On 8 October 1967, a group of Bolivian Rangers, trained and 'advised' by US officers, trapped Che Guevara in the Bolivian Nancahuazu River region. Several hours later, on direct instructions from headquarters and the dictator-President Barrientos, he was murdered by firing squad. American journalist Daniel James, who was in close contact with certain CIA circles, was later to write cynically: 'The Armed Forces' decision to execute Che had been made well in advance and was not the outcome of a last minute decision. It was a matter of policy...' (It should be added that Che had always respected the lives of his own prisoners: Major Sanchez, an officer in the Bolivian army who had been imprisoned by the guerrillas, was freed several days later and the memory of this episode impressed him deeply. In 1971 he became the only officer to resist General Banzer's fascist coup.) The Bolivian army and their US 'advisers' had learned their lesson from the 'error' committed by Batista in 1953 when he had failed to kill Fidel Castro immediately upon his capture.
Isolated in a harsh and sparsely populated region with no tradition of struggle or peasant organisation, and cut off from any possible urban support by the betrayal of the Bolivian Communist Party, the rural guerrillas under Che's leadership were doomed to failure and it was only the courage and the outstanding endurance of his fighters which enabled him to hold out for eight months.
The death of Che was the beginning of the end of the rural guerrillas' period of breakthrough. Little by little they were to be crushed throughout Latin America (Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, etc.) with the exception of Colombia. In the years to follow, a second wave of guerrilla warfare emerged, this time in the great urban centres of the southern section of the continent. This too met with annihilation in Brazil, Uruguay, etc., although not in Argentina. Faced with such a list of failures, the Latin American revolutionaries of today have been forced to redefine their concept of armed struggle to include the forging of stronger links with the activities of the masses in workers' and peasants' union organisations, the political mobilisation of large sections of the population under the leadership of a vanguard party — in a word, to return to a certain extent to the 'classic' Leninist problematic of power, of the revolutionary crisis and the arming of [illegible].
Is this to say that the ideas of Che have been superseded and that his work belongs to the history books alone? It would be easy — perhaps too easy — to list after the event the errors he made in Bolivia: illusions on the possibility of the Bolivian CP playing a revolutionary role; an under-estimation of the necessity of building a political revolutionary organisation among the workers and peasants and particularly among the miners, the vanguard of the proletariat; a concept of armed struggle concentrating too heavily on geographico-military aspects and lacking any organised links with the mass movement, etc.
However, nothing would be more superficial and false than to dismiss entirely the work of Che and his contribution to revolutionary strategy in Latin America (and elsewhere). Not only because rural guerrilla activities might still prove to be a decisive means of struggle in agrarian based countries, but also because Che was no mere theoretician of guerrilla warfare. At the core of his military and political writings, there is a fundamental idea which has lost none of its relevance: 'If one admits that the enemy will fight to remain in power, then one must envisage the destruction of the oppressing army; it must therefore be opposed by a people's army.' The rational kernel of his thoughts on strategy (which recurs constantly in his writings), more profound and important than the technical instructions for the foco of guerrilla warfare, is the conviction that 'the overthrow and total destruction of the army by the forces of the people' is 'the indispensable condition for any true revolution'.
Was Che a utopian, an adventurist? Let us read again the passage written in 1961, thinking meanwhile of Santiago, September 1973: 'When people speak to us of gaining power by an electoral process, our question is always the same: if a popular movement is put into power by a large popular vote and decides to begin the great social transformations which make up its programme, would it not immediately find itself in conflict with the reactionary sectors of the country? Hasn't the army always been the tool of these classes? If this is true, then it would be logical to assume that the army would be on the side of its own class and would take part in the struggle against the new government. By means of a coup d'etat, more or less violent, the government would be overturned and the whole game would start again ad infinitum. Of course, it could also happen that the oppressing army would be defeated by an armed popular response defending the government. What seems unlikely to me is that the armed forces would accept profound social reforms and resign themselves calmly to being liquidated as a caste.'
It is sufficient to compare this astonishing prophecy with something written by Luis Corvalan, secretary of the Chilean CP, in 1970, in order to see where lies lucid realism and where tragically irresponsible utopianism: 'Amongst our armed forces a spirit of professionalism and a respect for the government established according to the Constitution reign supreme. Moreover, the Army and the Navy were born in the struggle for independence.'
Today three quarters of the population of Latin America are under military rule. The Latin American people are experiencing the 'Iron Heel' as described by Jack London: brutal oppression by an officer class in the pay of an oligarchy of big capitalism and imperialism. ITT and the IMF have replaced the United Fruit Company and the Wall Street banks of the Thirties, but it is still the imperialist monopolists, via the military, who make and break governments and regimes in many of the countries of the continent.
