Richard Gott is the much-heralded author of In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chavez and the Transformation of Venezuela and, more recently, of a book called Cuba: A New History. He has worked for The Guardian newspaper as a freelance journalist for many decades and it was precisely working for The Guardian that took him to Bolivia in 1967 and the events surrounding the capture and murder of Che Guevara that he recounts here:

I went up to Bolivia in the summer of 1967 from my base in Santiago de Chile. The whole of Bolivia was under martial law as it was a military dictatorship and it was quite difficult to travel around without signed permission from the Commander in Chief. I visited Camiri where guerillas were imprisoned and talked to officers there and then I went up to Valle Grande which is in a sort of half-way zone between the mountains and the jungle.

I again talked to the military commander there and he certainly gave me the impression that Che Guevara was surrounded and that he had a very good picture of where the guerillas were and the extent to which they would possibly be captured within a few weeks. From the point of view of someone like myself who was in favor of the guerilla struggle, I was quite depressed by the news. I then retreated from Valle Grande and went to Santa Cruz, which was the biggest city in the east of Bolivia.

Outside Santa Cruz was a big American training camp where about 20 US soldiers were training a troop of about 600 Bolivian Special Forces. When I got there I talked to the commander, Colonel Robert Shelton who was in an optimistic mood because he had just sent off 600 soldiers to Valle Grande to search for the guerillas. A day later, when I was in Santa Cruz in the evening, one of the soldiers I had interviewed at the training camp was sitting at a corner restaurant and called over to tell me he had news for me - that Che Guevara had been wounded and captured and may well not survive the night.

So, with a couple of friends, I drove through the night to Valle Grande and got there at nine in the morning. We knew that Guevara wasn't there, that he was some 30 kilometers away, and we tried to get permission to go there, but that was completely forbidden so we spent the day in Valle Grande having considerable difficulties with the military that were very nervous about my companion having a telephoto lens who was busy photographing the military. We had identified this rather strange figure who was a CIA agent - a Cuban exile - wearing a sort of guerilla military kit, but without any insignia and he obviously didn't like us there taking photos of him and he tried to get us expelled.

We went to the rather primitive landing strip where you could just about land a DC-6 and a helicopter but nothing more powerful. Because this was a big military zone there was a considerable amount of coming and going, and quite a lot of guerillas and soldiers had been shot in the previous month. We spent the day at the airstrip until the Colonel came back from La Higuera (a mountain village where they had held Che) and said, with a big smile on his face, that Guevara was dead. We believed what he told us and we rushed to the village post office to see if we could send a cable but communications were far too primitive. We then waited around because we understood that they would fly out Che Guevara's body to the airstrip. So we returned there and spent the afternoon there. A helicopter made two or three trips to La Higuera to bring back the bodies of the soldiers who had been killed.

Eventually at 5:00 o'clock in the afternoon the helicopter landed at the far end of the airfield and we could feel that they wanted to take the body away, which was in a stretcher on the landing rails of the helicopter, so that we wouldn't see anything. Indeed, that's what happened. The corpse on the stretcher was loaded into a Chevrolet van which then went off at great speed up the airfield. So we got into our jeep and told the driver to follow which he did through the rough cobbled streets of Valle Grande until eventually we got very close up to the van which suddenly braked and turned sharply left up a hill into the gates of what was a small village hospital.

The soldiers guarding the hospital tried to close the gates after the van, but we were so close to it that they couldn't and we just followed the van, parking the jeep right behind the Chevrolet of which the back door suddenly opened and the CIA agent jumped out saying in English, "Let's get the hell outta here" in a broad American accent, after having obviously had a horrid journey in the back with a corpse.

They then took the body in the stretcher across the courtyard and laid it out in a sort of laundry hut across two stone basins where the sheets and clothes were normally washed. That was the first time we got to look at the figure. I'd met Che about four years before in Havana and knew what he looked like and had no doubt from the first moment that this was him. Essentially, people really didn't want to believe that it was him, and it has to be said that dead guerillas look similar with long hair, long beards, dressed in sort of guerilla clothes. But I had no doubts at all that this was Che Guevara. The crowd of people looking on didn't want to believe it and hoped that it wasn't him. The military were sure it was him because they knew they had captured him, but they didn't have any proof and realized that people might not believe it. However, when we came to send out our reports my testimony was included and the story went around the world saying we knew it was him because I was, in fact, the only person who had known him alive.

The corpse itself was very beautiful and, as it were, very self-possessed. It was a dead body, but, I think, because the eyes were open and the long hair sort-of framed the face, you didn't feel horrified by the sight. I was more disgusted by the smiling faces of the military and that of a nun standing by the body. Che Guevara's face was completely uninjured and he looked alive. It was extraordinary - he looked truly alive and very human - he had, I think, only been killed 4-5 hours before.

Outside the hut, which was open on one side to the courtyard, there was a crowd of villagers and peasants who were all very, very silent. It was a feeling of tragedy. I don't recall talking to any of them - we were rather frightened by the military, frightened by the man from the CIA, frightened that we wouldn't get the story out because we were the first ones there by some 24 hours. The following day a whole troop of journalists flew in from La Paz. We knew we had a scoop, but were sad and grieving ourselves at this terrible event. I realized at once that this meant an end for the time being of the Guevara strategy of guerilla warfare which had been dealt a heavy blow by his death.

After we had been there for about half an hour we realized that it was almost 6:00 o'clock and it was beginning to get dark and there was no way of getting the news out from Valle Grande so we would have to drive back through the night to Santa Cruz. We were extremely exhausted, but luckily our driver got us back to Santa Cruz. However, we couldn't find anywhere there which had a telegraph or telex or even international phone service, so I had to catch a plane back to La Paz with my story in my hand.

On the plane was Colonel Shelton, the head of the American training mission which who was flying out of the country as quickly as he could. I said that I supposed he was feeling pretty pleased and he said "Yes, mission accomplished."

(RHC)