ORDEAL OF REGIS DEBRAY
By Robin Blackburn and Perry Anderson
{The following article appeared in the August 27 issue of the London Observer. (Perry Anderson is a research fellow in Latin-American Sociology at Reading University. Robin Blackburn has been making a study of the Cuban Revolution at Nuffield College, Oxford, and will begin teaching sociology at the London School of Economics in October.
[The two young British intellectuals went to Bolivia at the invitation of Bertrand Russell to investigate the Debray case. This is the report they wrote upon returning to London. ]
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The ordeal of Régis Debray -- the 26-year-old French intellectual on trial for his life as an alleged terrorist in Bolivia -- began a few days before last Christmas when a letter reached him in Havana.
The letter was from Ché Guevara, once Castro's chief lieutenant and now the legendary hero of Latin American rev- Olutionaries. In it, Guevara said he was ready to give his first interview to the world since his mysterious disappearance from Cuba in 1965 and that he had selected Debray for the assignment.
What happened then to make Debray the focus of international protest? How did he end up in the military prison of a tiny oil town in the tropical backlands of southeastern Bolivia, where we have just seen him?
We went there after Bertrand Russell had invited us to investigate the Debray case. In two interviews, speaking a mixture of Spanish, French and English to confuse his jailers, Debray gave us his account of the events which followed the arrival of Guevara's letter on the twenty-first floor of the Hotel Habana Libre on 21 December 1966. We have checked his story against the accounts of his fellow prisoners, his military interrogators and jailers, and the officer who will prosecute hin.
Guevara's choice was a logical one. Debray had been lecturing in philosophy at Havana University. He had won high regard with the Cuban leadership for two long essays on the continental strategy of revolution and was just completing his first book, "Revolution Within the Revolution?," a blueprint of the new Cuban tactics in Latin America.
Debray's instructions from Guevara were to wait for a contact in February at a left-wing bookshop in Paris, Ia Joie de Lire.
He flew to Paris two months later when his appointment at Havana ended. On 15 February he was approached in the bookshop. The message: he was to go to Ia Paz, the 12,000-ft—high Andean capital of Bolivia, where, at 6 p.m. every Tuesday, a man called Andrés would be waiting for him outside the Sucre Palace Hotel.
Debray duly went to La Paz. He was carrying with him official accreditation as a journalist from his French publisher, Frangois Maspéro, and the Mexican magazine Sucesos: both credentials were confirmed by the Presidential office of the Bolivian Government. He had a valid French passport (the French consul in La Paz, Madame Teresa de Villancour, who has seen the passport, confirms that it contains the entry stamp of Bolivian frontier officials).
He made contact with Andrés, who took him to a girl who used the Bolivian "underground" name of "Tanya" but whose real name seems to have been Laura Martinez. With her, he set off south from La Paz by one of the antiquated buses that the Bolivians quaintly call gondolas.
At Sucre, 200 miles away, he and an Argentine travelling under the name of Fructuoso booked into the Hotel Grande on 3 March. Fructuoso was, in fact, a painter named Ciro Roberto Bustos, who claims that he was summoned to an opposition political conference in Bolivia at the same time, but who was probably also summoned by Guevara independently, perhaps to make drawings of him in his new role -- Bustos was an exceptionally skilled draughtsman.
The two men stayed in Sucre until the morning of 6 March. They then continued their journey south. A few days later they were in the small town of Camiri, in the oil zone. From there, Tanya took them north into deserted and densely wooded hill country.
In early March, Bolivia was still in an uneasy civil peace. The military dictatorship of General Barrientos, set up after a putsch two years earlier, was becoming increasingly isolated from popular appeal, but there was no sign yet of outright revolt. Debray was thus travelling to a journalistic assignment in peacetime conditions.
Still guided by Tanya, he was led
to the Casa Caramina, a remote ranch in the Nancahuazt region. There he found himself in a guerrilla training base, from which an insurrection was about to be launched. It had been bought some eight months before by "Coco" and "Inti" Perédo, two Communist brothers who have since emerged as the leaders of the Bolivian guerrillas.
