How Did Che Guevara Die? The Capture, Execution and Cover-Up in Bolivia

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Collage of three portraits of Che Guevara and a photo of soldiers around his body, with the headline How Did Che Guevara Die? The Capture, Execution and Cover-Up in Bolivia.

Just after one in the afternoon on 9 October 1967, a Bolivian army sergeant walked into a mud-walled schoolhouse in the village of La Higuera and fired a burst from an M2 carbine into a wounded prisoner. The prisoner was Ernesto “Che” Guevara, 39 years old, Argentine doctor, hero of the Cuban Revolution and the most wanted guerrilla on earth. Within a day the Bolivian government was lying about how he’d died. Within a week his hands had been cut off and his body had vanished. It’d be 30 years before anyone found it.

Most people know the outline. The detail is messier, because the declassified CIA and White House papers and the people who were actually in the room don’t always tell the same story.

Quick Answers

When and where was Che captured? On 8 October 1967 in the Quebrada del Yuro, a ravine in south-east Bolivia, by Bolivian Rangers under Captain Gary Prado.
When was he executed? On 9 October 1967, at about 1.10pm to 1.15pm, in the schoolhouse at La Higuera.
Who shot him? Sergeant Mario Terán of the Bolivian army.
Who gave the order? Bolivia’s military high command in La Paz. The CIA officer on the spot says Washington wanted Che kept alive.
What was the cover story? That he’d died of wounds from the battle.
Where’s the body? It was buried in secret beside an airstrip at Vallegrande. Remains identified as his were dug up in 1997 and now lie in Santa Clara, Cuba.

How Che Ended Up in Bolivia

Che had been restless for years. He’d helped Fidel Castro, a man who as a schoolboy once wrote to President Roosevelt asking for ten dollars, take power in January 1959 and bring the curtain down on the mob-run playground that was Batista’s Havana. He then ran Cuba’s national bank and its industry ministry before dropping out of public view in 1965. An attempt to export the revolution to the Congo collapsed inside a year, and he pulled out in the same month that Mobutu seized power there.

Fidel Castro leans in to talk to Che Guevara, who wears a beret, in a black-and-white press photograph from 1959. — Fidel Castro confers with Che Guevara in Cuba, in this original 1959 print from The New York Times archives.

Bolivia was the next attempt. Che entered the country on 3 November 1966 disguised as a balding, bespectacled Uruguayan called Adolfo Mena González, carrying papers that made him a researcher for the Organization of American States. He set up camp on a remote farm at Ñancahuazú. The idea was to start a guerrilla war in the middle of South America that would spread to the neighbours, his native Argentina included.

It went wrong early. Mario Monje, head of the Bolivian Communist Party, turned up on New Year’s Eve 1966, demanded overall command and left without a deal when Che refused. His party never properly backed the guerrillas. The force peaked at 45 fighters, 16 of them Cuban, and the local farmers it was supposed to inspire mostly wanted nothing to do with it. Che himself was an asthmatic pushing 40, a long way from the man who’d marched through the Sierra Maestra.

Passport of “Adolfo Mena González” used by Che Guevara with two photographs of him

The Net Closes

In April 1967 Che split his column in two. The halves never found each other again. Days later the French writer Régis Debray, who’d been visiting the camp, was arrested at Muyupampa and confirmed to the army that Che was the man in charge.

That got Washington’s attention. A US Army Special Forces team under Major Ralph “Pappy” Shelton set up at La Esperanza and put Bolivia’s brand new 2nd Ranger Battalion through 19 weeks of counterinsurgency training. The CIA sent two Cuban exiles, Félix Rodríguez and Gustavo Villoldo, to work with Bolivian intelligence. Rodríguez was a Bay of Pigs veteran from the same world that produced the agency’s long run of failed attempts to kill Castro.

Bolivia’s generals weren’t fussy about the company they kept in those years. Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo’s “Butcher of Lyon”, was living in La Paz under the name Klaus Altmann and would go on to advise the country’s military regimes.

