SPECIAL FORCES" TAKEN OVER IN DEBRAY CASE?
Walter Flores filed a writ of habeas corpus May 19. He demanded that his client be either released at once or that he be charged in accordance with the laws of Bolivia. This posed the. central issue very sharply -- with what is Régis Debray charged? No one in the government has yet stated this or made any other move to conform with the provisions of Bolivian law for a trial.
Curiously enough, General Ovando, a member of the ruling military junta and for a time co-equal in powers with General Barrientos, denounced Walter Flores for taking Debray's case. "A Bolivian shouldn't do that," he said.
At the same time he echoed the declarations of General Barrientos about assuring Debray a fair trial.
On May 20 General Barrientos in= jected a new note in his press conference. Up to then -he had stressed, in reference ‘to the Debray case, that Bolivia has abolished the death penalty. (Prisoners are simply shot by the army without trial as occurred in the case of César Lora, a well-known Trotskyist leader, on July 29, 1965.) [See World Outlook, Vol. 3, No. 28, p. 16.] -; Barrientos now told the press, "I am going to ask Congress to reestablish the death penalty." .
Questioned about Debray, the Bolivian dictator said, "Régis Debray has not been executed."
Barrientos refused, however, to state where Debray was being held. He also said that neither journalists, photographers, nor his mother could see the prisoner. He admitted having received a message from General de Gaulle inquiring about the fate of Debray.
Barrientos then went into a tirade against the guerrilla fighters who have made their presence known to his regime.
A Bolivian journalist asked: "Régis Debray was arrested a month ago; but we still don't know anything about him."
Barrientos replied to this as follows: "We are only at the first stage in this. We are in process of handling our dead and wounded. Bolivians have priority, one thing at a time. But you can be cer-
tain that those detained will be judged in strictest accordance with the law. We are a civilized country, we do not torture people. We will apply our laws."
The editorial note on the case which appeared in the May 23 issue of Le Monde, read as follows:
"Once again it is not possible to refrain from noting General Barrientos' vehemence and the contradictions in what he says. Last week he formally promised to see Mme Alexandre-Debray, and now he has postponed this interview indefinitely. It is difficult to understand the reasons causing the Bolivian president to fail to respect the rules of a Constitution adopted last February and which expressly provide for due process of law within twentyfour hours for anyone who is arrested. In stating that his ‘forces only captured some guerrillas,' General Barrientos thereby contradicts all the reports given the past month and a half by the Bolivian press itself, according to which the three foreign journalists, the French Régis Debray, the Argentine Fructuoso and the English Roth, were arrested at Muyupampa, April 20, by the D.I.C. (Department of Criminal Investigation). The photos published in the La Paz press confirm the capital fact that the three men were in civilian clothes and unarmed and with their identity papers in order.
"Under these conditions it is permissible to wonder about the real fate of Régis Debray and his two companions, held in strict secrecy despite the remarks made by Bolivian jurists and the demands for clarification coming from abroad. The obstinate refusal of the Bolivian president to furnish the least proof of the accusations levelled against the three foreigners captured in the province of Santa Cruz naturally increases the uneasiness aroused by this affair. Thus, certain observers, particularly in La Paz, are now asking if Régis Debray and his companions have not been turned over by the Bolivian authorities to the American special services for ‘interrogation, ' either in Bolivia itself, or at the headquarters of the ‘special forces' of the United States, in the Panama Canal Zone. Such a transfer would be easy. A regular military airline does in fact operate between the base at Howard field, in the Panama Canal Zone, and the Bolivian airports at Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, where Hercules planes of the U.S. Air Force have already landed matériel and heavy helicopters for the Bolivian armed forces engaged in difficult operations against the guerrillas."
As if in direct answer to the observations made by Le Monde (the Paris daily appears on the streets the evening before the dateline it carries), Robert Chatten of the U.S. embassy press service in La Paz said May 23: "We are not holding Debray either in the Canal Zone or elsewhere. The report is absolutely without foundation."
Jaime Céspedes, speaking for the Bolivian army, also issued a denial. "It is a tendentious report and completely false." He said that he did not know where Debray was being held. "However, I can assure you that he is in Bolivia; and, utilizing the occasion, I also want to deny the tendentious report according to which he has been interrogated by the FBI."
Hundreds of intellectuals and dozens of organizations internationally have mobilized in behalf of Régis Debray.
In Mexico, the magazine Sucesos Para Todos published a long editorial May 18 on the case.
"Régis Debray," declared the editors, “went to Bolivia as the correspondent of Sucesos Para Todos, with all the precautions and discretion required to succeed in a genuinely difficult and risky journalistic mission. His press card for this journal, made out in 1966, leaves no doubt as to his professional occupation... Any attempt to present Debray as conducting activities other than those of a press correspondent constitutes a fraud aimed at justifying the repression of the legitimate efforts of the press to reach sources of news.
The magazine published an open letter to General Barrientos signed by around a hundred Mexican intellectuals and university students demanding the release of Régis Debray.
"A political man sets an example,” the letter said among other things. "Thus he cannot assume an attitude of violence or vengeance without immediately provoking the same violence and the same vengeance...The real problems of this continent will not be resolved by imprisoning or executing this French youth who can be accused only of idealism...We are sure that shedding the blood or punishing Régis Debray will only multiply the Régis Debrays throughout the Hispano-American continent."