Debray had still not seen Guevara. He was informed, however, that he would soon do so. But events now moved very fast. An oil engineer in the zone reported fo the Army suspicious movements in the Nancahuazi zone. A large military patrol was dispatched to investigate. The outbreak of revolutionary war in the Bolivian southeast was thus suddenly precipitated while Debray was waiting for his interview.
On 23 March the Army patrol ran into an ambush along the banks of the Nancahuazi River. Three officers were killed and 15 men captured.
Once hostilities opened, the guerrillas abandoned the Casa Caramina and went over to mobile columns in the dense jungle. It was in these conditions that Debray finally made contact with Guevara. He says the circumstances of his interviews were difficult: Guevara was commanding units on forced marches -- not the best conditions for prolonged interviews.
By the first week of April, Debray had completed his mission. On 5 April he and Bustos tried to get out through the town of Gutierrez. But the Army had already occupied it. After two more weeks of marching with the guerrillas, they decided to leave at the other end of the military sector, in Muyupampa, a town northwest of Lagunillas on the road to ucre. Meanwhile, in Lagunillas, a young Anglo-Chilean free-lance photographer called George Roth was riding a horse into the hills in the hope of finding the guerrillas. Roth, who had been filming the Bolivian Army's operations, rode out on 16 April with a wave to the military commander, who knew of his intentions.
Two days later, guided by a local peasant, Roth stumbled into the guerrilla encampment outside Muyupampa. There he found Debray and Bustos. The guerrillas were by now anxious to be rid of all three men, who were hampering their operations. Thus, 10 hours after Roth discovered the guerrillas, the three men were expelled from the encampment and began to make their way down to Muyupampa on foot.
At 6 a.m. on 20 April, Debray, Bustos and Roth walked into the small -798-
township, unarmed, in civilian clothes and carrying cameras. They were trying to hire a jeep to drive to Sucre and La Paz when they were arrested by the local agents of the DIC -- the Bolivian political police.
Debray was unworried by this; journalists in Bolivia are frequently hauled in for interrogation. A French Dominican missionary, Pére Schwartz, saw him a few hours after his arrest and asked if he should report it to the French Embassy in Ia Paz. "Don't bother," Debray said. "We will be released in a matter of hours."
While the three men were in the police station, a Bolivian journalist, Hugo Delgadillo, of Presencia, saw them. He chatted with them and photographed then: Nothing abnormal seemed to have happened.
In fact, unknown to Delgadillo, a deserter from the guerrillas had identified Debray and Bustos as having been with the guerrillas. When the police learnt this, they telephoned command headquarters in Lagunillas.
An hour later, the Fourth Army Division's solitary helicopter picked up the prisoners. They were taken to the Army barracks at Choreti. "At eight o'clock in the morning, I was arrested," Debray told us. "By eight in the evening, I was being tortured." Bustos and Roth received similar treatment. It was only when a superior officer, Major SAnchez, arrived and intervened that the torture stopped. A local doctor called to attend to the prisoners two days after their arrest found them barely conscious.
Debray was shown an obituary of himself, published abroad, and told: "It will be easy for us to shoot you now; why should we bother to present you to the world, when it believes you already dead?" Bustos was also brutally maltreated and pressure put on him to give "evidence" against Debray.
Debray says that he was now endlessly interrogated by Bolivian Intelligence officers, American CIA agents, and Cuban exiles sent down from Miami. 24 April, four days after Debray's ar~ rest, the register at the Hotel Beirut records the arrival in Camiri of two U.S. military officers, Major Theodore Kirsch and Joseph Keller (rank unknown). In May, another group of U.S. officers -- Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Price, Major Theodore Kirsch again, and "James Evetts" and "D, Fabian" (ranks unspecified) -- visited Camiri.
The extreme precariousness of the Bolivian military regime helps to explain the treatment of the prisoners. The prime allegiance of the Government bureaucracy and civilian police is still to the pre-
vious regime; the destitute Indian peasantry has no reason to support the military, and the tin miners, who earn most of the country's foreign exchange, are opposed to a Government which has cut their wages by 50 percent, imprisoned their trade-union leaders, declared largescale redundancies [layoffs] and sent troops against them. On 24 June, 29 miners were shot at the San José mine, according to Government communiqués. In 1965, Debray himself wrote: "Bolivia is the country where the subjective and objective conditions (for armed struggle) are best combined. It is the only country in South America where a socialist revolution is on the agenda...."