Both in heavily industrialised countries (Brazil, Argentina) and in traditional agrarian based countries (Paraguay), both in countries with a long parliamentary and constitutional tradition (Chile, Uruguay) and those which have always been crushed by the power of the military (Nicaragua) — in almost every corner of the continent the dominant classes have been eager to replace Liberty, Equality and Fraternity by Infantry, Artillery and Cavalry. The militarization of the state is not the result of the specific historic or economic character of this or that country, but of a general merging of the class struggle in the continent, characterised by a sharpening of social contradictions, a crisis in the politico-ideological apparatuses responsible for controlling the people (the Church, the political parties, education, the press) and consequently by a shifting of the axis of power towards the repressive apparatuses (the army, the police, armed para-police organisations, etc.). As regards the Peruvian military regime, a temporary exception presented by the Communist Parties as an exemplary model of 'revolutionary' nationalism, its shift further and further towards the right is evident: a clear return in force of the imperialist monopolies (copper, petroleum, etc.), an economic policy dictated by the IMF, a massive repression of the trade unions, etc.
The Havana resolution of the Latin American Communist Parties (June 1975) spoke of the Latin American armed forces as an institution which could become an 'element of progress and even of revolutionary potential'. The recent history of the continent proves a thousand times over that Che was right when he insisted: 'What can draw the military to true democracy? What loyalty can be expected from those who have always been the instrument of domination of the reactionary classes and imperialist monopolies, from a caste which only exists thanks to the arms it possesses, and which thinks only of the preservation of its own rights?'
We can recognise that Che did not give sufficient importance to political work within the armed forces of the bourgeois state, work which would not bring about the 'reform' of this institution but its disintegration from within by the clandestine and/or semi-legal organisation of the ranks, NCOs and even officers sympathetic towards the proletariat. However, to believe that for such work one can do without a policy of arming the workers, or avoid a violent confrontation between revolution and counter-revolution, indicates a most dangerous lack of realism. As Trotsky wrote in connection with the 1905 rising, the majority of soldiers 'is capable of laying down its arms or, eventually, of pointing its bayonets at the reaction only if it begins to believe in the possibility of a people's victory. Such a belief is not created by political agitation alone. Only when the soldiers become convinced that the people have come out into the streets for a life-and-death struggle...'
The method proposed by Che for establishing a popular army opposed to the capitalist army — rural guerrilla warfare — has been proved to be inadequate for the majority of countries in the continent; but the question which he posed is fundamental and is far from being satisfactorily solved by the Latin American revolutionary left today. Urban guerrilla warfare, not envisaged by Che, which was developed with a great deal of courage and imagination by revolutionary groups such as the Tupamaros or the Brazilian ALN, has also failed (the question still remains open in Argentina), due to, amongst other reasons, the use of torture by the military regimes; torture thereby becoming a decisive institutional factor in the carrying out of the politico-military domination of the Latin American bourgeoisie.
Nevertheless, it is on the political and social level that we must seek the roots of the failures of the continent's revolutionaries since the death of Che: the inability to organise/mobilise the great mass of the workers and [illegible] character belonging to history and to the legend of the Latin American and world revolution; Che the intransigent defender of the armed road as the only guarantee of real triumph retains on the other hand a living significance.
In fact, his thesis on the inevitability of armed confrontation is only the logical consequence of his analysis of the social nature of the revolution in Latin America. Through two experiences which he had lived through personally — the negative experience of Guatemala in 1953-54 and the positive one of Cuba in 1959-61 — he understood the indissoluble dialectical unity between the anti-imperialist and socialist tasks in the Latin American revolution.
In fact, from April 1959 Che was envisaging, with remarkable foresight, 'the uninterrupted development of the revolution' in Cuba, to the extent of the abolition of the existing 'social system' and its 'economic foundations' — in other words, of capitalism. In an article in 1963, he extended the lessons of the Cuban revolution to the entire continent: 'When the armed vanguard of the people takes power, they will have destroyed at the same time both the imperialists and the local exploiters in their country. They will have crystallised the first stage of the socialist revolution; they will be able to start building socialism.' Thus Guevara was breaking with more than thirty years of Stalinist tradition in Latin America, and adopting one of the central themes of the theory of permanent revolution; this was the product of his own revolutionary experience, and not of the writings of Trotsky, whose works he was probably not familiar with at this time (it was not until 1967 in Bolivia that he was to read The History of the Russian Revolution, a copy of which was found by the Bolivian army in the guerrilla hide-out).
