Abstract

Guevara, Debray and the CIA

This article focuses on the association of the guerrilla leader Che guevara with Bolivia. Exactly when Che became involved is not clear. According to what Marxist philosopher Regis Debray said in prison, the Bolivians asked him to be their leader. He did not come here by his own choice. He came because the Bolivians called him. In the early fifties he had been for a year or more a doctor in the Alto Beni, but he apparently spent most of 1966 traveling all over southeast Bolivia. The Bolivian authorities tried to put over the notion that the guerrifias were a bunch of bandits from abroad, messing about in Bolivia's internal affairs. But in fact there seem to have been no more than seventeen Cubans with the guerrillas-who probably originally numbered about 200. Debray has said that approximately 10 per cent of the guerrillas were Cubans, and this figure looks substantially correct.