On 31 August a farmer called Honorato Rojas led Che’s other column to a river crossing at Vado del Yeso, where the army was waiting. Most of them died in the opening volley, including Tania, the only woman in the force. The Rangers graduated on 17 September and went straight into the hills. Nine days later Che’s own group walked into an ambush just outside La Higuera and lost three more men.

His last diary entry, written on 7 October, recorded that they’d bumped into an old woman herding goats, paid her 50 pesos to keep her mouth shut and had little hope she would. He had 17 men left.

8 October: The Fight in the Ravine

By lunchtime the next day Prado’s Rangers had the guerrillas boxed into a steep, scrubby ravine called the Quebrada del Yuro (you’ll also see it spelled Churo). The shooting started in earnest at about 1.30pm. Che was hit in the calf and a bullet knocked his carbine out of his hands. He tried to climb out with the help of a Bolivian fighter called Simón Cuba, known as Willy, and the pair were caught at around 3.30pm.

One version, repeated in the National Security Archive’s chronology, has Che calling out that he was worth more alive than dead. It’s a line that suits his enemies rather well and it rests on the word of the soldiers who caught him, so treat it with caution.

Prado radioed divisional headquarters in Vallegrande to say they had “Papá”, the code word for Che. Colonel Joaquín Zenteno asked him to repeat it before the celebrations began. The prisoners were then taken seven kilometres to La Higuera, where Che was put in the one-room schoolhouse after dark. A memo that CIA Director Richard Helms sent to the White House three days later says he had a leg wound, was otherwise in fair condition and refused to answer questions.

The Last Morning in La Higuera

At 6.15am on 9 October a helicopter landed with Zenteno and Félix Rodríguez, who’d brought a field radio and a document camera. Rodríguez photographed Che’s diary page by page, then had his own picture taken standing next to the prisoner outside the school. It’s generally reckoned to be the last photograph of Che alive.

Che Guevara, long-haired and dishevelled, stands among Bolivian soldiers and CIA officer Félix Rodríguez at La Higuera on 9 October 1967. — The last photo of Che alive, with Rodríguez

The Helms memo contains a line that doesn’t get quoted much. The CIA officer on the scene had cabled that Che’s fate would be settled that day by Bolivia’s top brass, adding: “I am managing to keep him alive, which is very hard.”

Somebody in the village did show him some kindness. Julia Cortez, a 19-year-old trainee teacher at the school, carried in a bowl of peanut soup on her mother’s orders. Che told her it was the best thing he’d eaten in months. She was having her own lunch when she heard the shots.

Who Killed Che Guevara?

Sergeant Mario Terán of the Bolivian army pulled the trigger, acting on an order from Bolivia’s military high command. The CIA had an officer standing in the village, but on the documentary evidence it didn’t give that order.

Black-and-white photograph of Bolivian army sergeant Mario Terán in uniform and peaked cap. — Sergeant Mario Terán

The order came from La Paz. Helms’s memo puts it at 11.50am, sent directly from Bolivian army headquarters to the Rangers. Rodríguez says it arrived over the radio in a simple number code, so that anyone listening in wouldn’t hear the instruction in plain words. 500 stood for Che, 600 meant he was to be killed and 700 meant he was to be kept alive.

The message that came through was “500, 600”. The numbers rest on Rodríguez’s word alone, though the memo confirms the order itself.

President René Barrientos and his generals had decided there’d be no trial. Their thinking isn’t hard to guess. Debray’s trial was already drawing the world’s press and nobody in the capital fancied a second one with Che in the dock.

Rodríguez has always said his instructions were to keep Che alive and that aircraft were standing by to fly him to Panama for questioning. He says he told Zenteno so, and that Zenteno replied he had to obey his own orders. In a BBC interview 40 years later, Rodríguez admitted he could have faked the command to the troops and got Che out, and chose not to.

