03/27/2025
A dead Che is a good Che.
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On this day in U.S. Army SF history........27 March 1967 – Major Ralph “Pappy” Shelton deployed to Bolivia to train Bolivian recruits for a counterinsurgency campaign against guerrilla leader Che Guevara.
Bolivian President Rene Barrientos appealed to U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, Douglas Henderson, for assistance in confronting the threat posed by a growing communist insurgency led by the Argentine-born guerrilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara, once a prominent leader in Fidel Castro’s revolutionary force during the Cuban Revolution.
When Castro took power in 1959, Guevara was put in charge of the infamous La Cabaña Fortress prison, which housed mostly political opponents who had resisted Castro’s communism. It is estimated that between 150 and 550 prisoners were executed on Guevara’s extrajudicial orders during his tenure as the warden, often only after the prisoners endured brutal torture and interrogation. Che was well known for taking great satisfaction in killing people whom he believed were not ardent Marxists.
Green Beret Major Ralph “Pappy” Shelton from the 8th Special Forces Group deployed from Panama to Bolivia, where he led a 16-man mobile training team whose mission was to train and organize several hundred newly recruited Bolivian soldiers in infantry tactics, marksmanship, and planning and conducting counterinsurgency operations.
Between May and September 1967, Shelton and his team of Green Berets trained the Bolivian Army’s Second Ranger Battalion to operate in units divided into platoons, companies, and finally, the battalion. They taught them how to march, shoot, detect b***y traps, fight hand-to-hand, deal with barbed wire, avoid ambushes, and maneuver at night. The Bolivian forces built themselves up physically and practiced marksmanship and fieldcraft.
When training ended in mid-September, the Bolivian Second Ranger Battalion was transferred to the guerrilla zone. Just two weeks later, on 8 October, these forces, so well-trained by Shelton and his team, surrounded Guevara’s guerrilla forces. Guevara himself was wounded and captured in action and executed the next day by Bolivian authorities.
President Lyndon Johnson’s Latin American advisor, Walter Rostow, later outlined in a memo the importance of Guevara’s death. Among several significant implications, he noted, “It shows the soundness of our ‘preventive medicine’ assistance to countries facing incipient insurgency—it was the Bolivian Second Ranger Battalion, trained by our Green Berets from June-September of this year that cornered him and got him.”
Pappy Shelton retired from the Army after his Bolivian excursion. He died 29 June 2010 at the age of 80, perhaps best remembered as the man who trained the Bolivian troops who captured the ruthless revolutionary Che Guevara.
---Mud
