2023-05-07 22:55:00
He Bolivian General Gary Prado Salmón, famous for having captured the guerrilla Ernesto “Che” Guevara, died this May 7 in the city of Santa Cruz at the age of 84. “He was accompanied by his wife and his children. He leaves us a legacy of love, honesty and courage. He was an extraordinary person,” wrote his son Gary Prado Araúz on Facebook.
Since mid-April, Prado Salmón suffered from health complications and was hospitalized, for which his son thanked in his message all the people who supported his family “in this time of his agony.” One day following his death, his family denounced that the Bolivian army refused to give him a final goodbye with military honors.
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The son of a soldier and born in Rome in 1939, Prado Salmón spent his childhood in Bolivia and received military training. His military career spanned 35 years, where he held positions as instructor, military professor, regiment commander, division commander and diplomatic functions, according to the Bolivian newspaper Duty.
The general, then a captain in the Bolivian army, led a patrol in southwestern Bolivia on October 8, 1967 that ended with the capture of “Che” Guevara, who was then wounded. For this fact, the Bolivian Army remembers him as the hero of the battle of Ñancahuazú.
The story of the arrest of Che Guevara, in the words of Gary Prado
In an interview given in 2016, the soldier recalled the raid that culminated in Guevara’s arrest: “I went down with 60 men and we set up an operation at regarding 9:30 in the morning. We closed off the ends of the ravines, we began to register and the combat began, because most of the guerrilla group was actually inside there. The combat lasted until around 5:00 in the followingnoon, but following 1:30 in the followingnoon, two soldiers, who were guarding one of the ledges of the ravine, took two prisoners, they yelled at me, Captain, here we have two. I went to see him and it was “Che”. He had a slight injury to his right calf and his carbine was destroyed by a shot.”
Gary Prado continued his story: “We went to La Higuera, we spent the night there, I have spoken with Che, I have taken care of him, I have given him coffee, I have fed him. The following dawn the commander of the police arrived by helicopter Eighth Division, Colonel Centeno Anaya and my battalion commander, Major Miguel Ayoroa, I gave the corresponding report to both of them and handed over the prisoners, Che and Willy Cuba, who was Bolivian. I’m going back to the ravine because we still have to keep looking”.
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“That night I hardly slept because of the tension and I ordered my four second lieutenants to take turns so that there was always someone with the prisoner. I used to go to see him all the time. We brought him food, coffee, cigarettes… There was no need to harass him,” Prado said.
When confronting Che, Prado had to reassure the guerrilla: “Che thought that they were not going to kill him and this type of talk made him recover his morale. We did not have orders not to take prisoners.” A day later, the military court of Santa Cruz de la Sierra complied with the order to execute Guevara.
“When we arrived, the battalion commander said ‘Che has been executed on orders from La Paz.’ I was not in La Higuera when the execution took place or when the order was received,” he recalled.
“Che was sent to die in Bolivia”
According to Padre, Che was sent to die in Bolivia, as he reflected in an interview in 2018. “After so many years, what has been unraveled is that Che was finally sent to die here,” he said. “They got rid of him, that’s the reality.” He said Cuban leader Fidel Castro did not necessarily have that intention, but “the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party no longer tolerated him because of his character and his way of being impulsive”he wrote in his book The Immolated Guerrilla.
“At the time of his capture, he was a defeated man, who saw the end of his dreams,” he recalled in 2016. “He told me ‘this is over, I am worth more to you alive than dead’, he was demoralized. That in the The first three hours in my custody I gave him water, coffee, cigarettes… he saw that we treated him well, with respect because there was no need to do anything or ask him anything.”
For Prado Salmón, Che’s arrest was only “a small incident half a page in the history books.” “For him, the capture of Che was not the most important thing he did in his life. For him, the most important thing was to help make the Armed Forces a democratic institution, respectful of the Constitution and the laws,” recalled Padro’s son.
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That same year, the Bolivian Congress named Prado Salmón a national hero for defending what the Bolivian military government of General René Barrientos then considered a “subversive foreign invasion.” Years later, he was prosecuted by the courts during the government of Evo Morales for an alleged crime of terrorism that he always denied.
The accusation of the Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS) once morest Prado Salmón occurred, in his words, “to break the civic spirit and the Santa Cruz spirit that was confronting and obtaining support from other departments for the totalitarian MAS project.” “That has been the goal, and they have largely achieved it,” he argued.
In 1981, an accidental shot hit his spine and left him in a wheelchair.. In 1988 he retired from his military career and later served as Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and Mexico, as a university professor and presidential adviser during the government of Jaime Paz Zamora.
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