Bolivia

47 years after his murder: his draft program, for the first time in English

Richard Fidler

08/10/2014

Opinión

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Forty-seven years ago today Ernesto “Che” Guevara was murdered in cold blood along with two other guerrillas by the Bolivian military after being captured, wounded, the previous day. We now know that the army was acting on orders from the White House and Pentagon.[1]

The event is marked each year in Vallegrande, the town in Santa Cruz department where Che’s body was buried for three decades in a common grave with other guerrillas alongside an aircraft landing strip. (His remains were later transferred to Cuba to be placed in a monument in Santa Clara.)

This year a novel aspect of the commemoration was the participation of an official Argentine delegation from Che’s country of birth and the placing of a plaque sent by President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. The two-day ceremonies were shorter than usual because many of the Bolivians normally involved are actively campaigning for the MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) government in Sunday’s election, according to Oswaldo Chato Peredo, a survivor of the 1967 guerrilla force. Peredo told La Razón that many of the MAS candidates in Santa Cruz “are people who have been formed in Che’s school of thinking….”[2]

Appropriately, October 8, celebrated in Bolivia as the “Day of the Heroic Guerrilla,” was the day of the MAS closing campaign rally, held in El Alto.

In Argentina, the Telam news agency reports, a Spanish translation of the Smith and Ratner book (see note 1, below) is being launched.

The Bolivian government newspaper Cambio published today a special four-page supplement on “Che: Bolivian,” from which I have translated the following article, first published two years ago in La Razón and on the web site of the author Carlos Soria Galvarro.[3] The article quotes the text of a previously unpublished programmatic document drafted by Che in the opening stages of his Bolivian guerrilla struggle but never completed before his capture and death.

Of particular interest is what the text (and the crossed-out words) indicate of Che’s evolving and tentative thinking about the immediate tasks facing the Bolivian revolution that he hoped to spark: calling for nationalization of foreign capital and its local allied firms, construction of a “new,” not yet necessarily “socialist” society, the need to involve the original peoples in their own languages, etc.

I have translated the text as published in Cambio, which differs from the original article mainly in the final paragraph with its reference to Evo Morales.

Full text, with links and photos: http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/2014/10/ches-proposal-for-bolivia.html or http://tinyurl.com/movzuch

https://www.alainet.org/en/active/77876