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

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

According to Guevara biographer Jon Lee Anderson, Mr. 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.

But a twitchy Mr. Terán, unnerved by Guevara’s gaze, now had to administer the coup de grace. He stepped back, closed his eyes and, by his account, fired a volley that hit Guevara’s thorax.

Mr. Terán, 80, died March 10 in a military hospital in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, of an unspecified illness, retired Gen. Gary Prado told the station Radio Montanero. Prado had been in charge when Bolivian troops, including Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Terán, who had lost several of his army comrades during a firefight with Guevara and his followers. After the execution, Rodríguez reportedly gave Mr. Terán the pipe the guerrilla had been smoking just before he was shot. “A souvenir for you,” he told the sergeant.

In killing Guevara, Mr. Terán had played a small but notable role in helping create the legend that continues to surround the Marxist fighter. Many people, particularly Cuban Americans, were happy to see Guevara dead for his role in the 1959 Cuban revolution as a top lieutenant to Fidel Castro. But countless others were stunned, especially when it became clear the CIA was involved in his capture and execution.

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. Mr. 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. Little is known about his early life, other than that his father was a merchant. He attended a military academy and belonged to a Bolivian special forces regiment when he was part of the force seeking Guevara in 1967.

Announcing his death, his former commander Prado described Mr. Terán as a “valiant man.”

“What bothered him most was being chased by the media, because he wanted to remain anonymous,” Prado added. "He said had simply carried out his orders as a soldier, which came from the Presidency.”

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

In 2007, Latin American media sites reported that Mr. Terán had gone almost blind before he got a free cataract removal operation from Cuban doctors working in Bolivia as part of Operación Milagro (Operation Miracle), a joint venture launched by Cuba and Venezuela to help Latin Americans who could not afford to pay. He had used a false name, the reports said.

One of his sons published a notice of gratitude to the Cuban doctors in a Bolivian paper, El Deber, but Mr. Terán himself told El Mundo in 2014 that although he did have the operation, he had never really been close to blindness.

Although Mr. Terán rarely talked of that day he shot Guevara, Bolivian reporters who tracked him down years later quoted him as saying: “It was the worst moment of my life. I saw Ché large, very large. His eyes shone intensely. When he fixed his gaze on me, it made me dizzy.”

Mr. Terán, who was good at following orders, said the guerrilla told him to aim well. “I took a step back towards the door," he recalled, "closed my eyes and fired.”