Word: bolivia
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...great mysteries surrounding Che Guevara's diary of his ill-fated guerrilla campaign in Bolivia is how it reached the hands of Fidel Castro. Almost immediately after Che had been captured and executed by Bolivia's army last fall, Western journalists swarmed to La Paz to bid for the publishing rights. "If I had the money," said Bolivian Minister of Government Antonio Arguedas at the time, "I would buy the diary myself and resell it at a profit." It seems, however, that money did not stand in Arguedas' way after all. Last week, less than a month...
...Mexico, graves are still decorated with candy skulls and toy skeletons. These are afterward given to the children to play with or to eat. For a tableau of hell (opposite). Girard combined bread-and-sugar diablos from Ecuador, plaster devils from Bolivia, pottery Satans from Venezuela, and unpainted wood grotesques from the Mexican town of Erongarícuaro...
Violated Discipline. The most serious problem, as both Che and Castro make clear, was the hostility of Bolivia's Communist Party and its secretary-general, Mario Monje, to the idea of guerrilla warfare. From the day he arrived in disguise on the deserted cattle ranch that served as the guerrilla base camp, Che was faced with the task of trying to impose his strict martial control on a group that had violated its own party discipline by joining his forces. Castro, in his introduction, bitterly accuses Monje of sabotaging the whole campaign with his "chauvinism and sterile reactionary sentiment...
During his first months in Bolivia, Che set about trying to show green troops how to cut through the thick jungle underbrush and how to live off the land, noting once that his hunters had "managed to get two monkeys, a parrot and a dove." He determined "to write to Sartre and B. Russell to have them organize an international fund to help the Bolivian Liberation Movement." Shortly after his troops staged their first hit-and-run attack on the army, killing seven men, Che gloated: "Perhaps this is the first episode of a new Viet Nam." On his birthday...
Even the little triumphs were short-lived. Bolivia's stolid Indian peasantry, whom Che expected to join the revolution, did not respond: "The mass of peasants does not help us at all and has become informers." Che watched some of his most loyal followers fall in combat, get separated from others and cut off from supplies by the army's ever-tightening clamp. "This type of struggle gives us the opportunity not only to turn ourselves into revolutionaries, the highest level of the human species, but it also allows us to graduate as men," he wrote on Aug. 8, still...