General Gary Prado Salmón, who as a captain of the Bolivian Army led the operation to capture the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, an important ally of Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution, in 1967, died in May 6 at a hospital in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. He was 84 years old.
His son, Gary Prado Arauz, announced the death on Facebook but did not give a cause.
After leaving Cuba in 1965, Guevara tried and failed to ignite a Communist revolutionary movement in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after which he and other guerrillas headed to Bolivia in the following year, hoping to overthrow the government of President René Barrientos Ortuño, a general took control of the country in a coup.
Captain Prado and his men – part of a CIA-backed special forces unit – had been hunting the guerrillas for months when he received a tip from a farmer, an old friend from school. , who said he had seen them in a deep ravine near the small village of La Higuera.
At about 1:00 p.m. on October 8, 1967, Captain Prado heard shouts from the ravine: His soldiers had captured two guerrillas.
When one of them surrendered, General Prado then told The New York Timeshe called out, “I’m Che Guevara, and for you I’m more worth living than dying.”
Mr. Guevara was wounded in battle, his gun was broken.
General Prado said in a 2017 interview with FT Magazine: “He was in poor shape, dirty, smelly and rundown. “He has been on the run for months. His hair is long and messy and messy, and his beard is bushy.” And, General Prado said, “He had no shoes, just pieces of animal skin on his feet.”
Mr. Guevara was confined in a room of a small school in the nearby village of La Higuera, where he spoke several times with Captain Prado. Asked why he was fighting in Bolivia, Guevara said: “Revolution has no borders.” Captain Prado told him he had come to the wrong country, which he said had experienced his own revolution through land reform and the nationalization of the mines.
“Then he was worried about his future,” General Prado told this year’s CE Noticias Financieras English publication. “’What will happen to me?’” I told him he was going to court.
But the next day, after Captain Prado had left to pursue other guerrillas, he said, Guevara was executed by an army sergeant on orders from President Barrientos. Captain Prado returned just in time to help tie Guevara’s body to the body of a helicopter that carried the body to nearby Vallegrande.
General Prado told FT Magazine: “He was then placed on a concrete slab in the small laundry room behind the hospital, and about 30 press photographers from around the world were invited in to take pictures. pictures of the body when it was in such a state. “It is important for the government and military to present Che’s death as a lesson to anyone who intends to invade or threaten the Bolivian way of life in the future.”
General Prado eventually wrote two books, “How I Captured Che” (1987) and “The Failure of Che Guevara: Military Response to the Guerrilla Challenge in Bolivia” (1990).
Gary Augusto Prado Salmón was born on November 15, 1938 in Rome, to Julio Prado Montaño, a Bolivian Army officer on duty in the city, and Adela Salmón Tapia. At the age of 15, after his family returned to Bolivia, Gary enrolled in the military college and graduated with the rank of second lieutenant in 1958. He became a lecturer at the school.
In 1974, seven years after Mr. Guevara’s arrest, Captain Prado became a military hero, captured as one of the leaders of an uprising against President Hugo’s military dictatorship. Banzer Suárez. However, a year later, he was reinstated.
In 1981, now a colonel in command of the army’s 8th Division, he led the recapture of an Occidental Petroleum natural gas plant in Santa Cruz held by far-rights who had threatened threatened to blow it up unless Bolivia’s military junta resigned.
But it would be Colonel Prado’s last active duty: He was paralyzed by a bullet to the spine shot by one of his men. Citing an eyewitness account, The Miami Herald reported that he was shot by a lieutenant in what Colonel Prado said was an accident.
Colonel Prado was eventually promoted to general, but an injury that left him in a wheelchair prevented him from becoming the army commander he had hoped for. He retired from the army in the late 1980s, then served as Bolivia’s ambassador to Britain and then Mexico.
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Some Mexicans who admired Guevara opposed General Prado’s appointment as ambassador. During a reception at a Mexican cultural center in 2001, Alberto Hijar, an art critic, threw a glass of wine at General Prado and shouted: “Cheer health!” Mr. Hijar told The Chicago Tribune“He’s a war criminal.”
But General Prado told The Tribune: “I did the right thing all my life, not just in this episode. I don’t need to be embarrassed or hide it.” He tried to downplay the significance of Mr. Guevara’s arrest, adding, “All of that has barely four lines in Bolivia’s history.”
