a possible focus for armed struggle.

All Uncle Sam and the Bolivian authorities needed now was confirmation. The vital question is who could have provided it? With the Cubans' publication of these documents, Debray's very presence in Bolivia was enough to betray Che.

Che himself said in his diary in April with the publication of my article in Havana: "There can be no longer any doubt about my presence here. " We were certain after the declarations of Debray, who was being held in Muyupampa. During the initial questioning, he had said he was there to obtain an interview with Che and that he had obtained it.

That confirmed for us that it was really El Che who was leading the Guerrilla. Washington, May 11th, at the White House, a memo from security advisor Walt Rostow arrives on President Johnson's desk. The first credible report that Che Guevara is alive and operating in South America.

The net around Che is tightening. President Barrientos declares a state of siege. The two superpowers become involved.

On June 26th, the Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin visits Cuba. Moscow attempts to pressure Castro into ending the guerilla operations, but Castro is thought to have refused, intending to support liberation movements in Latin America no matter what. For the US, however, there could be no question of allowing the Barbudos to export the revolutions to South America.

The idea of this camp and the other American military assistance is to teach the Bolivians to defeat the Communist guerillas themselves, without the need for American troops. However, that was the idea in Vietnam, too. At the end of April, the United States sent military advisers with experience in Korea and Vietnam to oversee the training of some 700 Bolivian rangers, a crack unit entrusted with eradicating the guerrilla.

The following months for Che and his companions would be an endless, aimless trek, through the Bolivian mountains in appalling conditions. We spent the year going around in circles, and this enabled the army to surround us. There was no way out.

We sometimes went for up to ten days without eating. We weren't psychologically prepared to put up with that. If we went to peasants asking them to buy food, they would betray us.

We had to take a thousand precautions just to be able to approach them and hope to buy something to eat. The guerrilla was like a cancer patient in the terminal phase. We knew his days were numbered.

We didn't know when it would come but we were constantly expecting to hear the news of his demise. What could still have saved El Che? Paradoxically, once he had been betrayed, perhaps the very fact that his presence in Bolivia had been revealed to the international media, the announcement brought a certain amount of protection.

The hunted beast was front page news again, and not merely a dead man walking. The best strategic card we had was Che's very presence but nobody played that card. Neither the guerilla nor Che himself.

Debray, aware that the army knew Che was there, chose to keep quiet in terms of the public. Che may be alive or he may be dead, I don't know. The yankee journalists say he's been dead for two years.

It's possible, I don't know. We've already mourned his death several times. I think that if one day Che decides to come forward if he's still alive, it will be his own decision.

Why did Regis Debray not reveal Che's presence to the public if this could have helped the guerrilla? Historian Humberto Vasquez has a document signed by the French intellectual's own hand. This is a letter from Debray to his lawyer.

I gave my word to the commander Recce Tehran not to reveal Che's presence to the public. For me, that was Debray's sin. If he had talked, everyone would have believed him as at that time, Debray's word was Cuba's word.

It was the word of the revolution. A lot of people would have joined the fight, not only here in Bolivia, but also everywhere in the world. Argentinians, Brazilians, Frenchmen, and Spaniards would have said: "If Che is there, I'm going," and perhaps it would have reversed the situation.

Regis Debray would finally be freed in 1970 following a new coup d'etat. He had been sentenced to 30 years in prison by a military tribunal in 1967. Could his revelations have in any way affected the fate of a man who was probably already condemned to death?

In that month of July, Che continued along the way of the cross. Asthmatic since childhood, he suffered increasingly from attacks, and he had run out of medication. His asthma attacks continued day and night.

Whenever we stopped, he would press his thorax against a piece of wood to compress his lungs and try to breathe. On July 6th, his men attacked the town of Samaipata, hoping to find medicine for their leader. The operation failed.

They held the town, but the local pharmacy had nothing of any relevance. Once again, Che and his companions, they too plagued by all manner of ailments, headed back into the forest. The last petty victory of a Che whose last breath was imminent.

We were there with Che, who was sick, whose head was like that. I mean, his head was not functioning properly. He had a lot of problems.

He even lost consciousness sometimes. Once we had to carry him on a stretcher for more than ten kilometers while we were being pursued by the army. We insisted that he rest up, but every time he would always categorically refuse.