It is only by starting off from this basic understanding of the combined socialist and anti-imperialist character of the revolution that one can explain Che's insistence on the destruction of the repressive bourgeois machinery. In the neo-Menshevik perspective put forward by the traditional Communist Parties of a national-democratic revolution in alliance with the 'progressive' bourgeoisie, the problem of breaking the established military institution has no place within their political horizon; since the national bourgeoisie is predominant in the revolutionary bloc, a considerable section, if not the majority, of the top military hierarchy is considered as a potential ally. The last resolution of the Latin American Communist Parties (including, alas, the Cuban CP), at Havana in 1975, states that sectors of the Latin American bourgeoisie 'hold positions which converge with those held by the proletariat, the peasants and other non-capitalist layers of the population in the struggle against imperialism... Consequently, these bourgeois sectors can participate in democratic and anti-imperialist unity of action with the popular forces'. The affirmations in this same document of the 'revolutionary potential' of the armed forces and the 'steady evolution of patriotic consciousness' amongst them evidently spring from this socio-political hypothesis.
The evolution of Latin America in the course of the past few years (and especially the overt turn towards imperialism taken by the military junta in Peru) rather confirm, however, the theories developed by Che in his political testament, Letter to the Tricontinental (1967). In a memorable passage, destined to become the political banner of the revolutionary left throughout the continent, he proclaimed: 'The national bourgeoisies are no longer in any way capable of opposing imperialism — if indeed they ever were — and they now make up its rearguard. There are no further possibilities: either socialist revolution or a mockery of revolution.'
If the similarity between Che's concepts and the strategic orientation put forward by the theory of permanent revolution is undeniable, it is nonetheless clear that Guevara attributed a far greater revolutionary role to the peasantry than did Trotsky. Having said this, we should note, paradoxically, that the Latin American Trotskyists have on several occasions played an important role in the mobilisation of the peasant masses: the POR in Bolivia in 1952-54, Hugo Blanco in Peru in 1961-63, and in Mexico today, the formation (with the close collaboration of the PRT, the Mexican section of the Fourth International) of the Independent Revolutionary Peasant Coordination. Also, Trotsky himself stressed, in one of his last works, that 'Marxism has never invested its estimation of the peasantry as a non-socialist class with an absolute and static character'. The Cuban revolution (after the revolutions in Asia) showed the decisive role which might have been played by the peasantry in an uninterrupted revolutionary process, culminating in a fusion of the democratic and socialist revolution.
Was Guevara wrong in his desire to generalise the lessons of the Cuban 'peasant war' to the whole of Latin America? One can conclude that he was mistaken in expecting a repetition of the Cuban experience in the greater part of the continent and in his under-estimation of the social and political weight of the urban and mining proletariat, particularly in the countries of the southern part of the continent, where the working class is clearly the direct historic subject of all possible revolutionary transformation. Moreover, the urbanisation and industrialisation (limited and deformed, but nonetheless real) which has taken place over the last 20 years in Latin America today gives the proletariat and the urban masses an increasing importance, far greater than at the time of the Cuban guerrillas in the Fifties. But this is not to deny that half, or nearly half, of the population of the continent is still composed of peasants; and one of the great merits of Che's work was to draw attention rightly to the huge revolutionary potential of this class, including within a socialist perspective.
What will the respective roles of the proletariat and the peasantry be in the Latin American revolution? Clearly, the answer will not be the same for both Columbia and Argentina, for Uruguay and Mexico. In reality, the revolutionary left in the continent, torn between a dogmatic workerism of European origin and a populist cult of the peasantry imported from Asia, is far from reaching a clear and rigorous answer to this question. The writings of Che, as long as they are approached with an open, critical mind, can be a significant contribution to this debate.
The other dimension of the thought and political practice of Che which brings him close to revolutionary Marxism and the theory of permanent revolution is his resulting internationalism. From 1959 his constant preoccupation was to extend the Cuban revolution to the entire Latin American continent. This preoccupation was based on an intuitive belief that the fate of the revolutionary Cuban state and its autonomy in the face of the Soviet bureaucracy were linked to the fate of the Latin American revolution, and also on an understanding of the close ties between the revolutionary processes in various countries on a continental scale. But Che's internationalism did not stop at Latin America; he was one of those rare revolutionary leaders of our time to comprehend the organic unity of the world capitalist system, the dialectical relationship between the various sectors of the class struggle within this system, and the need for a unified revolutionary strategy on an international scale. When he put forward the slogan 'one, two, three, many Vietnams' in 1967, Guevara was outlining (for the first time in many years in the history of the workers movement, apart from the revolutionary Marxist minority) an orientation towards world revolution which would be answerable not to the national interests of any particular state or any particular 'socialist' power, but to the international proletariat in its entirety. But he did not confine himself to launching slogans; he practised what he preached by trying to open up within Latin America a 'second front' which could assist Vietnam.
