At around ten in the morning on 9 October 1967, in the schoolhouse of La Higuera, a CIA officer named Félix Rodríguez took a phone call from the Bolivian high command. According to Rodríguez’s own CIA debriefing, the message was coded: Operation Five Hundred and Six Hundred. Five hundred meant Guevara. Six hundred meant kill.
That call, as Rodríguez recounted it years later to US officials, is the closest thing to a documented order that the record of Che Guevara’s execution contains. No written instruction from President René Barrientos or the Bolivian Army high command has surfaced. What exists instead is a sequence of radio messages, a soldier’s memory, and a government that told at least two different stories about what happened to the body within the first week.
This piece follows the paper trail, such as it is, from the ravine where Guevara was captured to the contradictory statements Bolivian officials gave the press in the days after. Monday’s Case File reads the photograph that resulted from this sequence; here the question is narrower and harder: who decided, in what order, and what does the surviving record actually prove.
What the record agrees on, and what it doesn’t
Che Guevara was captured on 8 October 1967 in the Quebrada del Yuro ravine near La Higuera. A US Southern Command report places the capture at about 1:30 p.m., after Bolivian Rangers — trained, the following week, to be credited publicly by a senior White House aide — engaged the guerrilla column. Guevara was wounded and disarmed. He was held overnight in the village schoolhouse. He was executed there the next day, 9 October.
Everything after that point is where the official record starts to disagree with itself, sometimes within the same week.
Below the line, we lay out the chain of custody for the decision itself: who held the authority to order the killing, how that authority is reported to have travelled from La Paz to a schoolroom in La Higuera, and what each official told the public in the days that followed — set directly against what the declassified record shows. We also trace what happened to the men who gave the order and the man who carried it out, and close with three questions any reader can ask of a proof photograph like this one.
