been nearly five decades since the epic life-and-death story of the Argentine-born revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara entered into the modern literary canon. The posthumously published diary of the literate, handsome young man who sought to bring socialism to the world through armed revolution and died doing so in Bolivia in 1967 rapidly became an international cult classic, a tragic new bible for a rebellious generation. The unavoidable parallels between the end of Che’s life and the mythologized passion of Christ made his story all the more potent, helping to ensure his legacy as the ultimate symbol of sixties idealism. Today, Che Guevara’s face is one of the most widely reproduced images in the world, universally recognized as an icon of youthful defiance against orthodoxy. In his adoptive homeland of Cuba, where the Castro revolution has endured for over fifty years, Che has become the emblematic patron saint of its officially cherished socialist principles. To millions of youngsters everywhere, meanwhile, ‘Che lives’, as the old slogan goes, if only on their T-shirts, while others seek even now to emulate his example on new battlefields. Not surprisingly, for the few surviving men and women who fought under Che’s orders, life has never been the same.
Of the fifty-one guerrillas of various nationalities who joined Che in Bolivia, most were either killed in action or, like himself, executed after being captured. Only three out of the original eighteen Cubans made their way home again. The two Peruvians died. Out of twenty-seven Bolivian fighters, only seven survived. Most of them were captured and imprisoned; several switched sides and worked to apprehend their former comrades. Every war has its contingent of traitors.
There were three Argentine guerrillas including Che, but only one survived. He was Ciro Roberto Bustos, a young artist-turned-revolutionary, and the author of this memoir. Bustos was already a key operative in Che’s fledgling guerrilla network in Argentina, when, in early 1967, Che summoned him to Ñancahuazú, his new, secret guerrilla base camp in south-eastern Bolivia. Che himself had only been there a few months. Ñancahuazú was supposed to be the training ground and staging post for a future Latin American guerrilla army that would spearhead a ‘continental revolution’ against US-backed imperialism in the hemisphere. Once a Bolivian foco was established, the cadres from Peru, Argentina, and neighbouring countries would ‘irradiate outwards’, taking their revolutions to their homelands. Che’s idea was to spark off ‘two, three many Vietnams’ simultaneously, overwhelming the Americans’ capability to suppress them. In trying to do so, their imperial system would be weakened and destroyed once and for all. Che intended to lead the future Argentine foco himself.
Unfortunately for Che, the existence of Ñancahuazú was discovered by the Bolivian army prematurely, while it was still in the embryonic stage, and while he was away, on a gruelling, six-week training march through the wilderness with his small group of volunteers. This setback coincided with Bustos’s arrival in Ñancahuazú. He was accompanied by a young Frenchman, Régis Debray, a Marxist theoretician who had just published Revolution in the Revolution? a theoretical treatise on the very guerrilla strategy that Che was putting into practice in Bolivia. Debray had come to meet Che and to receive his instructions on creating an international solidarity campaign on behalf of the Bolivian revolutionary cause. Bustos was there to confer with Che on how best to proceed with the Argentine armed underground. A previous attempt at starting a guerrilla foco, in which Bustos had participated, had failed catastrophically three years earlier. Bustos had been a lucky survivor.
Now, the authorities’ discovery of the guerrilla presence at Ñancahuazú had triggered an early initiation of hostilities. As Bolivia’s army sent in troops, and also warplanes, to attack them, Che and his men were forced to go on the run. It was an abrupt end to Che’s hopes for a stealthy, well-organized beginning to his ambitious new revolutionary project. When the enormity of the fiasco dawned on him, Che remarked with characteristic fatalism: ‘So, the war has begun.’
As Che broke up his fighters into two smaller groups in order to escape the army dragnet, Bustos and Debray hiked out of the battle zone in the hopes of slipping away undetected and carrying on with their respective missions. They were immediately arrested by soldiers in Muyupampa, the first community they came to. It was April 1967.
For Bustos and Debray, days of terror followed as they were interrogated by their army captors in Camiri, the garrison town where they were taken after their arrest. An early sighting of them in captivity by a local reporter who took their photograph and published it may well have helped save their lives. Debray’s high-level political affiliations in France (his mother was an official of the ruling Gaullist party) soon brought international visibility to their case, and with it a certain guarantee of protection. A pair of CIA agents, Cuban–American exiles who had been brought in to assist the Bolivian army’s anti-guerrilla operation, showed up, and began to question them more deeply. In the beginning, Bustos used a false name. He was Frutos, a travelling salesman – but soon, his true identity was revealed. He was forced to admit his links with Che’s guerrilla band in Bolivia, but managed to keep secret his role as Che’s operative in the Argentine underground.
Under pressure from the CIA agents, Bustos drew pictures of the guerrillas he had spent time with and of the Ñancahuazú camp. He did so knowing that the identities of many of the guerrillas were already known thanks to photographs discovered at the base camp. According to one of the CIA agents, who spoke about it years later, Debray ‘sang like a canary’.
It is a fact of life that most people who fall into the hands of their enemies in wartime break under the pressure, and talk. They may try to mitigate or otherwise colour their information, as Bustos did, but they provide it because they have no choice and are usually threatened with death, sometimes having been tortured first. Bustos and Debray were right to feel afraid of their captors; most of the guerrillas who subsequently fell into the Bolivian army’s hands were shot dead.
In the coming months, as their guerrilla comrades were hunted down, Bustos and Debray were brought to trial. For Che himself, the end came on October 9, 1967. He had been wounded and captured in battle, held overnight in a dirt-floored schoolhouse in a tiny mountain hamlet, questioned repeatedly by various officers. He was then executed, shot to death by a Bolivian army sergeant on the orders of Felix Rodríguez, one of the same CIA men who had interrogated Bustos and Debray.
A few weeks later, Bustos and Debray were sentenced to thirty years in prison. Three tedious years of detention in Camiri dragged by, with no end in sight. Then something unexpected, but very fortunate, happened. In December 1970, after a failed military coup, a left-leaning general, Juan José Torres came to power. As Bolivia’s president Torres moved quickly. Bustos and Debray were amnestied, put on a plane and flown to neighbouring Chile. There, the socialist politician Salvador Allende had become president just three months earlier, gave them a warm welcome. (They were very lucky indeed; Juan José Torres lasted only ten months in power before a right-wing officers’ faction overthrew him. He fled into exile in Argentina, where he was murdered by the military junta’s death squads in 1976.)
After a time in Allende’s Chile, Debray returned to Paris, where he resumed his professional life as a professor, thinker and writer. He served as a special adviser on foreign affairs to the socialist Mitterrand government in the 1980s, and eventually broke with his old mentor Fidel Castro, excoriating the Cuban leader publicly for his traits of stubbornness and arrogance; he accused Che of possessing similar character defects.
Reunited with his wife, Ana María, and their two young daughters, Paula and Andrea, Bustos remained in Chile, where he was given work in a publishing house. Shortly before Pinochet’s violent coup against Allende on September 11, 1973, he decided to return to Argentina, and thus narrowly escaped being caught up in the murderous military crackdown that followed. But in Argentina the dirty war against the Left had already begun as well, and Bustos soon found himself at risk. Some of his friends were killed; others disappeared. In January 1976, Bustos requested political asylum in Sweden for himself, Ana María, Paula and Andrea. It was immediately granted. Once in Sweden, the family was relocated to Malmo, the southwestern port town, and there they stayed.
When I met Bustos in Malmo in 1995, I found a man who was in a deeper, lonelier exile than I could ever have imagined. He seemed to be still living in a state of limbo, as if he had left Argentina, but never really arrived in Sweden. After nearly two decades there, he still did not speak