The University of San Andrés, La Paz

The rector received me in his office on the eleventh floor of the tower block that houses the University of San Andrés. The tower block stands on the edge of the old centre of La Paz and looks much as many buildings looked after the Warsaw Uprising had ended. Walls riddled with bullet holes, here and there a wall torn open by an artillery shell. Many windows have no glass, and since we are at an altitude of nearly four thousand metres, sharp cold winds sweep through the corridors.

Students sit at lectures frozen and huddled; the wind tears their notes away and scatters them into the street.

Fortunately, lectures take place infrequently. From time to time, when the spirit of the opposition university assumes a menacing form, the government closes the university for several months. During the periods when it is open, students are most often on strike — demanding the resignation of the government. If the strike has no effect, they prepare a new revolt. No one thinks of studying, and this is understandable. Students in Bolivia are, alongside the miners, the main opposition force; on them rests the burden of the struggle against the regime. To be a student in this country is a dangerous occupation. Many students die during street demonstrations; many are killed in successive armed assaults by the army on the university, or in the ranks of the partisan movement. Students come to the university armed. The university building is full of weapons — automatic pistols and crates of grenades. I remember they once had an anti-aircraft machine gun, purchased from smugglers. They placed it on the roof of the tower block and fired it at the aircraft that came to bomb the university.

The rector’s office too is full of bullet marks — fresh marks, the residue of a fratricidal war the students had recently waged among themselves. Not all the young people here are left-wing. Some are in the service of the oligarchy. Others belong to various groups at odds with one another: anarchists and Trotskyists, Maoists and independent Christian Democrats, social fascists and national revolutionaries. On the Faculty of Medicine, 13 political parties are active. Across the whole university — about 20 parties, though it is difficult to count exactly, since many form and disappear within a week. Political life in Latin America is a process of constant budding — an astonishingly vital party reproduction. The greatest difficulty for a Latin American is to submit to someone else’s discipline, so if he wishes to be politically active, his first impulse is to create his own party.

The war that left its marks in the rector’s office was fought between Trotskyists and anarchists. The Trotskyists declared themselves the supreme political authority of the students and demanded recognition of this fact by the other groupings. The anarchists — opponents of all constituted and organised authority — declared the Trotskyists usurpers and agents of the government. Among Bolivian students the most insulting epithet is to call someone an agent of the government; shooting immediately ensues. During the dispute the Trotskyists occupied the university tower block, while the anarchists entrenched themselves in the neighbouring hall of residence.

The exchange of fire lasted two weeks. The government watched with indifference, since it suited it to let the students bleed each other dry.

The Story of the Peredo Family

The Peredo family is a subject for an entire novel. The commander of the new partisan unit, Chato Peredo, was the youngest of six brothers. His father Romulo ran a scandal sheet in Cochabamba. His first brother Romulo died in a drunken shootout in a bar. The second, Esteban, was a cowboy, killed in a fight over cattle. The third, Pedro, died as a policeman, shot by bandits. Three more came from Romulo’s eighth wife. Of these, Coco died as a partisan in Che Guevara’s unit at the age of 28. His brother Inti — also in Che’s unit — survived another year, wandering Bolivia as a lone partisan, a one-man Liberation Army. He was killed in September 1969 in La Paz, shot by police in his sleep.

Now the youngest, Chato Peredo, was avenging his brothers. He had formed a partisan unit of 75 people — mainly students. On 18 July 1970 the unit set out into the forest.

Teoponte — The Account of Guillermo Veliz

We left La Paz in two lorries. Officially we were a brigade fighting illiteracy. A ceremonial send-off was held before the Presidential Palace. No one looked into the backs of the lorries, and there at the bottom lay a great deal of weapons and tinned food. In the afternoon we reached the South American Placers gold mine, owned by a Californian conglomerate. We blew up the hoist and took two West German technicians hostage. We released them when the government released ten political prisoners. We entered the jungle — the selva — three hundred kilometres north of La Paz. From the first day, aircraft circled above us. The army occupied the roads and villages and waited for us to die of exhaustion and hunger.

Nobody knew the terrain. Half the unit had never left the city before. We had to keep moving to avoid encirclement. Two weeks in, the food ran out. People began to weaken. We ate bamboo shoots, roots, wild fruit. Nobody knew what was edible and what poisonous. There are trees in that jungle from which a resin drips that is worse than hydrochloric acid — one drop burns through a skull to the brain. Wild wasps. If one stings you in the eye, you go blind. Poisonous snakes everywhere. You cannot sit by day because ants will eat you alive; you cannot sleep by night because of the mosquitoes.

On the ninth day without food, one man shot himself. The next day our commissar Nestor Paz died of exhaustion in the arms of the commander. We all loved Nestor — he was the most beloved man in the unit. We carried his body for five days until the current of a river carried his remains away.

We were seventy-five. Eight survived. The army shot fifty-five. Twelve went missing.

Guevara and Allende

At a meeting someone from the floor asks me to compare the figure of Guevara with that of Allende and to say which of them was right.

Behind this question lies the view that only one of them could have been right, and the audience awaits my choice between the path of Che Guevara and the path of Salvador Allende.

At a certain point in his life Guevara abandons his ministerial office, abandons his desk, and goes to Bolivia, where he organises a partisan unit. He dies as its commander. Allende — the reverse: Allende dies defending his desk, his presidential office, from which — as he always said — “they will carry me out only in a wooden pyjama” — that is, in a coffin.

Superficially these are very different deaths; in reality the difference concerns only the place, the time, and the external circumstances. Allende and Guevara give their lives for the power of the people. The first — defending it; the second — fighting for it. Allende’s desk is only a symbol, just as Guevara’s peasant boots are a symbol.

Both were convinced to the last that they were following the most righteous path: for Guevara it was the path of armed action; for Allende, the path of political struggle. Both were by profession doctors — Guevara a surgeon, Allende an internist. The shots that end Guevara’s life and Allende’s life were not fired from ambush. Both accept their deaths consciously, knowing it is coming. Each of them could save himself — has every chance, has time.

In the way they die, Guevara and Allende share an absolute determination, a consciously chosen irreversibility, a kind of insane dignity. In those last hours everything that might serve their salvation is cast aside: bargaining, manoeuvring, compromise, surrender, or flight. The path clears and straightens, and leads only into death.

Both deaths are manifestations — challenges. The desire to publicly attest to one’s conviction, and the willingness, free from all hesitation, to pay for it at the highest price.

Can one say which of them was right? Both were right. They acted in different circumstances, but the goal of their action was the same. Both inscribe the first chapter in the history of the Latin American revolution. That history is only beginning — only being made.

source: kapuscinski.info