Régis Debray was sentenced to thirty years in prison November 17 by a drumhead military court in Camiri, Bolivia. The severity of the sentence came as no surprise after the caricature of judicial procedure that passed under the name of a trial.
Ciro Bustos, the Argentine artist, who, like Debray, had spent time with the guerrillas in March, was also sentenced to thirty years.
The four other defendants, deserters from the guerrilla movement who testified for the prosecution, were "absolved."
Debray and Bustos were convicted of "rebellion, murders, assault and robbery." No evidence was produced in the entire course of the trial that either had ever fired a shot. Debray had come to Bolivia as a journalist to interview Che Guevara; Bustos to make sketches of the guerrillas.
The two were arrested with an Englishman named Roth, unarmed and in civilian clothes, at Muyupampa, April 20.
Throughout the trial no defendant was allowed to speak. Debray was given a court-appointed lawyer who neither sympathized with nor understood his revolutionary views, although it was precisely Debray's politics rather than his actions that were on trial.
Foreign correspondents were expelled from Bolivia by the military for daring to write dispatches critical of the irregular procedures in the trial.
Private meetings between Debray and his lawyer were secretly recorded and introduced into the trial.
The only testimony against Debray came from deserters from the guerrillas, men completely at the mercy of the court and creatures of the army. Other guerrillas who were captured and would not give false evidence were murdered in cold blood by army officers.
Finally, on November 13, after both prosecution and "defense" had made their final summaries, the court read selected extracts, allegedly from Che Guevara's diary, into the record. There was no opportunity for Debray to examine them, verify their authenticity, or see the entire context from which they were taken.
Debray has protested the refusal of the court to allow a presentation of the political views for which he was tried. In an interview with Juan de Onis of the New York Times the day before the verdict was handed down he declared:
"What I will never tolerate is that a political conviction for an ideological crime be allowed to stand as a criminal conviction. I am not a murderer or a thief."
As the trial closed, Jaime Mendizabal, a Bolivian lawyer for Bustos, tried to argue before the court that the proceedings had been irregular. Col. Efraín Guachalla, president of the court, shouted, "This trial has ended," and brought down his gavel with such force that the head broke off and flew into the first row of spectators.
Juan de Onis reports that there was a scramble to recover the souvenir.
Debray and Bustos plan to appeal -- a higher military court.
It was not announced where Debray would be imprisoned, but the New York Times reported that "military sources" had indicated he would be sent to a military prison in the Beni Department, a hot lowland region in northeast Bolivia.