Why Bolivia
By 1966 Che Guevara had been out of public view for more than a year. An Argentine-born doctor, he had been a leading figure of the Cuban Revolution and had held senior posts in Fidel Castro’s government. He had also grown critical of Moscow’s caution after the settlement of the Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, and he was increasingly drawn to the idea of armed struggle elsewhere. In 1965 he left Cuba, first to fight in the Congo, where the effort failed, and then to prepare a new venture. He chose Bolivia, in the middle of South America, as the base from which revolution might spread to neighbouring countries, including his native Argentina.
The choice was based on hope more than evidence. Bolivia had a history of political upheaval and poverty, and its location bordered five countries. But it also had an army that had been reorganised after a revolution in 1952, and a government under President René Barrientos that had real support among many peasants. These factors made the country less promising for a guerrilla movement than Guevara expected.
The campaign begins
Guevara reached La Paz in early November 1966, using a disguise and false papers. He travelled to a remote farm and camp in the Ñancahuazú region in the south-east, where a small group of fighters, mostly Cubans and Bolivians with some Peruvians, gathered over the following weeks. His plan was to build up the force slowly, establish contact with local people and expand.
The plan met difficulties almost at once. The leader of the Bolivian Communist Party, Mario Monje, met Guevara in December and refused to place the party’s support under Guevara’s control, and the group lost the backing of the party it had hoped would help. Peasants in the area were mostly wary or uninterested, and few joined. The guerrillas spoke little Quechua, the language of many local people, and were not rooted in the community.
In March 1967 the group had its first armed clashes with the Bolivian army, which had been alerted to its presence. In April the French writer Régis Debray and the Argentine artist Ciro Bustos, who had visited the camp, were captured, and the army learned more about who was leading the group. The United States sent advisers and trained a Bolivian ranger battalion, which later took part in the pursuit. Guevara’s message to a conference of Third World revolutionaries, published in April, called for the creation of “two, three, many Vietnams”, a slogan that reached a wide audience even as the real Bolivian campaign was going badly. The phrase referred to the Vietnam War escalation then under way, which Guevara saw as a model for stretching American power, though the United States was not directly fighting in Bolivia.
Isolation and decline
Over the following months the guerrillas were short of food and medicine, and Guevara suffered from asthma. In April the group divided into two, with a rear column under Joaquín (Juan Vitalio Acuña), and the two parts lost contact with each other. The rear column was ambushed and destroyed in late August at a river crossing. The army also found supply caches and documents, which allowed it to narrow its search.
Guevara’s diary from the period, which later became known worldwide, records the problems candidly: the lack of peasant support, the slow pace of recruitment, illness and hunger. His group walked through difficult mountain and scrubland terrain and was repeatedly spotted. By the autumn it had fewer than twenty fighters.
Capture at the Quebrada del Yuro
On 8 October 1967 Bolivian Rangers cornered the remaining group in a ravine called the Quebrada del Yuro, in a hilly area of the south-east. In the clash that followed several guerrillas were killed. Guevara was wounded in the leg and his rifle was damaged, and he was captured. Reports from the time quote him as identifying himself to the soldiers, though accounts of what was said differ and should be treated with caution.
The prisoner was taken to the nearby hamlet of La Higuera and held overnight in a small schoolhouse. Among the people who spoke to him there, according to later accounts, was a Cuban-born CIA officer, Félix Rodríguez, who was working with the Bolivian forces. Rodríguez later described the encounter in his own words, and his account is one of the sources historians use, with the usual care.
Execution at La Higuera
On 9 October 1967 Guevara was shot at La Higuera. The decision, by the accounts available, was taken by the Bolivian high command, and the order was carried out by a sergeant, Mario Terán. It is generally reported that the American side had wished him to be kept alive for questioning, but that the Bolivian leadership wanted him dead. The details of who decided what remain contested, and different participants later gave different versions.
Guevara was 39. The Bolivian authorities first said he had died of wounds received in the fighting, and later accounts and photographs made this account hard to sustain. The Cuban government confirmed his death on 15 October in Havana, where Castro announced several days of mourning.
Why the campaign failed
Historians usually point to several causes. The group never won the support of Bolivian peasants, and it lacked a political base in the cities. The army, though poorly equipped by comparison with some others, was supported by the United States and soon found the guerrillas. The Bolivian Communist Party had refused to cooperate. Guevara’s theory of the guerrilla “focus”, in which a small armed band could create the conditions for revolution by acting, was tested in conditions different from those in Cuba, where a broad urban opposition had existed alongside the rebels.
The failure had effects across Latin America, and it was noticed far beyond it. In 1967 the student movement in many countries was looking for symbols, and the death of a man who had given up office to fight drew attention from people who knew little about Bolivia. Other guerrilla movements continued in several countries, but many were defeated in the following years. Guevara himself became more famous in death than he had been in the final years of his life, largely through the Korda photograph and the posters that followed, which are the subject of the companion article on his image and legacy.