Che Guevara Executed: Bolivia Ends a Revolutionary

"Shoot, coward. You are only going to kill a man." Those were reportedly the last words of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, spoken to the Bolivian sergeant assigned to execute him. On October 9, 1967, one day after his capture in the Yuro ravine, the Argentine-born revolutionary was shot nine times in a schoolhouse in the village of La Higuera. He was 39 years old. Guevara had arrived in Bolivia eleven months earlier under a false identity, convinced that the conditions for rural guerrilla revolution existed throughout Latin America and that Bolivia — impoverished, politically unstable, and geographically central — was the ideal location to ignite a continental uprising. He was catastrophically wrong. The Bolivian Communist Party refused to support his campaign. Local peasants, rather than flocking to his cause, informed on his movements to the army. The terrain was more hostile than Cuba's Sierra Maestra. And the Bolivian military, trained and advised by CIA operatives and U.S. Army Special Forces, hunted his column of fewer than fifty fighters with increasing effectiveness. By October 1967, Guevara's band had been reduced to seventeen malnourished, demoralized guerrillas. His asthma was debilitating, his boots were falling apart, and he had lost his medicine weeks earlier. On October 8, Bolivian Rangers encircled his group near the Yuro ravine. Guevara was wounded in the leg and captured alive — the one outcome the Bolivian government found most inconvenient. Bolivian President René Barrientos ordered the execution despite American intelligence officers' desire to interrogate Guevara further. CIA operative Félix Rodríguez, a Cuban exile who had been advising the Bolivian operation, relayed the order. Sergeant Mario Terán, who had lost friends to Guevara's fighters, volunteered for the task. Rodríguez instructed Terán to shoot below the neck to simulate combat death. Guevara was shot at approximately 1:10 p.m. The Bolivian military displayed Guevara's body to journalists, then amputated his hands for fingerprint verification and buried the corpse in an unmarked grave near an airstrip in Vallegrande. The remains were not found until 1997. Dead, Guevara became far more powerful than alive. Alberto Korda's 1960 photograph of his face — beret, long hair, defiant stare — became the most reproduced image in the history of photography. The revolutionary who failed to start a single successful uprising outside Cuba became the twentieth century's most enduring symbol of rebellion.