A Bad Assassination By Plutocrats, For Plutocrats: Che Guevara

I have been highly critical of the excesses of Athens in defending herself during the Peloponnesian War (Such as the infamous holocaust of Mylo, with its grotesque justification). And I exceriorate tyrants such as Constantine, Napoleon, Louis XIV, Kaiser WII, Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, etc. for their human rights destruction. So it may seem strange my war against Islamism goes as far as approving the execution of a few Islam Fundamentalist terrorists (while being mild with Saudi’s MBS… although he is embarked on mass lethal war in Yemen, and a questionable relationship with assassinating an editorialist of the Washington Post…).

Well, I am far from approving all the activities of the US armed forces and secret services. I am not just talking about the Banana wars of the 1920s, 30s, in service of plutocrats, which the head of the US Marine Corps, Major General Butler then correctly decried. The assassination of Che Guevara (see below) is more of the same. See:

Military Industrial Complex: A Necessary Danger To Civilization

But also of more obscure actions, such as lawyer Donovan, soon to found the OSS, going to Yugoslavia in July 1941 to foment trouble against the Nazis… something that resulted in the death of more than a million Yugoslavs… ultimately just to extend the US world empire, on the cheap.) The list of various exaction campaigns perpetrated by the US government against other nations is in the hundreds… However, fighting Islamism (instead of using it as was long done, starting in the 1930s) is a good thing… And the USA has finally joined France on the correct side of the struggle against a superstition justifying sexism, stupidification, terror and dictatorship

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Eliminating Soleimani was a question of world public security:

Major General Soleimani of Iran, an authentic war hero, and an imminent (mass) killer was a master Islamist general. Soleimani was excellent at using both Suni and Shiite, even arming them against each other, his Quds force pulling the strings. The end result was a projection of Iranian Islamist power westward, greatest, arguably, since the Eight Century.

One lesson of history is that Islamist military adventures have to be taken seriously. The diminutive Arab Islamist power quickly destroyed several large empires, including Zoroastrian Sassanid Persia, and half of Rome, in a few years, in perhaps the greatest military feat of history.

Soleimani promoted Islam, an ideology most successful, precisely because it is most friendly to dictators.

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Che Dead

… Whereas Che Guevara promoted, however violently and idiotically, the struggle against inequality… a much better cause: 

However, those of Marxist inspiration tend to use dictatorial means, as promoted by Marx (following in a sense, Julius Caesar…)

Che’s hysterical ideology advocated exporting “revolution” to any country whose leader is supported by the empire (the United States) while falling out of favor with its peasants. Guevara talks about how constant guerrilla warfare taking place in non-urban areas can overcome (plutocratic) leadership. That was, and is, eminently stupid, and not supported by the facts, poor peasantry being militarily important, potentially, only in very few countries… and thus, that’s not what happened where revolutions worked!

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I always was against the execution of Che Guevara. It was an extra-judicial assassination, the way it happened, with nothing to justify it. The Che failed in Bolivia, because there had been a redistribution of land to poor peasants in 1950s. Thus the Che found himself alone, with little to no support, hunted by the CIA and its trained helpers. Bolivia was still replete with racism and massive inequality (I have lived there, long ago)… But that Bolivian racism and inequality could be endured… whereas the mix of dictatorship, Mafia, United Fruits and US exploitation in the 1950s Cuba was not tolerable; so Castro and Che succeeded in Cuba, not Bolivia, for the same reason that revolution could succeed in Russia, not the USA.

The ongoing threat posed by Che Guevara to Bolivia was nonexistent (nearly 2,000 soldiers trapped his little band of 17 famished guerillas; a goat shepherd Bolivian woman had apparently revealed their whereabouts…). One could safely have detained him, indefinitively, there was no human reason to assassinate him (officially CIA was against it). It was a crime, and that is why the Che was assassinated, precisely because it was a crime. US plutocrats involved in latin America and their CIA helpers were all for a reign of terror.

