Che Guevara [antikvár]

Introduction The revelation slipped out almost casually during a long morning's conversation over coffee in November 1995. Sitting in the garden of his private walled compound on the ouskirts of the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, retired General Mario Vargas Salinas divulged to me his role in the secret burial of the man he had helped hunt down twenty-eight years earlier: the Argen-tine-born revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The general's confession broke silence on one of Latin America's most enduring mysteries. After his capture and murder by the Bolivian military and in the presence of a CIA agent in October 1967, the body of Fidel Castro's right-hand man had vanished. In his Santa Cruz garden, Vargas Salinas disclosed that he had been part of a nocturnal burial detail, that Che's body— minus his hands, which had been amputated—and those of several of his comrades were buried in a mass grave near the dirt airstrip outside the little mountain town of Vallegrande in central Bolivia. The officers who had defeated the world's most charismatic guerrilla fighter sought to deny him a burial place that could become a place of public homage. With his disappearance, they hoped, the myth of Che Guevara would end. Instead, the Che myth grew and spiraled beyond anyone's control. Millions mourned his passing. Poets and philosophers wrote impassioned eulogies to him, musicians composed tributes, and painters rendered his portrait in a myriad of heroic poses. Marxist guerrillas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America anxious to "revolutionize" their societies held his banner aloft as they went into battle. And, as the youth in the United States and Western Europe rose up against the established order over the Vietnam War, racial prejudice, and social orthodoxy, Che's defiant visage became the ultimate icon of their fervent if largely futile revolt. Che's body might have vanished, but his spirit lived on; Che was nowhere and everywhere at once.