La Paz: The Bolivian soldier who pulled the trigger to execute the famed revolutionary guerrilla Ernesto “Che” Guevara has died in a military hospital, at the age of 80.
Mario Terán Salazar “simply complied with his duty as a sergeant of the army,” said retired General Gary Prado, who led the group that captured Guevara in 1967 after a months-long pursuit.
Speaking to Radio Compañera, he said Terán had died after a long illness. He is survived by his wife and two children.
Guevara, an Argentinian physician, achieved mythic status as a leading figure in the Cuban revolution that won power in 1959 under Fidel Castro by toppling the dictator Fulgencio Batista.
After serving as a senior official in Cuba’s government for several years, he set off to try to lead other insurrections – with far less success – in Africa and then in South America.
His small band was finally tracked down by Bolivian soldiers in 1967.
Terán was chosen to kill him after orders to execute the already wounded Guevara, then 39, arrived from the capital.
“It was the worst moment of my life,” he told reporters later. “I saw Che large, very large. His eyes shone intensely. I felt him coming over me and when he fixed his gaze on me, it made me dizzy …
“‘Calm yourself,’ he told me, ‘and aim well! You are going to kill a man!’ Then I took a step back toward the door, close my eyes and fired.”
Guevara’s biographers said his first shots missed Guevara’s chest but eventually hit.
Terán was born to Vicente Terán and Candelaria Salazar on 9 April 1941 in Cochabamba, Bolivia. His father, a merchant, was 46 years old when he was born; his mother was 45. Little beyond this is known about Terán’s early life.
Terán joined the military sometime before 1967, at which time he was a sergeant in Company A of Bolivia’s Manchego Regiment.
After thirty years of military service, Terán retired as a senior warrant officer. Terán lived the rest of his life under an assumed name in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia’s largest city. He and his wife Julia Peralta Salas, whom he married in 1965, had six children – two sons and four daughters.
In 2007, numerous media outlets reported that Terán, under a false name, had received a free cataract removal operation performed by Cuban doctors as part of Operación Milagro. One of Terán’s sons asked El Deber, a local Santa Cruz newspaper, to publish a notice thanking the doctors on Terán’s behalf. After the Cuban government learned what had transpired, Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, published an editorial using the event to promote Che Guevara’s legacy, writing that “Four decades after Mario Terán attempted to destroy a dream and an idea, Che returns to win yet another battle, and continues on in the struggle”.
Terán’s eye operation had become public knowledge only about a week before the 40th anniversary of Guevara’s death. Some reports at the time, especially those from publications sympathetic to Cuba, additionally stated that Terán had been “virtually blind” before the procedure and that it had cured him of this blindness.
However, in a 2014 interview with a Spanish newspaper El Mundo Terán disputed these reports. While acknowledging that Cuban doctors had removed cataracts from his eyes, he said that he had never been blind.