Not everybody accepts that this lets Washington off the hook. The American lawyers Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith argued in their 2011 book Who Killed Che? that the US trained the unit, supplied the intelligence and had its man standing in the village, so it can’t just shrug. What the paper trail does show is that the White House found out after the event. On 11 October national security adviser Walt Rostow told President Johnson “we are 99% sure that ‘Che’ Guevara is dead”. He called the decision to shoot him stupid, if understandable from Bolivia’s point of view, and made a point of noting that the battalion responsible was the one American Green Berets had been training.

The Execution

Rodríguez says he went into the schoolroom and told Che himself. He also says he told the soldiers not to shoot the prisoner in the face, so the wounds would match the official line that he’d died in combat. Willy was shot first, in the room next door.

Then it was Sergeant Mario Terán’s turn, and here the accounts split. One has him volunteering. Another has him losing his nerve, walking out and being ordered back in by his officers. In Terán’s own telling, Che told him to calm down and aim well. He stepped back, shut his eyes and fired. The first burst hit Che in the legs. The second hit his arm, shoulder and heart. “It was the worst moment of my life,” Terán said.

Rodríguez timed the shots at 1.10pm. Helms’s memo says 1.15pm. Rodríguez left La Higuera with Che’s Rolex, and Terán is said to have kept his pipe.

Close-up of Che Guevara's body lying shirtless on a stretcher with his eyes open as onlookers stand over him in Vallegrande, October 1967.

What Were Che Guevara’s Last Words?

Nobody knows for certain. The version quoted most often comes from a US defence intelligence report written in November 1967, which has Che telling Terán: “Know this now, you are killing a man.” Terán’s own account is close to it. The Bolivian army preferred a version in which Che admitted he’d failed.

None of them can be proved. There was no recording and no neutral witness, and every account comes from someone with a reason to tell it a particular way.

The Body in the Laundry

The body was strapped to the landing skid of a helicopter and flown to Vallegrande, where it arrived at about five that afternoon with most of the town waiting on the airfield. The British journalist Richard Gott was there. He watched it being driven to the local hospital and laid across the concrete washstands of an open laundry hut, where two doctors pumped it with embalming fluid.

Bolivian soldiers holding rifles pose around Che Guevara's body, laid out on a concrete washstand in the Vallegrande hospital laundry.

Overseeing all this was a Cuban American who gave his name as Eduardo González. When Gott asked where he was from, the man answered: “From nowhere.” It was Gustavo Villoldo of the CIA. He and Gott were the only two people in Vallegrande who’d seen Che alive, which made them the only ones who could say for certain who was lying on the slab.

Meanwhile the official story was already coming apart. The army said Che had died of battle wounds, in a coma, hours after capture. Its own officers then gave times of death that were nearly a day apart. The death certificate and the autopsy report got round the problem by leaving the time out completely, something the US ambassador drily pointed out in his cable home.

Che Guevara’s Last Photo and the Death Photo

Two photographs came out of those 48 hours and they couldn’t be more different. The first is the one Rodríguez posed for outside the schoolhouse on the morning of 9 October. Che stands among Bolivian soldiers with the CIA man at his shoulder, filthy, long-haired and in rags. Rodríguez later said the famous revolutionary looked like a beggar. He was dead by early afternoon.

The second was taken the following day, when the army let around 30 journalists into the laundry at Vallegrande. Among them was a Bolivian photographer, Freddy Alborta. His picture of the dead man lying with his eyes open, surrounded by officers, has been compared ever since to Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ and Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. The army wanted proof that Che was finished. What it sent round the world looked more like a religious painting. Alborta died in 2002, and the AP archive still credits his frames to “Anonymous”.

Neither is the image most people carry in their heads. That’s Alberto Korda’s portrait from a memorial service in Havana in March 1960, the one on the T-shirts. The two Bolivian pictures show where that face ended up seven years later.

