“I am Che Guevara and I have failed”

They say Fidel Cas­tro wanted to get rid of him -be­cause he was more in­tel­li­gent and ca­pa­ble than el co­man­dante-so he sent him on an im­pos­si­ble mis­sion: to spread the Cuban rev­o­lu­tion through­out Latin-Amer­ica start­ing in Bo­livia with­out sup­port and with­out clear knowl­edge of the re­al­i­ties on the field. Oth­ers say that Che Gue­vara him­self was the one that in­sisted on going, with a bunch of Cuban and Bo­li­vian guer­ril­las, prepar­ing ex­ten­sively and think­ing that it was the right place to spread Cas­tro’s gospel.

What­ever the rea­son, the cam­paign, last­ing 11 months, ended in total fail­ure with Che and his guer­rilleros cap­tured and ex­e­cuted under the di­rect or­ders of the Bo­li­vian pres­i­dent and in the pres­ence of the CIA’s chief Che-hunter, a man called Felix Rodríguez. The US was heav­ily in­volved in the hunt for Che be­cause Wash­ing­ton feared that if he was suc­cess­ful, with a se­cure base in Bo­livia he could or­gan­ise new rev­o­lu­tions in Brazil and Ar­gentina and pos­si­bly other coun­tries in the re­gion.

The pic­ture of Ernesto “Che” Gue­vara lying dead was taken by the AFP (Agence France-Presse) pho­tog­ra­pher, Marc Hut­ten, who, with a few other cor­re­spon­dents, was in­vited to wit­ness and record the end of one of the most fa­mous rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies of all times, oth­er­wise known by the nick­name Ramón.

The jour­nal­ists were flown from La Paz to the South­ern city of Val­le­grande where, in the nearby town of La Higuera, Che and other guer­ril­las, in­clud­ing a Pe­ru­vian and a Cuban doc­tor, were cap­tured.

“I saw the body of a bearded man with long hair and dressed only in olive-green trousers lying on a stretcher over a ce­ment wash­ing sink. A stink of for­mol floated over the body rid­dled with bul­lets and bled,” ex­plained Hut­ten later.

The pic­ture was au­then­tic and the iden­tity of the body con­firmed by other means, but what about the mes­sage in the head­line of Los Tiem­pos, the news­pa­per of the re­gion? The state­ment of the com­man­der of the Bo­li­vian mil­i­tary that cap­tured Gue­vara said he was wounded but not killed. He “con­fessed” his iden­tity and his fail­ure in front of the sol­diers that cap­tured him. But other sources said that he never gained con­scious­ness after he was shot.

“I am Che Gue­vara and I failed” doesn’t seem to be the ul­ti­mate mes­sage of a sea­soned rev­o­lu­tion­ary. It sounds more like a state­ment of pro­pa­ganda from his re­joic­ing cap­tors.

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Los Tiem­pos, Cochabamba, Bo­livia