He said he had to be the guerrilla's driving force. Che decided to keep heading north to break through the army's encircling moves and avoid further hostilities, but the army reinforced the pressure. Regular skirmishes decimated the guerrilla's ranks.

One by one, several dozen of them were killed. In early September, there were just 22 of them left. Twenty-two exhausted wretches starving and sick, no longer taking precautions, openly appearing in the region's villages.

They arrived two at a time. We were so scared. Why were you scared?

It was because we didn't know them and they all had long hair and beards. That made us afraid. Also, people here were saying that the Cubans abused women, that they killed old women and did bad things to the younger girls.

We heard all kinds of things about them. Some people were so frightened they took their daughters away and hid them in the mountains. Did they run away?

Yes, they came in here and set down their backpacks. There, in that collapsed house, a woman cooked them some pork. They paid for it.

Some of them were there in that house. What did you ask them and what did they say? We asked them: "Why are you fighting?

" They said they were fighting for the peasants so that we would be equal to everyone else. El Che said: "That's why I'm fighting and all I want is to get to Vallegrande," "and that's all. " My brother came out and told them not to go down the hill because we thought the army was camping out by Baton Point, but they didn't listen to us.

They passed by La Higuera and the army was there. If they'd gone on the high road, nothing would have happened to Che. He'd still be alive.

On September 26th, Che decided to head for Batan Point. It was the day he walked into the lion's den. The guerilleros were coming from La Higuera and were taking this path.

They had sent an advance party to check things out before heading for Pukara but the army was waiting in ambush behind this stone wall, which acted as a barricade, and the guerrilleros didn't see them. They were taken by surprise. The ambush where Julio and Coco fell was the beginning of the end for the guerrilla.

The group fell back, the army hot on their heels. On October 6th, they reached an isolated farm. The series of betrayals continued, and once more they were denounced.

We're in Virgilia Cabrita's house. Che met the dwarf. We lived here.

They treated her very well but when the army came, she betrayed them. That's how the military knew the guerrillas were in the area. El Che made his last strategic error.

He decided to head into the Quebrada del Churro. The locals cursed the place, saying the mountain eats up those who are lost there. It was in this desolate bowl that El Che's woeful military adventure in Bolivia came to a sad end.

The guerilla had been more or less pushed back into this area. With two or 3,000 men on its trail. They were under constant persecution.

There was no let-up. Ernesto Guevara soon realized his mistake. After a long day's march, the weary guerrilleros set up their last camp at the bottom of the ravine.

On October 8th, the small group of warriors in a Marxist vision of damned martyrdom fought their last fight. Che had just a few hours left to live. About 11:00 in the morning, when all my plans were ready.

I gave the order to commence operations. The first shots were fired at us as we approached the ravine. Two soldiers fell.

That's when the battle started. The army arrived from that way but from over here too. The first attack took place on this side.

One of the guerrilleros took cover here to defend himself. At the same time, soldiers caught them in the crossfire. We can still see the bullet marks.

One, two, three. El Comandante Guevara was about this distance away. He was spotted when his ammunition ran out.

He pulled out his pistol, but that was empty too. He was also wounded in one leg. One soldier aimed at him and shouted: "I'm going to kill you!

" Willie The Cuban stepped forward and said: "No, don't shoot, he's the comandante! " That's when the soldiers called me in. I must have been ten or 12 meters away.

They told me they'd taken some prisoners. I went up and was able to identify one of them as Ernesto Che Guevara. As night fell, the Bolivian army gathered together the corpses.

Che Guevara had been captured. The soldiers dragged him to La Higuera and locked him in the village schoolhouse. Wounded in one leg, in the throes of an asthma attack, this was where he spent his final hours.

At dawn on October 9th, a CIA agent sent to the scene subjected him to the humiliation of being photographed beside his delighted captors. Pitiful hunters posing with a circus animal, their decrepit guerrillero prey. It would be the last shot of Che alive.

During the morning, the Army sent a radio message to La Paz with just three words, muerto o vivo? At eleven o'clock, the presidential palace responded, muerto. It wasn't Barrientos who gave the order.

