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General Gary Prado Salmón, who as captain of the Bolivian Army led the operation that captured Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, a critical ally of Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution, in 1967, died on May 6 in a hospital in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. He is 84 years old.
Gary’s son Prado Arauz announced his death on Facebook but did not give a cause.
After leaving Cuba in 1965, Mr. Guevara tried and failed to foment a Communist revolutionary movement in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then he and other guerrillas went to Bolivia the next year, hoping to overthrow the government of President René Barrientos. Ortuño, a general who seized 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 they 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.
Around 1 o’clock in the afternoon on October 8, 1967, Captain Prado heard shouting from the cliff: His soldiers have captured two guerrillas.
When one of them surrendered, General Prado later told The New York Times, he said, “I am Che Guevara, and I am worth more to you alive than dead.”
Mr. Guevara was wounded in the battle, his gun broke.
“They present a pitiful, dirty, smelly and broken figure,” General Prado said in a 2017 interview with FT Magazine. “He’s been on the run for months. His hair is long, matted and tangled, his beard is falling out.” And, General Prado said, “He had no shoes, only scraps of animal skin on his feet.”
Mr. Guevara was arrested in one of the small school rooms in the village of La Higuera, where he had several conversations with Captain Prado. Asked why he fought in Bolivia, Mr. Guevara said, “Revolution has no limits.” Captain Prado tells him that he has come to the wrong country, which he says has undergone its own revolution through agrarian reform and the nationalization of mines.
“Then we are concerned about its future,” said General Prado in the British publication CE Noticias Financieras this year. “‘What’s going to happen to me?'” I said he was going to trial.
But the next day, after Captain Prado left to chase other guerrillas, he said, Mr. Guevara was killed by an army sergeant on the orders of President Barrientos. Captain Prado returned in time to help strap the body of Mr. Guevara to the runner from the helicopter that took him to nearby Vallegrande.
“He was then placed on a concrete slab in a small laundry at the back of the hospital, and around 30 press photographers from around the world were invited to take pictures of his body while he was in the country,” General Prado told FT Magazine. “It is important for the government and the military to show Che’s death as a lesson to anyone who wants to attack or threaten Bolivia’s way of life in the future.”
General Prado eventually wrote two books, “How I Captured Che” (1987) and “The Defeat of Che Guevara: Military Response to 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 stationed in the city, and Adela Salmón Tapia. At age 15, after his family returned to Bolivia, Gary entered military college, graduating as a second lieutenant in 1958. He became an instructor at the college.
In 1974, seven years after Mr. Guevara’s arrest made Captain Prado a military hero, he was arrested as one of the leaders of the uprising against the military dictatorship of President Hugo Banzer Suárez. However, a year later, he returned.
In 1981, now a colonel commanding the army’s Eighth Division, he led the recapture of the Occidental Petroleum natural gas plant in Santa Cruz that had been seized by the ultra-right who threatened to blow it up unless the Bolivian military junta stepped down.
But it will be the last active-duty operation of Colonel Prado: He was paralyzed by a bullet to the spine fired by one of his own men. Citing eyewitness accounts, The Miami Herald reported that he was shot by a second lieutenant in what Colonel Prado said was an accident.
Colonel Prado was eventually promoted to the rank of general, but his injury, which left him in a wheelchair, prevented him from becoming an army commander, as he had always wanted. He retired from the military in the late 1980s, and later served as the Bolivian ambassador to the UK and later to Mexico.
Information on his survival was not immediately available.
Some Mexican admirers of Mr. 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, “To the health of Che!” Mr. Hijar told The Chicago Tribune, “He’s a war criminal.”
But General Prado told The Tribune: “I have done the right thing in my life, not just in this episode. I don’t have to be ashamed or hide.” He tried to downplay the importance of Mr. Guevara’s arrest, adding, “All these things happened in hardly four lines in the history of Bolivia.”
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