Che Guevara was captured by US-trained Bolivian Rangers

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was captured on 8 October 1967 in a ravine near the village of La Higuera, Bolivia, by the Bolivian army’s 2nd Ranger Battalion, less than an hour into a firefight that began at about 1 p.m. A CIA memo sent to the Secretary of State three days later said he had a wound in his leg but was otherwise in fair condition.

The capture ended an insurgency that had little chance from the start. Guevara began his Bolivian campaign with only about sixty fighters, not all of them Bolivian, and chose sparsely settled countryside where recruits were few and frightened. By October, a Ranger patrol probing the valley counted just seventeen rebels. Guevara and two men covered the retreat of the wounded; halfway up the slope, Rangers confronted him and demanded his surrender. Two Bolivian guerrillas, “Willy” and “Aniceto”, were taken with him.

Who actually caught him

Bolivian soldiers, under Captain Gary Prado Salmón — but with deep American involvement. US Army Green Berets had trained the Ranger battalion from June to September that year, and the CIA had attached two of its contract officers to it, posing as Bolivian captains. One of them, Felix Rodriguez, was at battalion headquarters in Vallegrande when the shooting started; he flew over La Higuera, confirmed by radio that the prisoner really was Guevara, and reached the village the next morning. Yet only that May, when the captured French writer Régis Debray named Guevara as the guerrillas’ leader, had the CIA begun to doubt its belief that he was dead.

National Security Adviser Walt Rostow took the result as vindication:

“It shows the soundness of our ‘preventive medicine’ assistance to countries facing incipient insurgency.” — Walt Rostow to President Johnson, 11 October 1967

What happened to the prisoner next is told in his execution the following day, and the official lies that covered it.