It was the army's first organized effort to find guerrillas, camps, and hidden caches, and although it never confronted Guevara, the force had two encounters with Joaquin's contingent, resulting in the wounding of a Bolivian soldier and the death of Moises Guevara. A report from the U.S. defense attache to the DIA says, "Even though they were not successful in capturing a guerrilla unit the experience obtained by the Bolivian troops has certainly enhanced their morale. For the first time, upon being fired at, they did not drop their weapons and run." Interestingly, as the soldiers searched one camp abandoned by Joaquin, they found a piece of paper inside an empty toothpaste tube that identified the members of his group, but they seem not to have recognized what it was.
Ironically, at this moment, with the Bolivian Army responding more capably and Guevara's band, including Joaquin's splinter group, on the defensive, the U.S. House of Representatives released transcripts of Henderson's testimony made before a subcommittee more than two months earlier, on May 4, 1967. It caused a brief crisis in U.S.-Bolivian relations. The House Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs had begun hearings on communist activities in Latin America and asked Henderson to testify. He said, "I would judge only from the evidence available to all of us that the guerrilla activity was in it first stage, that it had not yet taken the shape of an activist direct attack by violence against the Government".
The La Paz newspapers, basing their reports on an Associated Press dispatch, changed Henderson's observations from the past to the present tense, perhaps because it was unclear what time period he referred to. They also changed "all of us" to simply "us," thus losing the sense of information publicly available and implying that Henderson meant embassy, and probably U.S. intelligence, sources. They also carried his additional observation that the guerrillas were "hard-core" people who would not be eradicated easily and that the effort to do so would take resources away from other purposes. This, said Henderson, was the "longrange meaning of the threat."
Bolivian media stories ran Associated Press speculation that the situation might be uncontrollable as though it represented Henderson's opinion and gave similar treatment to other U.S. press commentaries. One came from U.S. News & World Report, saying that Barrientos had "lost prestige" because of the failure to oust the "terrorists" and that as long as the guerrillas continued to operate, the country faced the danger of "skidding into another military coup." Another stinging commentary came from the New York Times, which Latin American journalists and politicians often regard as quasi-official. A major article in "The Week in Review" section of the June 18 Sunday edition described a Bolivia in shambles. Students and miners, it said, were "acting up," leftist politicians were being arrested at an increasing rate, capital was drifting out of the banks, and the army was fumbling ineffectively against the guerrillas. Meanwhile, Barrientos, who had imposed a state of emergency, presided over a shaky government that would almost surely be overthrown but for the armed forces' loyalty to Ovando, who was in turn loyal to Barrientos.
Three weeks later, in the same well-read section of the paper, the Times returned to the charge, this time calling the Barrientos government a "grossly inept" regime that was viewed by the United States as only the best of grim alternatives. The issue appeared two days after the Samaipata raid and dwelt extensively on the guerrilla problem. "Intelligence experts," it stated, "say that the guerrillas are getting stronger and bolder daily," and it described U.S. military experts as being "appalled at the poor quality and poorer motivation of the Bolivian foot soldier. . . . Merely by continuing to exist the guerrillas are 'winning' militarily."
Finally, the story made the stunning claim that the Bolivian government secretly had asked Argentina to send troops to pin down the guerrillas. While acknowledging that both governments denied any such request, the Times said that actually Buenos Aires turned it down, but only "for the time being." The source or the accuracy of the Times story remains unclear, but seasoned observers of the Bolivian scene believe such a request, especially if granted, would have been the kiss of death for an incumbent government in La Paz. The paper also quoted Argentine military sources in Bolivia as saying 10,000 Argentine troops would be on the border "before long." And again, it speculated upon the possibility of a coup d'etat, this time giving it more credence than it had three weeks earlier.
Bolivian Achievements, U.S. Scorn
