General Gary Prado Salmón, who, as captain of the Bolivian army, led the operation that captured the 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 turned 84.
His son Gary Prado Arauz announced the death on Facebook but gave no cause.
After leaving Cuba in 1965, Mr. Guevara tried to spark a communist revolution movement in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but he failed, and then he and other guerrillas went to Bolivia the following year, hoping to overthrow the government of President René Barrientos. Ortuño, a general who had 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 he 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.
At about 1 pm on October 8, 1967, Captain Prado heard screams from the ravine: his soldiers had captured two guerrillas.
When one of them surrendered, General Prado later told DailyExpertNews, he shouted, “I am Che Guevara, and I am worth more to you alive than dead.”
Mr. Guevara had been wounded in battle, his gun broken.
“He presented a pitiful figure, dirty, smelly and decrepit,” General Prado said in a 2017 interview with FT Magazine. “He had been on the run for months. His hair was long, tousled and disheveled, and his beard was shaggy.” And, said General Prado, “he had no shoes, only pieces of animal skin on his feet.”
Mr. Guevara was held in a room of a small schoolhouse in the nearby village of La Higuera, where he spoke to Captain Prado several times. When asked why he fought in Bolivia, Mr. Guevara said: “The revolution knows no boundaries.” Captain Prado told him he had come to the wrong country, which he believed had undergone its own revolution through agrarian reform and the nationalization of its mines.
“Then came his concern about his future,” General Prado told the publication CE Noticias Financieras English this year. “‘What’s going to happen to me?'” I told him he will go to court.
But the next day, after Captain Prado left to pursue other guerrillas, he said, Mr. Guevera was executed by an army sergeant on the orders of President Barrientos. Captain Prado returned in time to help tie Mr. Guevera’s body to the runners of a helicopter that took it to nearby Vallegrande.
“He was then placed on a concrete slab in the small laundromat behind the hospital, and about 30 press photographers from around the world were invited to take pictures of the body lying in state,” General Prado told FT Magazine. “It was important for the government and military to show Che’s death as a lesson to anyone who intended to invade or threaten the Bolivian 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 in Rome on November 15, 1938 to Julio Prado Montaño, a Bolivian army officer on assignment in the city, and Adela Salmón Tapia. At the age of 15, after the family returned to Bolivia, Gary enrolled in military college and graduated as a second lieutenant in 1958. He became an instructor at the university.
In 1974, seven years after Mr. Guevara’s capture made Captain Prado a military hero, he was arrested as one of the leaders of an uprising against the military dictatorship of President Hugo Banzer Suárez. However, a year later he was reinstated.
In 1981, now a colonel in command of the Army’s Eighth Division, he led the recapture of an Occidental Petroleum natural gas plant in Santa Cruz that had been held by far-right activists who had threatened to blow it up unless the military junta of Bolivia resigned.
But it would be Colonel Prado’s last active operation: he was paralyzed by a bullet fired into his spine by one of his own men. Citing a witness’ account, The Miami Herald reported that he was shot by a second lieutenant in what Col. Prado said was an accident.
Colonel Prado was eventually promoted to the rank of general, but the injury, which left him confined to a wheelchair, blocked his path to becoming the army commander he once hoped for. He retired from the military in the late 1980s and then served as Bolivia’s ambassador to Britain and later to Mexico.
Information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Some Mexican admirers of Mr. Guevera oppose General Prado’s appointment as ambassador. At 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 Che’s health!” Mr. Hijar told The Chicago Tribune: “He’s a war criminal.”
But General Prado told The Tribune: “I have acted correctly all my life, not just in this episode. I don’t have to be ashamed or hide.” He tried to downplay the importance of Mr. Guevera’s capture, adding, “All that incident is barely four lines in Bolivia’s history.”