For Che, internationalism was simultaneously a moral imperative — an ethical demand of revolutionary humanism, going beyond narrow national limits in a powerful movement of fraternal solidarity — and a practical, concrete and material requirement of the revolutionary struggle against the common enemy: 'There are no frontiers in this struggle to the death... The practice of proletarian internationalism is not simply a duty for the people who are struggling for a better future; it is also an unavoidable necessity.'
Of course, he can be accused of paying too much attention to the Third World at the expense of Europe in his vision of the class struggle on the planet, and of not having conceived of the need for an anti-bureaucratic revolution in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Still, it remains true that since the death of Trotsky we have not seen a revolutionary leader of world wide historic stature who, like Che, has placed internationalism at the heart of his political perspective and his militant activity; who has conducted himself not as a 'statesman' but as a combatant in the world revolution, paying with his life for the working out of his internationalist strategy. It is through revolutionaries such as Che and his partisans in the world, such as Miguel Enriquez who fell in combat in Chile, or Rohan Wijeweera, imprisoned until recently in Sri Lanka, that a Communist International of the masses will be constructed in the future which will take on the heritage of the Leninist Third International (1919-1923) and the Fourth International of today.
As to the question of the Stalinist bureaucracy: it is true that Che did not have a clear view of the problem, but his profound anti-bureaucratic sensibility was undeniable. It showed itself in a particularly interesting way in the discussions which took place at the Cuban Ministry of Industry in 1964 (published in 1970 by Il Manifesto and Tricontinentale — French edition). Che explicitly criticised the material privileges of the bureaucracy in Eastern Europe: 'It is the leaders who gain each time. Look at the latest plan of the German Democratic Republic; the importance assumed by the leadership, or rather, the retribution of the leadership.' Also, while recounting his discussions in the USSR to his Cuban comrades, he mentioned the fact that his Soviet interlocutors had accused him of 'Trotskyism'. While rejecting this label, Che replied by clearly affirming: 'On this point, I believe that either we have the capacity to destroy contrary opinions by argument or else we must allow them to be expressed [...] It is not possible to destroy opinions by force, as that blocks all free development of intelligence.' Thus he was proclaiming one of the fundamental ideas of socialist democracy, at the same time manifesting his basic incompatibility with Stalinist procedure and methods.
Guevara was not a Trotskyist, of course. But it is not by chance that many Guevarist militants (even entire organisations, such as the recent example of the Comandos Camilistas in Colombia) have joined the ranks of the Fourth International, considering that it represents the continuation and deepening of the authentically revolutionary and internationalist dimension of Guevarism.
For all of these reasons, we Trotskyists salute his memory on the 10th anniversary of his death as a brother in combat; for us, as for many other militants of the new vanguard which has developed since the Sixties, Che Guevara, through his ideas, his actions and his example, is a huge revolutionary banner, a red flame, pure and ardent, which the dictators, the generals and their Pentagon 'advisers' will never be able to extinguish.
1. Daniel James, The Complete Bolivian Diaries of Che Guevara and Other Captured Documents, Allen & Unwin, London, p. 58.
2. Let us not forget that, in our own movement, the Fourth International, at its Ninth World Congress in 1968, defended a concept of armed struggle in Latin America which was not without similarities to that put forward by Che.
3. Ernesto Che Guevara, 'Tactics and Strategies of the Latin American Revolution', 1962, in Textes politiques, Maspero, 1968, p. [illegible].
4. 'Cuba: An Isolated Case or the Vanguard of the Struggle Against Imperialism?', 1961, in Textes politiques, p. 67.
5. [illegible]
6. [illegible]
7. 'Guerrilla Warfare: A Method', 1963, in Textes militaires, p. 156.
8. Leon Trotsky, 1905, Penguin, pp. 283-4.
9. Selected Works of Che Guevara, MIT Press, 1969, p. 372.
10. [illegible]
11. [illegible] Obras 1957-67, Casa [de las Américas], p. 880.
12. Leon Trotsky, 'Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution', 1939, in Writings 1939-40, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p. 85.
13. [illegible]
14. [illegible]
15. ibid., p. 86.