Coco Peredo

Bolivia: The Country That Would Not Be Ignited

Che Guevara chose Bolivia for his continental guerrilla campaign for reasons that seemed strategically sound: it bordered five other South American countries, making it a potential base for operations across the continent; it had a history of revolutionary politics, with the 1952 National Revolution still a living memory; it had a significant organised communist movement that had promised support; and its geography — the eastern jungle, the Ñancahuazú region — offered the kind of remote terrain in which a guerrilla force could establish itself and operate. The logic was not unreasonable, and it was not applied carelessly: Guevara spent months in Bolivia before the campaign began, establishing the base camp, training the initial cadre, assessing the conditions.

What the logic missed — or underestimated — was the specific character of Bolivian peasant politics in 1967. The 1952 revolution had not merely been a political event: it had been an agrarian revolution that distributed land to the peasant communities of the altiplano and the valleys. The peasants who received that land had, in consequence, a material stake in the existing social order that distinguished them sharply from the landless rural poor who had fuelled revolutions elsewhere. They were not waiting for liberation — they had already achieved the specific liberation that most mattered to them, the land, and they were suspicious of armed strangers whose political project might disturb the security of what they had gained. The guerrilla column, which could not communicate effectively in Quechua or Aymara and whose political message was delivered in the register of continental Marxism rather than the specific concerns of Bolivian agrarian life, found the peasantry indifferent or hostile rather than sympathetic. Without peasant support, the foco theory — which depended on the guerrilla force's ability to attract a popular base — could not work.

The Brothers and Their Commitment

The Peredo brothers' participation in Guevara's campaign was not incidental or opportunistic — it was the expression of a political commitment that had been building across their entire adult lives. They were communists in a country where being a communist carried real costs: surveillance, harassment, periods of detention, the permanent risk of more serious repression when political conditions allowed it. They joined a campaign that they understood was dangerous, in conditions that were not optimal, because they believed that the structural conditions of Bolivian poverty — the rural misery, the urban exploitation, the racial hierarchy that subordinated the indigenous majority to a mestizo and white minority elite — required a structural response that the existing political system was not capable of providing.

Whether they were right in that analysis is a question that subsequent Bolivian history complicates but does not simply refute. The electoral path that the Bolivian left eventually took — the path of Evo Morales's coca growers' movement and the MAS party that won the presidency in 2005 — achieved in democratic form some of the social transformation that the Peredo brothers had sought through armed struggle. But the democratic path was not available in 1967 in anything like the form it would take in 2005: the Barrientos military government had suppressed the organised left, and the formal political channels were controlled by forces committed to maintaining the existing social order. The Peredo brothers' conclusion that armed struggle was the available path was made in specific historical conditions, not in a theoretical vacuum, and it deserves to be evaluated in those conditions rather than against the possibilities that only became available decades later.

Vado del Yeso: The River and What It Took

Rivers have a particular significance in guerrilla warfare — they are both obstacles and vulnerabilities, points where movement must become slow and exposed, where the cover that forest and mountain terrain provides disappears in the moment of crossing. The army units tracking Guevara's column knew this, and the positioning of forces at crossing points was a standard counter-insurgency tactic. The guerrillas knew the risk of river crossings too, but the logistics of the Ñancahuazú region left few alternatives: the column had to move, and moving meant crossing rivers.

The ambush at Vado del Yeso killed nine people in a matter of minutes. Coco Peredo, who had been one of the column's most experienced and most trusted members — the man who knew Bolivia, who had the contacts, who could move through Bolivian society with the confidence of someone who had spent his life there — was among those killed. Haydée Tamara Bunke, who had built her intelligence cover over years for exactly the kind of campaign that was failing around her, died in the same crossing. Seven others whose names are less known internationally but whose lives and commitments were equally real died alongside them. The river that killed them was doing nothing more than being a river. The army unit that killed them was doing exactly what it had been trained and positioned to do. And the campaign that brought them to that river on that morning was following a strategy that history has judged to have been mistaken in its assessment of the conditions. All of these things are true simultaneously, and none of them fully explains or contains what happened at Vado del Yeso on 31 August 1967.

Also Profiled — Colombia, Venezuela & Bolivia