It was the CIA. I was able to talk with the soldiers who were there. As I was a colleague they confirmed it to me.

It wasn't Barrientos who gave the order. They just came in, took one look, and got back into their helicopter. A CIA report to President Johnson would appear to indicate the contrary.

After a short interrogation to establish his identity, General Ovando, Chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces, ordered him shot. I regard this as stupid, signed Walt Rostow, security advisor. Che's capture would have created such a scandal that the government wouldn't have been able to resist.

International pressure would have been too much for a country as weak as Bolivia. They said: "It's impossible, kill him, kill him! " On October 9th, 1967, at eleven o'clock in the morning, Sergeant Mario Teran volunteered for duty as an assassin.

He went into the schoolhouse alone, with a single order, his bullets should not damage the face. The official version should be wounds received during combat. A few seconds later, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna was dead.

I got to Vallegrande at about 9:30 in the morning. Then events started to unfold in front of our eyes. Well, I took a whole lot of pictures with my Pentax, let me show you.

During the morning, a lot of bodies were brought in on the helicopter rails, but late in the afternoon, a helicopter came in with a much, much larger corpse attached to the rail and that was obviously, Che Guevara. I didn't know for certain that he was dead, but we guessed that he must have died by then. They went off toward the little hospital laundry room, which became a morgue.

There is Che's corpse. It's not at all the corpse of a beautifully cleaned-up man there. He'd only been dead, well, by then, for probably about four or a maximum of five hours.

His body was completely subtle. I remember I had to get up onto the table, and I've got very flat feet. I'm not terribly nimble so I had to somehow scramble up onto this thing and then get up above.

I remember I slipped. I just had a pair of ordinary flat-soled shoes on. I slipped initially and I thought: "Oh my God, am I going to slip actually onto the body?

" Luckily, it didn't happen, I was very careful. I got up above Che's corpse and then I just took the shots that I took. I took what I think is the most interesting shot, and these moccasins which were in a terrible state.

I mean, they were homemade moccasins. Probably some campesino woman had made them for him, his two pairs of socks, and his bullet-ridden legs. My first impression was that this was almost a saint-like figure.

It wasn't Jesus Christ I thought, I thought of John the Baptist. I don't know why. He looked biblical.

He looked beautiful, even though he was covered in blood and he was in a very tousled state. Now because there was such an enormous crowd outside, they decided they'd pick the body up and sit it up in front of the audience so that Che was like this. I felt something radiating out at me when that body was sat up and faced me.

Without a single doubt, without a single doubt. You were sort of transfixed by the presence of this man. To me, I guess he was a hero.

The day after Che's death on October 10th, the soldiers staged a further performance, apparently delighted with their own absurd, macabre spectacle. Had not an immense victory been won against the Red peril? Che's body was put on display throughout the day in the hospital laundry room.

Then the Bolivian army authorized the good citizens to view his remains for 24 hours as the news of Che's death traveled around the globe. It was the end of a dream, of an alternative route for humanity. A road that we will not see again.

This is the kind of situation when you reach such a level of despair, you could shoot yourself in the head. It's sad, but we could have done nothing more. During the weeks that followed, the army concealed the truth of the circumstances surrounding Che's death.

The official version is still killed in action. Unfortunately, one man would contradict this story. I took the key and went into the school.

There was a terrible smell and blood everywhere. There were bits of flesh, hair, and shell cases with blood, lots of blood. The floor was covered with flies, it stank.

I just felt disgusted and I said to myself: "The world has to know" "that he was assassinated in such a horrible manner. " I made the decision to leave the government, and I fled to France to denounce his assassination. The truth would emerge on December 30th, 1967, to the indignation of the international community.

Meanwhile, the army had disappeared Che's body. They buried it at night close to the Vallegrande airstrip, along with six of his companeros. The operation took place in the greatest secrecy.

His tomb should not have become a place of worship. The Bolivians were able to keep the secret for almost 30 years, until October 1997. Che's remains were exhumed and returned to Cuba.

Che now has two mausoleums, one in Bolivia, unfinished due to lack of money, and the other in Havana. Here, for the occasion, for a man who, above all else, detested pomp and circumstance. Fidel Castro organized a funeral worthy of a Roman emperor.