Bolivia: The Case of Regis Debray

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At 8 o'clock in the morning of April 20, three men walked along a narrow mountain road toward Muyupampa, an isolated little farming town in the foot hills of the Bolivian Andes. They all admitted that they were on the way down from a guerrilla camp in the high jungle, although just what they had been doing there remains a matter of some dispute. Word that they were on the way had somehow preceded them to Muyupampa. Detachments of troops and plainclothes national police had moved into town the night before. They arrested the men without a fight.

All three were foreigners, and all said they were journalists. One was a British photographer, George Andrew Roth, who had often worked on stories with the Bolivian army; he was released. The second was a mediocre Argentine painter named Giro Roberto Bustos, who belonged to the Communist Party but considered it "bourgeois."

Bustos had entered Bolivia on a forged passport, but he claimed he had barged into the guerrilla camp by mistake. He was held for trial.

The third man was Jules Regis Debray, 26, a young French philosophy professor with sandy hair, wealthy par ents, and a circle of influential friends.

Debray, who had been with the guerrillas for several weeks, claimed that he was on an assignment for a Mexican magazine. He had been in Bolivia twice before on lecture tours, was well known as a confidant of Fidel Castro and the author of a new handbook on guerrilla warfare, Revolution in the Revolution?

With its detailed directions on how guer rilla bands striking at neighboring cities from mobile bases can precipitate full-scale revolutions in every Latin American nation, the handbook makes Castro's old tactics look almost amateurish.

The Bolivian government decided to throw the book, figuratively and literally, at Debray.

The New Marx. Imprisoned in the flyspecked oil town of Camiri, Debray was charged with murder, arson, armed insurrection, conspiracy against the state and illegal entry into Bolivia. He was held for trial by a military tribunal rather than a civilian criminal court. His arrest brought immediate protests from the French Ambassador, screams from the French press, and a personal appeal from De Gaulle. The Human Rights Commissions of France, Italy and Belgium dispatched observers to plead his case. His father, who is a lawyer, his mother, who is a Paris city councilwoman, and his childhood nurse all flew to the Bolivian capital of La Paz to rescue their petit chou.

So far, they have accomplished little. Papa Debray, muttering comparisons to "the trial of Joan of Arc" and "the Dreyfus case," has only succeeded in firing his son's Bolivian lawyer. He has urged Regis to conduct his own defense—which Papa sees as "a dialogue between the philosopher and the sword." Mama Debray, meantime, caused a near riot by defending those nice guerrillas to an audience that included the survivors of some of the guerrillas' victims. She also threw her son a dialectical screwball by revealing that "it was very difficult for me to understand his book." Said she: "I think he has invented a new brand of Marxism."