FADED JUNGLE GREENS WERE HIS FUNERAL ROBES
[The following paragraphs are from a report by Marlene Nadle, sent from Camiri, Bolivia, describing how the body of Che Guevara was brought in. The article was printed in the October 19 issue of The Village Voice, a New York weekly.]
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Children were the first to spot the body of guerrilla leader Ernesto Che Guevara lashed to the landing runners of a helicopter that hovered over the small air strip in Valle Grande. At 4:55 p.m. on Monday, October 9, the copter landed in a spot far from the swelling crowd which, except for the press, was held back by soldiers with bayonets.
The corpse was hustled into a Chevrolet van which was pursued across the airport by journalists in jeeps. They passed crates of napalm and stopped in front of a small, three-sided shed that was to serve as a makeshift mortuary.
A uniformed, stocky, blonde man in his 30s emerged from the van and shouted, "Let's get the hell out of here." Later, he denied any knowledge of English. Although the fellow wore no insignia on his jungle greens, he appeared to be direct-— ing the operation. No officer would identify him, but rumor was rampant that he was a Cuban exile in the employ of the
The body was removed from the Chevy and placed on the same slab that, just two weeks earlier, had been used for another guerrilla leader, Coco Peredo. Guevara's patched and faded jungle greens were his funeral robes; they were caked with blood. For shoes, he had only pieces of leather tied with ropes. His beard was scanty; his hair shoulder length.
If Guevara's body looked thinner than his recent photos, it was testimony to the last days when, pursued by the Bolivian army, he traveled great distances and suffered many privations. In the end, he was caught in a canyon-like fold in the hills near Higueras. There had been no cover for escape -- only the bald canyon walls. The Eighth Army troops simply waited him out. On the night of October 8, they got hin.
The body was fingerprinted, then stripped of its clothes and washed down. Physicians, assisted by a beaming nun, prepared it for embalming. They incised the neck. The nun, still smiling, handed them forceps, scissors, and swabs. Reporters, clinging to their vantage point, counted bullet holes: two in the neck and one in the thorax. There was also a wound in the abdomen.
While the body was being worked on, General Alfredo Ovando Candia, armed forces commander, made a short visit to the shed. He departed grinning. All the officers seemed jubilant, not so much at the death of Che Guevara, as at their own success in destroying the subject of so much speculation. It was as if Guevara had been apocryphal until they killed hin.
Outside the shed, more soldiers held the crowd back with bayonets -- but they couldn't quiet them. "SHOW US CHE. SHOW US CHE," they shouted. When the doctors had finished, they dressed Che Guevara in his bloody uniform and raised him up on the stretcher for all to see.