Update I
Our aim was to see Debray in his cell so as to reassure ourselves that he was alive and to make him feel that he was not alone. I asked Colonel Teran whether I could go in and photograph Debray. Surely, I pleaded, it is in your interests to let the world see that he is alive and permitted to receive visitors. The Colonel said that this was too important a matter for him to decide, but he would make the request known to higher authorities. Teran knew about the escape, of course, but at this moment the Bolivians still believed Debray and the others had not left the country and had merely rejoined the surviving guerrillas. For this reason, they hoped they would be able to scoop them up again and return them to custody with nobody any the wiser. (As a matter of fact, Debray and Bustos had already crossed the border into Chile. They knew that there was nothing else they could do for the guerrillas, and that the manhunt had only intensified. Roth was not with them - he had, sadly, been shot and killed during the jailbreak.)
[1]
In the meantime, the Colonel advised us to be patient and invited me to accompany him on one of his missions to Lagunillas the following day. The very thought filled me with nausea, but there was no way out and I agreed with a fake enthusiasm.
My misgivings were rendered moot that night, however, when we discovered the police waiting for us at the hotel. […] I do not know how many times over these forty years I have found my mind drifting to what may have happened had Schoenman not behaved so badly and attracted the attention of the authorities. The Colonel never returned from Lagunillas. The official story stated that he was killed there in a traffic accident, but it is almost certain he was executed by the regime as a punishment for the jailbreak, and it is equally certain that if I accompanied him I would have met the same fate. As it was, we only suffered the discomfort of two nights in a Camiri jail and the embarrassment of returning to the Peace Foundation with empty notebooks, after the Bolivians sent us packing.
Extract from Storming the Beaches: A Memoir of the Hot Years by Tariq Ali, Verso Press, London, 2002.
13 August 1967, 1:22 PM EST
Guevara's French Comrade Discovered in Chile
By JAIME CHACON
Associated Press
SANTIAGO, CHILE (AP) – The French journalist and intellectual Régis Debray, who until recently was involved in Ernesto “Che” Guevara's revolutionary campaign in Bolivia, has been detained by Chilean authorities and is being held in the northern town of Iquique. Debray had crossed the Bolivian border on foot, and was accompanied by an Argentine painter, Ciro Bustos.
Debray and Bustos were previously believed to be prisoners of the Bolivian military in Camiri, having been arrested in May as foreign agitators. It appears that they have escaped, as no notice of their release has been given by the Bolivian government. There has been no sign of George Roth, the Anglo-Chilean photographer who was detained along with them.
A representative of the Chilean foreign ministry, who wished to remain anonymous, has claimed that the two men will “almost certainly” be swiftly deported to their home countries.
French public opinion has been adamantly behind Debray during his stay in Bolivian prison, and influential figures on the left and right – including President Charles de Gaulle – have campaigned for his release.
Bolivian governmental sources were unavailable for comment.
The man is a celebrity now that he is back from playing revolution in the jungle. The communist faggots turn out in their thousands to hear his stories about his supposed “heroic escape” and how he fled the Bolivian police with a bullet in his shoulder. It is a disgusting spectacle, but my fellow students are hanging onto his every word, each one of them getting a hard-on when he speaks. The plan now, apparently, is to get him to speak at the Sorbonne on Guevara's particular strain of Marxist bullshit, something called
focalisme.
Sidos tells us that the time for confrontation is now. We do not need a French Lenin.
August 21, 1967 entry from the notorious far-right manuscript “The Diary of G.”
[1] And here be the PoD: the escape. In OTL, Debray and his companions remained in prison until the early 70s despite lobbying by the French government, and missed May 68 entirely.
*
More soon, this is just a little taste.