On march 23 in 1967 with the first big ambush at the river Ñacahuasu the armed conflict between the guerilla group and the bolivian army started. The troops of Che didn't even count with 50 people (23 Bolivians, 16 Cubans, 3 Peruvians and two born in Argentina, him and Tania), without counting 2 „visitors", 4 reported sick and 2 deserters. Even then from march to october the balance seemed favourable for Che. The guerilla caused 49 casualties among the bolivian troops, a similar number of wounded and many prisoners. They captured a decisive amount of weapons and goods. Furthermore on july 6th they took spectacularly the village of Samaipata on the road from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz.

Enclosed by thousands of soldiers

Nevertheless his acitivities were isolated and sporadic from beginning to end, and nobody knew for sure whether Che was in charge of them. He only counted on the diffuse sympahties of the leftwing parties and of society's sectors liable to be allies like the miners, who meanwhile had suffered from a brutal preventive sanction known as the "Masacre de San Juan" (june 24). The rearguard had been eliminated during an ambush on august 31 and on september 26 three hardened members of the advance guard fell. At the beginning of october, enclosed by thousands of soldiers, he was already in a desperate situation.

In this conditions and with only 17 men left he was forced to fight a battle in the gorge of El Churo. On sunday, october the 8th, wounded at the right calf and with an inoperative weapon, Che was taken prisoner by a sqadron of "ranger" soldiers, recently trained by US instructors. At his side was "Willy", a bolivian miner with the name of Simeón Cuba. After being lead to the little village of La Higuera both were executed "by superior order" the following day in the little school, where both had been kept prisoners.

Commotion and radicalization

The impact these events had on Bolivia was shattering. Like seldom before the country was at the centre of the world's attention. On the other hand many sectors of society, above all the youth, grew more radical in their political convictions, starting to admire fervently the romantic heroism of Che and his men, who at the continent's heart tried to alter the wake of south american and the world's history. Even the bolivian military, without admitting it officially, let themselves be carried away by this tide, for between 1969 and 1971 they promoted nacionalizing and other measures regarded as patriotic and aintiimperialistic.

But Bolivia is not an island. So, what events where at the time the centre of attention on the world's stage? In the first place Vietnam. But by the middle of the 1960ies the north american intervention in the asian south west had grown gigantic, from 23.000 soldiers in 1964 the number increased vertiginously to over half a million in 1968. The frontal combats between marines and the vietnam guerilla forces started just during this period and did not stop until the final military defeat of the United States in april 1975.

In his famous message to the Tricontinental, published in april 1967 (written before leaving to Bolivia), Che compared the solidarity of the progressive world with Vietnam with the verbal stimulation the plebs offered the gladiators in Rome. The motto of the message was very clear: "To create two, three, many Vietnam...". And this is exactly what he tried to accomplish in Bolivia.

A netting of events and personalities

Then, in 1968, the french may came up with its vast repercussions. The crusted reigning ideological and institutional bases, being of the right or the left, were turned upside down by the storm of rebellion. The slogans "Everything is possible", "Imagination to power", Forbidding forbidden" along with portraits of old Marx, Lenin, Trotski, Mao, Ho Chi Min, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara set the tune of these days. Very suble bonds tied situations to events and to people.

In the wake of these events and the recurrent cuban impulse in several south american countries armed projects started to spred, specially fed by the youth. A wave of disposition to sacrifice rolled, encountered by the crushing genocide of the military dictatorships promoted in Washington, including the one of Banzer in Bolivia (1971-1978) and the resulting establishment of neoliberal conditions. Since the transforming utopies seemed to be eradicated by fire and blood and for ever, the lukewarm reinstallation of democratic liberties passed to be the only achievable programmatic goal.

Lasting popularity

Nevertheless, as we enter a new millennium under local, regional and worldwide circumstances very different to those of the 1960ies and 70ies, the winds of change reappear. A new generation appears and its proposals, even with its own colours and without repeating the failed experiences of the past, somehow are related in essence to the ideals of those years. And the symbol of Che reappers in the background. In Bolivia, the first indigene assuming the presidency in his first speach on january 22 in 2006 mentions Che as one of the precursors, places a huge portrait of him in the government palace and pays hommage at the 40th anniversary of his assassination.

Probably Evo Morales Ayma never would have learned that in an almost unknown discours outline conceived in Ñacahuasu Che had written as a stirring motto: "Democratization of the country's life with active participation of the main ethnic groups at greater government decisions." The motto appears together with cultivation and technification in endemic languages, abolition of flagella already abolished in other countries, participation of workers and peasants in planing, exploitation of mineral resources and the land's fertility, and infrastructural development "to turn Bolivia into a great unified country instead of being a divided giant with departments and provinces strangers to each other".

Che Guevara as a symbol for struggle

It ist also quite possible that Che himself put little attention to a programmatic concept for Bolivia, convinced as he was for one thing in a plan of continental magnitude pivoting around his combatant return to Argentina. And, then because he simply had to care for the survival of his emaciated and starving legion. Where is then the connection between a project of armed struggle without popular support like the one of 1967 and the peasant indigenous social movements following democratic procedures and winning the elections at the end of 2005?

The answer lies in: the symbolic image of Che, an icon accompanying the struggle of the poor, the desinherited and excluded all over the world. And in the flags raised by the events in the 1960ies and 70ies, humanism reborn, visionary ecological ideas, radical democracy, unreached social equality and longed for respect between nations and countries. Mutatis mutandis (with some change undergone) the old mottoes of liberty, fraternity and equality, freed of their liberal bonds, turned to gain importance.

Carlos Soria Galvarro T.,
Bolivian journalist and author. Among other books he published "El Che en Bolivia: Documentos y testimonios" (Che in Bolivia: documents and testimonies), La Paz, 1992 and 2005.

Translation: Antonio Seidemann
Copyright: Goethe-Institut, Online-Redaktion