Keep in mind that the Latin America of Guevara's youth was essentially a series of medieval fiefdoms, in which in each country a few dozen families shamelessly exploited the rest of the inhabitants, using periodic massacres, summary executions, and permanent near-starvation conditions to maintain themselves in power.
Look at any statistic you want from the period -- literacy, infant mortality, life expectancy -- and you'll see that aside from a few thousand members of the elite, and a small middle class needed to run the government beauracracy, Latin Americans lived in a continuation of Europe's medieval period in every meaningful sense.
Just to give you an idea, from a period a bit before Che's long voyage, the average life expectancy in Chile --a country always considered to be at the forefront of development in Latin America-- was 27 years in 1900!
And the elites who perpetuated these regimes were very well armed, often by a certain foreign government.
This is to give a certain context to some of the comments posted here.
In light of the abismal, sub-human reality imposed on 99% of Latin Americans, is it any wonder that Guevara believed that violence was the only way to produce changes? Especially considering that violence had been used by these countries' rulers for 400+ years to stay in power?
Of course, Che was killed for his efforts, but to this day he has had a lasting effect on Latin America, probably more far reaching than he could ever have imagined.
In the 60, the US GOVERNMENT pushed land reform on most Latin American countries as a direct response to not-unfounded fears that the utterly exploitative, inequitable and inhuman division of property (1% of the population owning 90%+ of any given country's land) would lead to mass uprisings and spontaneous revolution. And Guevara's limited success in the continent was the number one US justification of this fear.
So here we have Che leading the US government to force the Latin American elites to violate the sacrosanct principle of private property on a mass scale!
And to this day, any moderately organized group of non-pacifist protestors in Latin America can send shivers down governments' spines thanks to the memory of Che. We saw that in Chiapas, where the indigenous population was treated worse than domestic pets, and we can see that today in Chile where some Mapuche indians in the south are fighting to reclaim lands stolen from them, in some cases resorting to guerrilla-like actions such as burning down the equipment and property of the huge transnational companies that have taken these lands and are now clearcutting them, mainly to export wood chips to Japan.
These groups, and others like them, are essentially powerless in the face of the military and police apparatus of modern Latin American governments. But thanks in part to the influence of Guevara, they have far more power than they otherwise would have. Still not much at all, but sometimes enough to actually get governments to sit down at the bargaining table and make a few concessions here and there.
And though we may like to think of current Latin American governments as modern entities that are simply plagued by a lack of money or other resources, or a bit of corruption here and there, the reality is often far closer to what it was 50 or more years ago. You'll be hard pressed to find more revolting rich-poor gaps than those in Latin America, with Brazil and Chile leading the way.
Yes, Chile, that supposed economic miracle where the cost of living is comparable to that of a small US city, yet the minimum wage is about US$ 1.20 an hour, where a 19% value-added tax is slapped on everything (this is what is know as a regressive tax -- it hits the poor violently and is irrelevant to the rich, who can reclaim it through their companies, often fraudulently), where employers routinely don't make the equivalent of social security and medicare payments thereby depriving their workers of much of their pensions (which are INDIVIDUAL, unlike US Social Security) and any real healthcare (and any worker who doesn't like it can hire their own lawyer and sue, but since class-action suits don't exist in Chile 1000 workers would have to hire 1000 lawyers, something that is for all intents and purposes utterly impossible)...
I could go on and on and on. And Chile is a hell of a lot better off than most of its neighbors!
In short, rather than condemning Che for committing a miniscule number of atrocities under regimes that have massacred thousands upon thousands at a time, we should be looking for some sort of solution for the current conditions in Latin America, hopefully a peaceful one.
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postbagboy
17 years ago
Bravo! Very well said.
Not very surprising that the OP hasn't responded to your reply.
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