Ciro Bustos

He began a close friendship with Alberto Granado which allowed him to come into contact for the first time with Ernesto "Che" Guevara,[2] who in 1962 was planning to start a guerrilla war in Argentina in order to internationalize the Cuban revolution and see it succeed in his own country of origin.

[3] Desertions, internal struggles, the difficult geographic conditions of such a remote and rural area, and the operations of the Argentine National Gendarmerie brought about the failure of the project in 1964.

This group begain to operate in mid-1966 in an area in the south of the Santa Cruz Department, by orders of Guevara and under his direct command beginning in November of that year, with the objective of taking power.

Bolivia was governed by the dictatorship imposed by general of the Bolivian Air Force René Barrientos after having ousted president-elect Víctor Paz Estenssoro, by means of the coup d'état of 4 November 1964.

On 20 April 1967, Bustos, Régis Debray and English journalist George Andrew Roth, were detained by a patrol of the Bolivian Army in the city of Muyupampa, subjected to interrogation and torture with assistance of members of the CIA, judged and condemned to thirty years in prison,[5] of which they only served four before being granted amnesty in 1970 by president Juan José Torres.