Che Guevara was executed in the schoolhouse at La Higuera, in the dry hills of south-eastern Bolivia, on the morning of October 9, 1967, one day after a Bolivian Ranger patrol had taken him prisoner in the Yuro ravine. A sergeant named Mario Terán fired the shots. He was 39. The order to kill him rather than put him on trial came from the president, René Barrientos, and the men who carried it out had been told to say afterwards that he had died of his wounds in the fighting.
The decision was made quickly because the alternative was risky: Bolivia's government had no court that could safely hold him, and the Americans who had helped train the Rangers wanted him out of the way, so Félix RodrÃguez, the CIA officer at La Higuera, asked Washington for instructions while the order from Barrientos was already working its way down the chain. Guevara was shot in the legs first and then in the chest, so that the body would carry wounds consistent with a death in a firefight.
Before it happened he asked to see the village schoolteacher, Julia Cortéz, and told her that the schoolhouse was a poor place to teach children in, since the government spent its money on soldiers. The body was strapped to the skids of a helicopter and flown to Vallegrande, where it was washed and laid out on a concrete slab in a laundry for the press. Reporters and soldiers crowded in to look at it, and the photographs taken in that room were printed everywhere within days.
The government then buried him in a hurry, in a common grave beside an airstrip, with no record kept. Nobody had written it down. His hands were cut off. They were kept, and his diary went to the military; it was published within months and showed that he had been in Bolivia all along, which was awkward for the governments that had said otherwise. A retired Bolivian general told an interviewer roughly where to dig in 1995, and two years later a team found a skeleton with no hands.