At 1.40pm on October 9, 1967, the 25-year-old Mario Terán, a thin-faced, wiry and moustached sergeant in the Bolivian army, took a swig of whisky and marched into a two-room adobe schoolhouse in the village of La Higuera, 155 miles southwest of Santa Cruz. His orders were to execute Che Guevara, a leading figure in the Cuban revolution who had chosen Bolivia as a launchpad for his worldwide Marxist-inspired movement. Guevara had been cornered the previous day and, after a gunfight, surrendered to a battalion of rangers under the command of Gary Prado, a 28-year-old captain.
Prado recalled that shortly after 10am he received the code words by radio: “Greetings to dad.” His colonel, Joaquin Zenteno, asked for volunteers to carry out the execution. Seven soldiers came forward and Zenteno pointed his index finger at Terán and a second soldier, who would dispatch Simeón Cuba Sarabia, known as Willy, another revolutionary who had surrendered with Guevara.
Guevara, wounded and suffering from asthma, had assumed he would be spared. “I’m worth more to you alive than dead,” he told his captors. President Barrientos of Bolivia thought otherwise.
“When I arrived, Che was sitting,” Terán told a Spanish journalist in 2016. “Seeing me, he said, ‘You have come to kill me.’ I felt self-conscious and lowered my head without answering. I did not dare to shoot. At that moment I saw Che great, very great. He felt that he was greater than me and when he stared at me he made me dizzy. I feared that with a quick movement he could take the gun away from me.” On another occasion he recalled Guevara’s last words: “Calm down and point well; you are about to kill a man.”
Terán described how he “stepped back towards the doorway, closed my eyes, and fired the first burst. Che fell to the ground with his legs shattered . . . I recovered my spirits and fired the second burst, which hit him in the arm, in the shoulder and in the heart.” The shots left two bloody, fist-sized holes on the wall. Lieutenant Carlos Perez, the only other person present, then shot Guevara in the neck. Other soldiers came in also wanting to shoot their long-invincible adversary. Nine wounds were later reported.
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Guevara was an Argentinian but he achieved mythic status through his role in the Cuban revolution that won power in 1959 under Fidel Castro; a few years later he tried unsuccessfully to lead other insurrections in Africa and then in South America. His bearded and beret-clad face, immortalised by the photographer Alberto Korda, still adorns thousands of student rooms. In 2016 the Smithsonian magazine noted: “From Bolivia to the Congo, from Vietnam to South Africa, from the USSR to the US, Korda’s Che became the apostle of anticapitalism and the ultimate icon for peaceful social activists everywhere.”
Terán returned to the scene two months after Guevara’s death, posing for a photograph. “There they took it, at the school door,” he said. “There were several who insisted on wanting to photograph me and talk to me. And I just went out into the street. And well, that’s it. I posed and it’s the only photo.” That image fell into the hands of Michèle Ray, a journalist from Paris Match, who spent six weeks piecing together the story of Guevara’s capture and death.
Thereafter Terán effectively vanished: he rarely spoke about Guevara; his address was Bolivia’s best-kept secret; and former guerrilla fighters speculated that he had an agreement with the CIA, which was said to be protecting him. Others believed he was afraid of a Cuban unit seeking revenge. According to Julia Cortez, the village schoolteacher who brought Guevara some soup shortly before his death, Terán was “afraid of the curse of Che”, which is said to have brought the premature deaths of several of those associated with the revolutionary’s demise.
Many years later Terán’s sight was said to have been restored by Cuban doctors in a Cuban-funded hospital in Bolivia. Granma, the official Cuban newspaper, reported with glee: “Four decades after Mario Terán attempted to destroy a dream and an idea, Che returns to win yet another battle, and continues on in the struggle.” The soldier was dismissive. “It’s not like they say, that they’ve given me my sight back,” he insisted. “I wasn’t blind. I had a simple cataract.”
Terán, who never returned to La Higuera, had little time for the evolving Guevara mythology, nor did he ever watch a film, read a book or see a play about the revolutionary. “I have never been interested in following what was said about Che,” he said.
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Mario Terán Salazar was born in Cochabamba, a city in central Bolivia, in 1941, the son of Vincente Terán, a merchant, and his wife, Canelaria Salazar. He joined the Bolivian army in 1959 and in 1965 married Julia Peralta Salas, though at the time of their nuptials his year of birth was recorded as 1942. They had six children, Mario, Victor Hugo, Ana Maria, Ana Karina, Janet and Abigail; he was glad that none of them followed him into the military.
The day before Guevara’s execution Terán was on patrol with the army, hunting down guerrillas, when his unit came under fire. He later claimed that seeing his comrades being killed was the reason he volunteered to execute Guevara.
Terán left the Bolivian army after 30 years of service and became a truck driver. A short figure with a paunch, he was first tracked down in Santa Cruz in 1987 but was reluctant to talk about the past, at times denying any involvement in Guevara’s killing. He insisted that he had never imagined that it would have such widespread ramifications, adding: “It put me and my family in danger.”
Mario Terán, Bolivian soldier and executioner of Che Guevara, was born on April 9, 1941. He died after a long illness on March 10, 2022, aged 80