Bolivian officers and journalists gather round Che Guevara's body in the Vallegrande laundry as an officer points at his chest, photographed by Freddy Alborta. — The day after his execution on 10 October 1967, Guevara's corpse was displayed to the news media in the laundry house of the Vallegrande hospital (photo by Freddy Alborta)

Why Were Che Guevara’s Hands Cut Off?

To prove he was dead. The Bolivian army wanted fingerprints that could be checked against Che’s Argentine identity records, and it didn’t want the body itself around for long.

The detail is grim even by the standards of the story so far. General Alfredo Ovando first ordered Che’s head cut off as proof of death. The Bolivian officers and the CIA man refused. A plaster death mask was made in its place and botched so badly that skin and eyebrows came away with it. Then the hands were sawn off and put in a jar of preserving fluid so the fingerprints could be checked. Argentine police experts matched them to Che’s identity records on 14 October.

The rest of him was buried before dawn on 11 October, somewhere near the airstrip. Ovando told Che’s brother Roberto that the body had been cremated. For three decades nobody outside a small circle of soldiers knew where it was.

The hands, though, went travelling. Bolivia’s interior minister, Antonio Arguedas, was a former communist who’d been vetted and approved by the CIA. In 1968 he secretly leaked a microfilm of Che’s diary to Cuba. A lawyer called Víctor Zannier hid the film in the sleeves of Bolivian folk records and carried it to Chile, a country with its own CIA story coming, and from there it reached Havana. Castro published it that summer and announced that the CIA had been outwitted.

Arguedas had also kept the hands and the death mask, buried at his home. In 1969 they were passed to a former Bolivian Communist Party member, Juan Coronel Quiroga, who by his own account kept the jar under his bed for five months. He then carried it in his hand luggage from La Paz to Madrid, Paris, Budapest and Moscow, and handed it over at the Cuban embassy on 5 January 1970. He also claims a man he took for a CIA agent had offered him $400,000 for the hands. That part rests on his word alone.

The Che Guevara Mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba, with a bronze statue of Che on a tall plinth beside a carved stone relief wall. — Che Guevara Monument and Mausoleum

Where Is Che Guevara Buried?

In a mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba, the city he captured in the last days of 1958. He’s been there since October 1997. For the 30 years before that, nobody would say where he was.

The secret broke in 1995, when a retired Bolivian general, Mario Vargas Salinas, told Che’s biographer Jon Lee Anderson that the body was under the Vallegrande airstrip. Cuban and Argentine forensic teams spent the best part of two years digging. On 28 June 1997 they uncovered a pit holding seven skeletons. One of them had no hands.

The remains were flown to Cuba and reburied with full honours in Santa Clara on 17 October 1997, almost 30 years to the day after the killing.

It’s worth knowing the identification has been challenged. The French journalist Bertrand de la Grange and others, whose case Álvaro Vargas Llosa summarised in 2007, point to witnesses who say Che was buried alone and to mismatches between the 1967 autopsy and the 1997 forensic report. Havana has never accepted any of that, and the handless skeleton remains the strongest single piece of evidence either way.

What Happened to the Men Who Were There

Barrientos died in a helicopter crash in 1969. Zenteno was shot dead on a Paris street in 1976. People who like the idea of a “curse of Che” make a lot of those two.

Terán spent decades living under an assumed name in Santa Cruz, mostly driving a lorry. In 2007 it emerged that he’d had cataracts removed by Cuban doctors working under Operation Miracle, a free eye surgery programme, which gave Cuba’s state newspaper a field day. He died on 10 March 2022, aged 80.

Gary Prado rose to general, was paralysed by an accidental gunshot in 1981 and was later declared a national hero by Bolivia’s parliament. He died in May 2023 at 84. Rodríguez went on to Vietnam and then to the edges of the Iran-Contra affair, and has told the La Higuera story many times since.

Walt Rostow’s verdict has aged better than most of the decisions made that week. A captured Che in a courtroom would’ve been a problem for Bolivia. A dead one, photographed on a washstand with his eyes open, turned out to be a far bigger problem for everyone who’d wanted him gone.