Che Guevara's death in Bolivia - "He looked like Christ"

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German nun Antonia Maria Freude thought Vallegrande, in the Bolivian jungle, was a peaceful little village like her own home town of Brochterbeck in Germany. However, in October 1967 it was suddenly swarming with soldiers and journalists.

"The day he was flown in from La Higuera I was working at the delivery station. Suddenly there were lots of people everywhere from all over the world," the 71-year-old nun recalls.

"He" was Argentine-born revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, one of the world's most wanted men in 1967.

After the success of the revolution in Cuba in 1959 and a failed operation in Congo in 1965, Che tried to create a "second Vietnam" in the Bolivian jungle, with 58 fellow fighters from Cuba, Bolivia and Peru, and was again miserably unsuccessful.

The nun who had left Germany in 1966 was working at the Senor de Malta hospital when the revolution knocked on the door.

"It was already strange that they decided to fight here, of all places," she says.

At 3 pm on October 8, 1967 the former president of the National Bank of Cuba - who once signed peso notes just with his nickname, Che - was cornered in the village of La Higuera. With his tangled black hair, the exhausted, disarmed commander appeared like a pile of dirt next to proud-posing Bolivians.

"The military hurled hundreds of hand grenades in the ravine where Che waited with his troops. They captured him less than 300 metres away from us," recalls former guerrilla fighter Dariel Alarcon, known as Benigno.

"Do not shoot... I am Che. I am worth more alive than dead," Guevara allegedly said as he turned himself in, according to Bolivian historian Ricardo Sanjines.

The Bolivians wanted to avoid a trial at any cost. At 1:10 pm on October 9, with nine shots, the drunken soldier Mario Teran executed the revolutionary born in Rosario, Argentina - a pathetic, bloody death.

Benigno, now 68, heard of the death of his leader on the radio. The corpse was taken to Vallegrande by helicopter, and there it was laid out in the laundry-room of the hospital.

Sister Antonia Maria got a glimpse of the body in the early hours of October 10. She sneaked into the dreary concrete room, and found an image that sticks to this day.

"He looked like Christ," she says.

The following morning the hospital doctor went to see her.

"When he said, 'we are going to amputate the hands of the dead Che Guevara,' I immediately said, 'I am not coming,'" she remembers.

The Bolivians wanted to cut off the hands of the revolutionary as proof of his death. His body, according to the military's version of the time, was cremated shortly after his death. Vallegrande should no way become a pilgrimage site for nostalgic revolutionaries.

The truth is that the soldiers hastily buried Che under the runway of the town's airfield. In 1997, the handless body was discovered, and it now lies in a mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba.

The German nun of the order of Saint Mary Magdalen Postel could not identify with the ideas of the revolutionaries, and neither could the population of Vallegrande.

"Many indigenous people lived here, and they mostly spoke no Spanish, just Quechua. Besides, there was no space for a revolution, president (Rene) Barrientos was actually very popular in the country," the nun recalls.

Sister Antonia Maria returned to Vallegrande after more than 20 years and is in charge of a children's home, Hogar Santa Susana. Every now and then she still visits the laundry-room. She was one of the last to see Guevara's body there, 40 years ago.

Today, the town of 20,000 is indeed a pilgrimage site for followers of Che Guevara, and locals too have learned to honour him. In many houses, alongside crosses, there are images of the commander, and some people pray to Brother Ernesto de la Higuera as if he were a saint. dpa ir vs cc