This was the country chosen by Ché Guevara for his reentry into the Latin- American scene. His arrival at the Casa Caramina some time in late 1966 or early 1967 was the detonator for the explosive political situation in Bolivia.
In four months, the Bolivian guerrillas have inflicted worse casualties on the Bolivian Army than its Venezuelan or Colombian counterparts have in a year. The Army says 55 men, including nine officers, have been lost since 23 March. It has captured only one genuine guerrilla, Jorge VAazquez, and has killed five others.
The guerrillas have moved steadily northwards from the oil zone of Camiri and Monteagudo towards Santa Cruz, Bolivia's second largest city. By early July they had reached the Santa Cruz-La Paz highway, the country's most important strategic and commercial road, over 300 miles north of their initial base.
On 6 July, they seized the town of Samiapata, about 300 miles west of Santa Cruz. The raid was directed by a man sitting in a jeep on the hill outside the town, hidden by bodyguards; the peasants who brought him bread and cheese were made to stay at a distance from the vehicle and were prevented from getting a glimpse of him. The precautions indicate that the unseen commander was Guevara. Indeed, the whole campaign to date has borne his stamp -- a series of swift moves which have distinguished the Bolivian guerrilla movement from others in Latin America, and have constantly sur~ prised and outmanoeuvred the Bolivian Army, whose only "victory" so far has been the "capture" of Debray.
This suspicion that Guevara was in Bolivia has clearly contributed to the violence in the interrogation of Debray. Roth, who had never even heard of Debray before their chance encounter in the hills, is still afraid even to speak of his treatment under interrogation.
Debray's fate has provoked a major international outcry. His father is a distinguished Paris lawyer and his mother a prominent right-wing politician, for 20 years vice-president of the Paris municipal council. President de Gaulle and the Pope have both intervened with the Bolivian authorities. Writers, professors and academicians of all political shades from Sartre to Mauriac came out in his defence. In Britain and the U.S. Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, Graham Greene, Bertrand Russell and others have protested.
Debray, Bustos and Roth are all convinced that only the international publicity saved them from being silently eliminated. The first person from the outside world to establish that Debray was alive was Monsignor Kennedy, an American prelate related to the late President, who was allowed to see him on 6 June.
Camiri is set in a bowl of hills, with only one dusty road leading into it. One-storey houses, rect ar streets and saloon-like bars give it the air of Dodge City in a Western. The last civilian mayor, indeed, was fond of firing shots into the air in restaurants when service was slow -- before he was himself shot down in 1964 in the town hall during a petrol workers' riot.
The trial has been postponed until 8 or 9 September. Debray and Bustos are being accused with five Bolivians who are allegedly captured guerrillas. In fact, two -- Salustio Choque and Vicente Rocabado -- are deserters from the guerrillas and pawns of the Army. The others are men expelled from the combat zone for physical deficiencies by the guerrillas themselves.
Bustos, despite ceaseless pressure to testify against Debray, told us in his cell: "I will certainly not be giving evidence against Régis. He is innocent of all the charges. He behaved like a journalist."
Roth has been provisionally released in La Paz and swore to us with great emotion that "nothing I have said incriminates Debray, and nothing will induce me to invent evidence against him." The one genuine guerrilla prisoner, Jorge V4squez, has, according to the Army, "escaped" from the hospital where he lay seriously wounded. He has almost certainly been killed by the Army.
Debray, meanwhile, remains locked in his tiny cell in the Casino Militar. The chief jailer, Colonel Luis Reque Taran, a former Bolivian attaché in Washington, told us: "I wouldn't be surprised if the Communists planned a raid to kill Debray. He has told us everything about the guerrillas and they will want to kill him for that." (In fact, as one of his military interrogators has confirmed, Debray has told the Army nothing about the guerrillas.) Of the charge that he
"inspired" the guerrillas, he commented: "They hardly need a 26-year-old Frenchman to teach them how to fight."
He believes Guevara has already
left Bolivia: "He has, after all, conti-
nental responsibilities."
TOKYO YOUTHS