[More on Che Guevara]
Roberto Rodríguez, left, a Cuban archeologist, and Carlos Somigliano of Argentina, yesterday at grave in southern Bolivia., cleaning bones that experts believe are those of guerrilla Che Guevara.
The guerrilla Che Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia in 1967. |
VALLEGRANDE, Bolivia, July 4 — In a six-foot-deep pit, the body of Che Guevara lies exposed to the Bolivian skies. Experts who have unearthed a mass grave in this small Bolivian mountain town said today that the grave contains the remains of Guevara and six of his guerrilla comrades.
The skull that is thought to be Guevara's Lies partly exposed at the bottom of the pit, covered by an olive-green military jacket. The skeleton has no hands, an important clue.
Although the remains have not yet been exhumed and definitely identified, two of the experts say they are "100 percent sure" they have at long last found the remains of the legendary Argentine-Cuban revolutionary.
After Guevara was wounded and captured on Oct. 8, 1967, he was held overnight and executed on the orders of the Bolivian President, and in the presence of a Cuban-American agent for the Central Intelligence Agency. The revolutionary had come to Bolivia in 1966 to begin what he hoped would be a continental revolution by Marxists against "Yankee imperialism." The deaths came after an abortive 11-month campaign led by Guevara, the former confidant of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The missing hands are the strongest piece of evidence. After Guevara's execution, his body and those of several of his comrades were flown by helicopter to this town. His body lay in public view in a hospital laundry for 24 hours, after which it and those of his comrades vanished.
The Bolivian high command decided to "disappear" their bodies to deny the guerrilla a place where his disciples could pay him homage alter death. But to preserve evidence that they had killed Guevara, they amputated his hands.
Since then, the whereabouts of the bodies has remained one of Latin America's most enduring mysteries and a state secret in Bolivia. Guevara's hands, preserved in formaldehyde, eventually surfaced in Cuba.
The long silence was finally broken in Nov. 1995 when a retired Bolivian general, Mario Vargas Salinas, disclosed that he had taken part in the secret burial in the early hours of Oct. 11, 1967, and that the guerrilla leader and his comrades had been buried in a pit dug by a bulldozer on the edge of Vallegrande's dirt air-strip.
After General Vargas Salinas's revelations, President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada formed a commission to find the bodies and return them to the families.
After several weeks of excavations by an Argentine forensic team and Bolivian soldiers, the bodies of several guerrillas were found, but not Guevara's. Under pressure from irate military colleagues, General Vargas Salinas went underground after saying he did not remember the exact location of Guevara's grave.
Over the last year and a half, Cuban Government forensic experts and historians intensified the effort to discover the graves in Vallegrande. They scanned the earth with mapping equipment to detect "anomalies," then returned in May, prepared to dig in places where they had determined that earth had been disturbed by a bulldozer.
But their work was halted for six weeks when the town passed an ordinance forbidding further excavation. Local authorities have long expressed a wish that the remains of Guevara and his comrades remain here, and planned a mausoleum.
But given the wishes of the families that the remains be returned to them, the Bolivian Interior Ministry overturned the local ordinance and authorized the work to continue.
The digging resumed on June 19, and on June 28 Bolivians working with the Cubans bulldozed open a trough in which they found human remains. As they dug, they realized that this was a site that had once been dug up by a bulldozer. Over the last few days the skeletal remains of seven men have come into view. The Cubans were joined on July 1 by three Argentine forensic anthropologists who were involved in the earlier digging, and what they have found "coincides absolutely with General Vargas Salinas's account," said one of the Argentine experts, Alejandro Inchaurregui.
Mr. Inchaurregui said today, "We have found common mass graves in which all the bodies were dumped in the same moments." He said three of the bodies were lying on top of one another, indicating that they had been thrown into the pit. Several of the skeletons are wearing crude sandals and others have military boots.
"The theory for the hypothesis that these are the bodies of Che and his comrades is strong, but we still have to undertake the work of identification," Mr. Inchaurregui said.
On Sunday the forensic team expects to remove the bodies to a laboratory for formal identification and Mr. lnchaurregui says he expects the identification of Guevara to be complete on Monday.
In addition to the missing hands, one further detail has strengthened the belief that the remains are Guevara's: In a pocket of the jacket covering the skeleton with no hands are traces of plaster of Paris.
On the same evening that Guevara's hands were amputated, death masks were made of his face at the Vallegrande Hospital. The plaster traces could be residue from that process.
Mindfully.org note:
These photos were taken of the screen displaying microfilm of this article.
Roberto Rodríguez, left, a Cuban archeologist, and Carlos Somigliano of Argentina, yesterday at grave in southern Bolivia., cleaning bones that experts believe are those of guerrilla Che Guevara.
The guerrilla Che Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia in 1967.
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