When Ernesto Che Guevara was captured as he led a small column of leftist guerrillas through the Bolivian mountains in 1967, the army that had hunted him down quickly resolved to wipe away the evidence of his Cuban-sponsored campaign to spread revolution across Latin America.
Guevara, 39 and already a legendary figure of the radical left, and other prisoners were summarily executed. Argentine agents cut off his hands to check his fingerprints against the files in his native Argentina. Then Bolivian soldiers took his body to a secret burial place.Its disappearance has led to endless speculation, especially in Latin America, where Guevara remains a hovering presence as a martyr to the ideal of social transformation.
Now, after 28 years of silence, a retired Bolivian army general who took part in the counterinsurgency effort and says he witnessed the secret burial has decided to disclose where the body lies.
"Enough time has passed, and it's time the world knows," the offi
cer, Gen. Mario Vargas Salinas, said in an interview in the large garden of his walled home outside the city of Santa Cruz in Bolivia's eastern lowlands.
"Che's body is buried in a mass grave in Vallegrande," he said, referring to a provincial capital in the mountains about 150 miles southwest of Santa Cruz. "He is buried under the airstrip at Vallegrande."
The Cuban government has long sought to recover the body. Guevara remains the patron saint of revolution at a time when economic difficulties have produced social strains in Cuba, and even many Cubans who differ with the government revere him.
But the issue is a delicate one in Cuban-Bolivian relations. Cuban diplomats have pursued a quiet campaign for the return of Guevara's remains but have met with little response from the Bolivian government, which asserts that it does not know where they are.
For the government here, disinterment could reopen a delicate domestic issue. Bolivian human rights groups estimate that as many as 150 suspected leftist activists remain classified as "disappeared," most of them dating from the right-wing military rule of Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez in the 1970s.
Vargas, who in 1967 was a 30-year-old officer based in Valle-grande with Bolivia's 8th Army Division, said he was one of only three witnesses to Guevara's burial, and he provided the most detailed account to date of the episode.
Vargas said he believed that one other witness was still alive, a former noncommissioned officer whom he knew only by his surname, Ticona.
Sometime after midnight, in the early hours of Oct. 11, 1967, Vargas said, he and a fellow officer, Maj. Guido Flores, received orders to accompany Ticona. Ticona drove a dump truck carrying the bodies of six guerrillas, including Guevara, to Vallegrande's airstrip.
"Next he brought a tractor," the general said of Ticona. "He dug the mass grave, brought the dump truck with the cadavers, dumped the cadavers, then brought the tractor and smoothed it over."
Guevara, who was trained as a doctor in Argentina, joined Fidel Castro's small band of revolutionaries in Mexico in 1955. In the guerrilla struggle that followed, Guevara became the rebel army's first military commander.