On 9 October 1967, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was executed in La Higuera, Bolivia. He had been captured alive the day before. His Bolivian diary ends on 7 October and cannot tell us his final words; accounts of those words differ. In 2026, it is 59 years since his death. Che’s Bolivian diary; contemporary U.S. memorandum.
The United States and the hunt for Che
This was not simply a confrontation between one guerrilla and the Bolivian army. U.S. Green Berets trained the battalion that captured Che alive; U.S. intelligence and CIA operatives also supported the operation. Félix Rodríguez had helped direct the hunt. On 9 October he was in La Higuera and, according to his declassified CIA debriefing, relayed the order to execute Che to the soldiers and told them not to shoot his face so the wounds would look as though they had been received in combat. A CIA memorandum attributes the formal issuing of that order to Bolivian army headquarters. That does not make Rodríguez a passive witness or separate the execution from the counterinsurgency operation the United States helped build. The Bolivian army then spread the false account that Che had died of battle wounds. National Security Archive, declassified records; CIA memorandum; U.S. diplomatic history.
Washington’s involvement was deliberate. U.S. officials treated the Bolivian operation as a possible model for counterinsurgency elsewhere in Latin America. After Che’s death, presidential adviser Walt Rostow expected it to discourage further guerrilla activity and cited the U.S.-trained battalion as evidence that American assistance worked. The documents show the United States helping to hunt a revolutionary and hoping his death would weaken movements beyond Bolivia. Counterinsurgency programme; Rostow’s assessment.
Why did he threaten capital and empire?
The familiar portrait can make Che seem like a solitary rebel. He was an Argentine physician, a commander in the revolution that overthrew Cuba’s U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship and, after its victory, a participant in building a socialist state. In Cuba he led the National Bank and later the Ministry of Industries. Machines, production, planning and workers’ education mattered to him as much as the battlefield. Che on revolutionary medicine; National Bank; Ministry of Industries.
For Che, socialism meant social ownership and production for collective needs rather than private profit. In Socialism and Man in Cuba, he argued for a new relationship between work and society. His politics challenged the right of foreign corporations and local elites to command labour, land and resources. The Bolivian National Liberation Army’s first communiqué appealed to workers, peasants and intellectuals and denounced the transfer of the country’s resources to foreign monopolies. Che, Socialism and Man in Cuba; ELN communiqué.
That is why his internationalism mattered. At the United Nations in 1964 he linked struggles in Africa, Asia and Latin America against colonialism and economic dependence. In 1965 he left his posts in Cuba and joined a liberation struggle in the Congo; Bolivia came later. In his 1967 message to the Tricontinental, he described imperialism as a world system extracting raw materials and cheap labour from dependent countries. A revolution able to spread across borders threatened that system. Che at the UN; Message to the Tricontinental.
What to remember on 9 October
Bolivian soldiers executed a revolutionary prisoner. A CIA operative had helped hunt him, relayed the order to the soldiers and helped construct the fiction of a battlefield death. The photograph survived. So did the political question behind it: who controls the land, the factories and the wealth people create?
Read further
- Che’s Bolivian diary — his own account of the campaign.
- Socialism and Man in Cuba — his thinking about work and socialist society.
- Message to the Tricontinental — his analysis of imperialism.
- Declassified documents — U.S. involvement in the hunt and execution.