Mario Terán was the man sent to kill Che Guevara

THEY HAD SPENT the night celebrating the arrest of their extraordinary prisoner, but in the bleary morning of October 9th 1967 a wake-up order came for A and B Company of the Bolivian Manchego Regiment. The words were “Saluden a Papá”, sent by President René Barrientos himself. They meant “Say hello to Dad”, and kill him. The original idea, backed by the United States, had been to send Che Guevara for court-martial; but Barrientos wanted this poisonous influence stamped out right away. Someone had to kill both Che and Willy, a guerrilla arrested with him; and when seven men were asked, and all volunteered, Colonel Zenteno’s finger had pointed at Mario Terán. “Usted al Che,” he said; you do Che.

For 40 minutes he had hung about, hoping the order would be annulled. This only infuriated his superiors. So from their camp at La Higuera, a village of no more than 20 dwellings in the dry broken hills of southern Bolivia, he was now climbing up to the schoolhouse. It was a humble place, built of mud and thatch, and silent now the children were away. But inside it was a legend, the most famous guerrilla leader anywhere, whose revolutionary socialist ideas had spread from Cuba all over Latin America and then beyond. He had been absent for years, fomenting trouble on Fidel Castro’s orders in Congo, Tanzania, Vietnam and even Europe. Now he had turned up in Bolivia with a ragtag band of guerrillas, and the day before A and B Company had run into them.