The CIA denied having killed Che. But, a few years after the crime, as it turned out, I talked with the Bolivian Justice minister. He told me: “There was nothing we could do. Our hands were completely tied. And it’s true to this day. We do exactly what the US tell us to do.” I didn’t realize at the time how exceptional that exchange was. I was direct eyewitness to history (and the lying snakes).

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In this 1967 photo provided by Felix Rodriguez, CIA agent and US soldier Rodriguez, left, is shown with (still alive!) Che Guevara, center, before Guevara was executed in Bolivia. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Felix Rodriguez)

According to Rodriguez, this was all very personal, as his family had suffered in Cuba from Che and his ilk……

Another eyewitness of the general scene, shortly after Che’s execution, thinks Rodriguez killed Che. There are official orders, and then there are real orders.

Newsweek, 10/9/2017: 

“A White House memorandum signed by Walt Whitman Rostow, national security adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, also attributed the order to kill Guevara to Bolivian military leader General Alfredo Ovando Candía. “I regard this as stupid,” Rostow wrote about the execution order, adding, “but it is understandable from a Bolivian standpoint.”

Two American human and civil rights lawyers however didn’t believe the CIA role could be so easily dismissed. In their book Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away With Murder, Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith reviewed previously unpublished documents from CIA, White House, State and Defense Departments and argued the CIA wanted and expected Guevara to be killed, if captured.

“The line of the government was that: ‘The Bolivians did it as we couldn’t do anything about it.’ That isn’t true. This whole operation was organized out of the White House by Walt Whitman Rostow and the CIA,” Smith told Democracy Now in 2012.

“The U.S. wanted Che dead because that was the way to end revolutionary fervour in Latin America and around the world,” Ratner added.”

The US wanted Che dead, because the US government at the time, did exactly what US plutocrats making a lot of money in Latin America told it to do. Now they make less money, and, say, China, has become much more profitable (until the apparition of the demoniac Trump, that is…)

Patrice Ayme

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Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna was born to a well-off family in Argentina in 1928. While studying medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, he took time off to travel around South America on a motorcycle; he witnessed the poverty and oppression of the lower classes. He received his medical degree in 1953 and continued his travels around Latin America, becoming involved with left-wing organizations, making a big noise that he couldn’t g. In the mid 1950s, Guevara met up with Fidel Castro and his group of exiled revolutionaries in Mexico. Guevara played a key role in Castro’s seizure of power from Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Che served as Castro’s right-hand man and minister of industry. Guevara strongly opposed U.S. domination in Latin America and advocated peasant-based revolutions to combat social injustice in Third World countries. Castro later described him as “an artist of revolutionary warfare.”

Guevara resigned—some say he was dismissed—from his Cuban government post in April 1965, possibly over differences with Castro about the nation’s economic and foreign policies: Cuba abandoned Guevara’s plans for economic diversification and rapid industrialization, and instead became a part of the Soviet empire. Guevara then disappeared from Cuba, traveled to Africa, feeding the war in Angola, and eventually resurfaced in Bolivia, where he was killed (after failing to do his homework, as I said above).

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October 9th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the execution of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. 

Only one person witnessed Che’s death: the executioner himself, Bolivian Army Sergeant Mario Terán.  “Know that you are killing a man,” Che told him. “Now shoot here, dammit.”  The latter order refers to Che’s exhorting his reluctant killer to aim the rifle at the chest.  The president of Bolivia, René Barrientos, had already announced Che’s death in the previous day’s battle.  The mortal wounds had to appear related to a battle, not an execution. It seems that many of those who took part in Che’s death were latter tracked by Cuban agents. What is certain is that were killed.

Terán was forgiven by Cuba and given free cataract surgery.

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Some Cuban exiles still hate Che, accusing him of extrajudicial executions. I am skeptical of these accusations, considering what we know of his later adventures, more characterized by naivety than anything else.

Tags: Che Guevara, Executions, Soleimani