Mario Terán, soldier who executed Che Guevara, dies at 80

Just past 1pm on October 9, 1967, a young and trembling Bolivian army sergeant named Mario Terán pointed his M2 carbine from point-blank range at Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The long-hunted Latin American revolutionary, 39 years old and an international hero to Marxist guerrillas, had been captured by an army patrol the day before.

Guevara lay wounded and shackled on the filthy stone floor of a mud hut in the Bolivian town of La Higuera. He looked directly at his executioner and said, as Terán recounted years later: “Calm yourself. And aim well. You are going to kill a man!”

After the guerrilla told him to aim well. Terán said, he “took a step back towards the door, closed my eyes and fired.”

Cubans hold a poster of Ernesto “Che” Guevara during a Havana demonstration, 2003.Credit: AP

According to Guevara biographer Jon Lee Anderson, Terán fired several rounds into Guevara’s arms and legs. He was following the orders of a Cuban American CIA agent on the scene, Félix Rodríguez, who wanted to make Guevara appear to have been killed in combat.

Terán, 80, died on March 10 in a military hospital in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, of an unspecified illness, retired General Gary Prado told the station Radio Montanero. Prado had been in charge when Bolivian troops, including Terán, seized Guevara.

Rodríguez, the CIA agent, had been helping Bolivian forces track down the Argentine-born revolutionary who was in Bolivia with a band of guerrillas hoping to replace the American-backed regime with a communist one.

Rodríguez swiftly showed up in La Higuera and reportedly insisted on getting his photo taken alongside Guevara before handing him over to Terán.

In later interviews, Rodríguez suggested he and the CIA would have preferred to keep Guevara alive, to show the world how defeated he looked – “like a beggar,” he said – when apprehended. But, he said, he was overruled by Bolivian president René Barrientos and the Bolivian military High Command.

Rodríguez also said he had been offered the job of executing Guevara but declined and gave the task to Terán, who had lost several of his army comrades during a firefight with Guevara and his followers. After the execution, Rodríguez reportedly gave Terán the pipe the guerrilla had been smoking just before he was shot. “A souvenir for you,” he told the sergeant.

In killing Guevara, Terán had played a small but notable role in helping create the legend that continues to surround the Marxist fighter.

Ever since his death, Guevara – to some, a martyred symbol of resistance – has had his face plastered on countless T-shirts or posters on students’ walls around the world. Terán, on the other hand, wanted to fade into obscurity. He changed his name and, when tracked down by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, said there were several Mario Teráns in Bolivia and pleaded mistaken identity.

Mario Terán Salazar was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, on April 9, 1941. He attended a military academy and belonged to a Bolivian special forces regiment when he was part of the force seeking Guevara in 1967.

Terán married Julia Peralta in 1965. Survivors include his wife and two children.

The Washington Post