The Death of Che Guevara

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Only now is it possible to piece together Che's itinerary after his disappearance. He seems to have traveled widely in Latin America, appearing now and then in Guatemala, where guerrillas are active, in Peru and in Brazil. He used various passports, some of which the Bolivian government found in a dead guerrilla fighter's mochila. He may have been in the Congo. He most certainly at one time or another was in North Vietnam, where the hard-core Bolivian guerrillas were sent for training as a kind of revolutionary counterpart to the American Special Forces who get their training in South Vietnam and use their knowledge to train highly efficient Bolivian Rangers. For a couple of weeks during the spring of 1966, Guevara was in Paris; then in late 1966, he arrived in Bolivia.

His affection for Bolivia apparently began when, as a young student in the fifties, he had bummed his way around Latin America. Bolivia had had a glorious revolution; its army had been completely wiped out in three days of heavy battle in April 1952; the tin mines had been nationalized, the large estates broken up. But the army was recreated by President Victor Paz Estenssoro; life for the miners was still bad; land reform did nothing to improve agriculture; the peasants' trade unions soon turned into armed gangs used by sindicato leaders for their own ends.

It was easy for Che Guevara to conclude later that the Bolivian revolution had failed because it hadn't gone whole hog as had the Cuban's. But he apparently had no illusions that the Bolivians could repeat, the Cuban pattern. For one thing, the Cuban revolution had taken place at a time when the Soviet Union was favorably inclined to helping revolutions in the Third World. This was no longer so, Che had observed; then too, the Cuban revolution was at the outset at least tolerated by the United States. But not even democratic liberal, "constitutional" revolutions, such as the one in the Dominican Republic in 1965, would any longer be tolerated by the US, he thought. A successful revolution in Bolivia would mean intervention on a massive scale by US troops, Che believed, and this actually was what he was aiming for. In his 1967 message to the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, written when he already was in Bolivia, he exhorted revolutionaries all over Latin America to create "two, three, many Vietnams" and try to bleed the American military forces to death. As he was writing that message, he himself was actively training his men in Kfancahuazu in southern Bolivia to do just that.

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