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Che was executed in cold blood 42 years ago by a U.S. lead death squad that captured him in Bolivia. Then, as now, he had emerged as a prominent symbol of  self-sacrifice, armed struggle, internationalism and uncompromising opposition to U.S. domination. His death stands as a glaring example of the role the U.S. and its agents play in the  brutal repression of humanity’s highest aspirations. The torturers of the CIA were not invented on 9/11 — but have a very long and bloody history.

Che is a highly romantic martyr of the people’s cause. But he was also a revolutionary leader and thinker  in a particular complex time; he was associated closely with a specific series of approaches and strategies.

Che (and the Cuban  movement he was part of) had a particular line on the role of the people in their own emancipation. It was  a view that exalted the actions of small military groupings of “heroic guerrillas” (calledfocos) in galvanizing revolution. Unlike the Maoists at that same time, Che and Fidel Castro were not advocates of a “land to the tiller” agrarian revolution, but sought to nationalize the existing plantation structure of Cuba and similar countries.

The fact that so many people revere him is a testimony to the deep desires for liberation throughout the world. And at the same time, revolution is not made by symbolism alone. The controversies surrounding Che’s strategies have contemporary significance.

The following piece was written over ten years ago in appreciation of Che’s impact — while also making a critical assessment of his strategic concepts. There has been considerable excavation of these events since this piece was written. Kasama intends to  publish other essays on Che reflecting a number of different assessments.

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October 9, 1967: The CIA Murder of Ernesto Che Guevara

By Mike Ely

Thirty years ago, on October 8, 1967, gunfire echoed through a steep ravine of the Andes Mountains in southern Bolivia. The guerrilla band led by Ernesto “Che” Guevara was pinned down and surrounded by Bolivian Army Rangers.

Less than a year earlier, Guevara and a team of cadres had secretly traveled from Cuba to Bolivia to launch a guerrilla war, hoping to topple Bolivia’s pro-U.S. military government. Guevara had gone up into the mountains with about 50 supporters. Within months they were discovered by Bolivian troops. And an intense pursuit started.

Trying to escape the government forces, Guevara divided his supporters into two groups, and was never able to reunite them. His diary records that, by late August, his group was exhausted, demoralized and down to 22 men. On August 31 the other group was ambushed and wiped out crossing a river.

Ernesto Guevara moments before his execution

On September 26, Bolivian army units ambushed Che’s remaining forces near the isolated mountain huts of La Higuera. The guerrillas found no way out of the encirclement. Several died in the shooting. Guevara himself was wounded in the leg. He and two other fighters were captured on October 8 and taken to an old one-room schoolhouse in La Higuera.

The next day, October 9, a helicopter flew in a man called “Felix Ramos” who wore the uniform of a Bolivian officer. “Ramos” took charge of the prisoner. Two hours later, Che Guevara and both other guerrillas were executed in cold blood. A look around the peasant village of La Higuera that day would have left no doubt who was responsible.

The U.S. Hand

The weapons and equipment of the killers were “Made in the U.S.A”. The Bolivian officer who took Guevara prisoner had been trained at Fort Bragg–at a U.S. school for army coups, murder and counterinsurgency. And the man in charge at the scene, “Captain Ramos,” was a veteran CIA field agent, Felix Rodriguez.
For years, the U.S. government had armed the Bolivian military and riddled it with their paid agents. As soon as Guevara’s new guerrilla force was discovered, Washington sent new teams of CIA and Green Berets killers into Bolivia–including Rodriguez and his fellow agent “Gonzalez.” U.S. transport planes arrived loaded with more arms, radio equipment, and napalm.

Rodriguez, who was masquerading as a Bolivian army captain, had previously led a CIA death squad in Vietnam. Later, this same Felix Rodriguez would be personally appointed by George Bush to be the key CIA operative at El Salvador’s Ilopango Air Force base during the 1980s, where Rodriguez oversaw the CIA’s notorious cocaine-for-arms airflights.

On October 9, 1967, it was Rodriguez who ordered that Guevara’s execution wounds should look like they were received in combat. It was Rodriguez who pocketed Che Guevara’s wristwatch as a souvenir and flew Guevara’s body to the nearby military base at Vallegrande. Early on October 11, after cutting off Guevara’s hands as evidence, the killers dumped his body in an unmarked grave near Vallegrande’s airstrip. Publicly, the Bolivian government insisted his body had been burned.

This whole operation was stamped “Made in the U.S.A”. By killing Che Guevara and his fellow guerrillas, the rulers of the United States intended to send a bloody message to the people of South America and the world.

Bullets in the Backyard

The U.S. ruling class has always viewed Latin America as its “backyard” and they have used armed force against anyone who challenged them there.

U.S. forces labeled Pancho Villa a bandit and murdered Sandino in Nicaragua. They overturned elected governments–including the murder of Chilean president Salvador Allende and 30,000 people in 1973. Dozens of bloody invasions and aggressions over the last century maintained U.S. control of Panama, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Central America. And in the last decade, they have mobilized their squads of CIA agents, advisers and “anti-drug” troops to fight against the people’s war led by the Communist Party of Peru.

While they oppressed the people of Latin America, the U.S. rulers have also threatened any foreign powers who tried to make their own inroads there–starting with their arrogant “Monroe Doctrine” of 1823. The U.S. declared its right to seize Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898. In the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, they deployed troops, naval armadas and death squads to prevent Soviet social-imperialism from “getting a beachhead on the mainland of the Americas.” More recently, they imposed NAFTA to tighten their grip on the people of Mexico and to shut Japanese and European imperialists out.

In the 1960s, at the time of Che’s final campaign in Bolivia, the U.S. pursued these policies with a vengeance. These were times, as Mao Zedong  wrote, U.S. imperialism looked like a “paper tiger…panic-stricken at the mere rustle of leaves in the wind.” A great wave of rebellion and revolution challenged the U.S. in Asia, Africa and Latin America. And the USSR had stepped out, as a new imperialist rival, to take advantage of the U.S. difficulties.

Killers document their own crime

President John F. Kennedy responded with bloody means. He sent a CIA fleet to land at Bay of Pigs in 1961 to attempt to overthrow the popular revolution in Cuba. He started the flow of troops and “advisors” into southern Vietnam to fight the national liberation movement there.

New CIA-run armies were organized. The Green Berets were founded. U.S. training schools were cranking out torturers, coup-makers and counterrevolutionaries. Many places throughout the world were seeded with U.S.-trained agents and killers.

And on October 9, 1967, those forces executed Che Guevara and his followers in that tiny village of La Higuera.