Guevara’s execution haunts town 50 years on
Today marks half-century since death of Argentine doctor who led guerrilla fighters from Cuba to Congo
LA HIGUERA, Bolivia — Irma Rosales, tired after decades of tending her tiny store, sat back one morning with a box full of photos and remembered the stranger who was shot in the local schoolhouse 50 years ago.
His hair was long and greasy, she said; his clothes so dirty that they might have belonged to a mechanic.
And he said nothing, she recalled, when she brought him a bowl of soup not long before the bullets rang out and Che Guevara was dead.
Monday marks a half-century since the execution of Guevara, the peripatetic Argentine doctor, named Ernesto at birth, who led guerrilla fighters from Cuba to Congo. He stymied the United States during the Bay of Pigs invasion, lectured at a United Nations lectern and preached a new world order dominated by those once marginalized by superpowers.
His towering life was overshadowed only by the myth that emerged with his death. The image of his scruffy beard and starred beret became the calling card of romantic revolutionaries around the world and across generations, seen everywhere from the jungle camps of militants to college dorm rooms.
Yet the villagers of La Higuera, Bolivia, who lived through that time, tell a story that is far less mythic, describing a short, bloody episode where a forgotten corner of this mountainous countryside briefly became a battleground of the Cold War.
As Latin America remembers Guevara’s death, the region also faces a larger reckoning with the same leftist movements that drew on him for inspiration.
The socialist-inspired movement of the late President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela led to gains in education and health care, but the country has sunk into hunger, unrest and dictatorship.
Bolivia is one of Latin America’s last democracies where leftists remain in control, and it is difficult for political movements to thrive in such a vacuum, one of the country’s leaders said.
“You cannot prosper or sustain yourself over time if you do not have the victories and struggles in other places,” said Álvaro García Linera, the vice president of Bolivia.
Jon Lee Anderson, who wrote a biography of Guevara and was key to discovering his remains — they were hidden by soldiers until the 1990s — says both Guevara and the left hit such low points before.
“But Che remains kind of pure,” he said. “An ever-present beacon, the icon. Where will it go in the future? I have this notion that Che comes and goes.”
In the years before his death, Guevara’s whereabouts were a global mystery.
After having overseen the firing squads that followed the communist victory he helped secure in Cuba, and after a stint running the country’s central bank, Guevara suddenly vanished in 1965, sent by Fidel Castro to organize revolutions abroad.
He was dispatched on a failed mission to Congo, then bounced between safe houses in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Prague.
Loyola Guzmán, a communist youth leader in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, was one of the first people to learn that Guevara was in Bolivia. She received a message one day calling her to Camiri, a small town near the border of Paraguay. She said she had no idea what the meeting was for.
While Guevara was known around the world, his fame did little to endear him to Bolivia’s peasants.
And the country had already undergone a revolution the decade before, instituting universal suffrage, land reform and expanded education.
During Guevara’s time fighting in Bolivia, not a single peasant was documented to have joined him.