Che Guevara's Bolivian Campaign and Capture
Che Guevara took a guerrilla column into Bolivia in 1966 and was executed there in October 1967. He had left Cuba in 1965 after a decade in which he had commanded a column in the revolution, run the national bank and the ministry of industries, and concluded that the revolution had to be exported or it would be strangled. His theory of the foco held that a small armed nucleus could create the conditions for revolution rather than waiting for them, which had worked in Cuba and had not worked in the Congo, where he spent seven months in 1965. Bolivia was chosen for its geography — a country bordering five others, at the centre of the continent — rather than for its politics. Almost everything went wrong. The Bolivian Communist Party refused to support a foreign-led operation, the peasants of the south-east spoke Guaraní rather than Spanish and reported the strangers, the group's two columns lost contact with each other for months, and his asthma left him unable to walk at times. The Bolivian army was trained by American special forces and hunted them with a ranger battalion. He was wounded and captured at the Yuro ravine on 8 October with about seventeen men left, held overnight in a schoolhouse at La Higuera, and shot the next day on orders from La Paz. His hands were cut off for identification and the body was hidden until 1997. The photographs made him a poster. The image everyone knows was taken by Alberto Korda in 1960 at a memorial service and was barely used for seven years, until an Italian publisher printed it after the death. It is now probably the most reproduced photograph in history and is used to sell things he would have prohibited.
- Year: 1966 CE
- Category: Military
