Thirty Years Since the Death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Archibald O'Reilly

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Born in Argentina, educated as a doctor, he witnessed the overthrow of the Arbenz regime by US imperialism in Guatemala in 1954. He joined Castro’s July 26th Movement in Cuba and played a leading role in the overthrow of the corrupt Batista regime. After spending some years as a leading figure in Castro’s government, he took off for the Congo to try and replicate the Cuban revolution in central Africa. Having failed to achieve this, he attempted the same project in Bolivia through the method of the "foco". A small band of guerrillas would initiate the struggle that would spark a rebellion by the masses. Rather than build a base on the altiplano among the Bolivian tin miners and the urban working class, whose combativity is legendary, Guevara chose to go to the rural areas to carry out an isolated guerrilla campaign. This ill-fated project resulted in his death at the hands of the Bolivian army with the connivance of the CIA. Abandoned and betrayed by the Bolivian Communist Party, Guevara’s band was tracked down and encircled by the army. The brutal tragedy of Guevara’s death outraged a generation of socialists and he became a legend overnight.

The fashionable appeal of Guevarism to left-leaning youth internationally, however, played a role in disorientating the Trotskyist movement. A faction of the Fourth International around Ernest Mandel and Livio Maitan, the International Majority Tendency (IMT), adopted in 1969, two years after Guevara’s death, an equally ill-fated strategy of guerrilla warfare which led to the death of a significant number of its members in Latin America. It led to a decade of debate inside Mandel’s organisation, the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, as an oppositional faction, the Leninist Trotskyist faction (LTF), questioned the wisdom of this approach. The documents of this struggle were published is The Leninist Strategy of Party Building, edited by Joseph Hansen. It is still a subject of controversy today as the article opposite shows. It is a reply to an article in In Defence of Marxism No 1 "Characterising the USFI Today" by Chris Edwards. This was itself a reply to the founding document of the Fourth Internationalist Tendency (FIT—not to be confused with the former US organisation of the same name) which contained the Bolivian Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Workers Revolutionary Party) led by Guillermo Lora. This Trotskyist party had earlier achieved, in Bolivia, what Guevara had declined to even attempt to do: they had built a base among the Bolivian tin miners and other sectors of the urban working class. It was one of the few places where Trotskyism had gained a mass base (the others being Vietnam and Sri Lanka). This tendency adopted, in its founding statement, a characterisation of the Mandel organisation (USFI) as "counterrevolutionary" because it adopted a Guevarist guerrilla strategy in isolation from the workers’ movement. The International Trotskyist Opposition disagrees with this analysis and we are currently debating it with them in our respective journals. Despite our disagreements with Guevarism, Guevara’s murder reminds us all of the tragedy which awaits anyone who adopts an ultraleft strategy and who badly misreads the relation of forces in the class struggle. It is necessary to learn the lessons from his downfall.