From Six Questions for Greg Grandin on Che’s Legacy:

Forty years ago this month, Che Guevara was captured and executed as he tried to lead a guerilla insurrection deep in the Bolivian jungle. Despite questions about his sometimes violent tactics and effectiveness as a revolutionary leader, Che remains an iconic symbol—even though he’s now been dead longer than he was alive. Che’s popularity in this country might stem more from how he looks on album covers and T-shirts than from his ideas or actions, but in Latin America, Che is remembered for his willingness to stand up to the United States. Greg Grandin, a history professor at New York University, is the author of several books on American influence in Latin America, most recently last year’s Empire’s Workshop.

1. How is Che currently viewed in Latin America and how different is his image there than it is here?
There are those in the U.S. who see Che as a generic symbol of rebellion against power and some who even think seriously about his political legacy, but he is more readily available as a pop and commercial icon. His image has been co-opted, following in the tradition of Warhol’s silk-screened Mao. In Latin America, some of this banalization exists, but the popularity and understanding of Che goes well beyond that. I was living in Guatemala a decade ago when peace accords ended that country’s 36-year civil war, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians died. Suddenly Che’s image was everywhere. One street vendor told me that during the first three months after the war ended she sold more images of Che than she did of pop stars or the Virgin Mary. So Che–who was no fan of free speech–became a symbol of exactly that in a country long repressed. Throughout the region, Che remains a multifaceted symbol of reform, embodying anything from anti-imperialist resistance to revolutionary purity. And of course it doesn’t hurt that he is so good looking—I.F. Stone said that he was the first man he had ever met who he thought not just handsome but beautiful. In recent years, a number of admirers have been elected leaders of a number of countries: Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner all have embraced Che. Even more cautious reformers like Brazil’s Lula feel compelled to pay homage to his legacy.

2. How has his image evolved over the last four decades in Latin America?
His popularity has increased since his death. When he was alive, the Cuban Revolution, of which he was one of the most visible spokesmen, represented a divide between Latin America’s old, reformist, Communist Party Left, and a new, insurgent left. Today, those debates are largely the stuff of history and his appeal is practically universal save among the most hidebound. Look at Bolivia to get a sense of just how much his reputation has evolved–it was there, in the remote village called La Higuera, that Bolivian forces, aided by CIA agents, executed Che. His Bolivian expedition was a complete failure and his capture had much to do with the fact that he didn’t receive much support from either the Bolivian Communist Party nor from peasants. But today Che’s image is everywhere in Bolivia and he is particularly esteemed by that country’s powerful peasant and indigenous movement. President Morales is reported to keep a picture of him in his wallet and just last year, upon winning the presidency, he participated in an unofficial inauguration, where he claimed Che as a patron saint of indigenous rights, saying, “The struggle that Che Guevara left uncompleted, we shall complete.”

3. What do you say to those who object to this canonization of Che, claiming that he’s nothing more than a totalitarian murderer?
I’d say tell it to the millions of Latin Americans, many of them at the margins of society, fighting for a just, truly democratic world, who still find inspiration in his struggle and image. To them, there is no confusion. Do our political commissars, always on the hunt for any whiff of residual sympathy for the militant New Left, really want to dismiss those people out of hand as irrelevant or misguided? Over the last two decades, social movements inspired by Che have fought against free-market orthodoxy. Those movements are bearers of the social-democratic tradition and are seeking to advance democracy.

4. The vision Che had for Cuba and the Third World in general did not develop. How does that effect his legacy?
You could argue that the failure of the Cuban model has actually benefited Che’s legacy, which has evolved from the specific political project he was associated with. Forty years ago. Che died trying to export the armed tactics of the Cuban Revolution elsewhere. There were many reasons why the Left by that time had embraced violent insurrection as a strategy, not the least of which was the refusal of the region’s elites, fortified with support from Washington, to give up even the slightest of its privileges. Since then, the Latin American Left has evolved. Today it is profoundly peaceful and democratic, despite having adopted an icon of insurrection as its talisman.

5. What are some of the common misperceptions about Che in the United States?
My guess is that the American public knows very little about Che. If they saw the movie Motorcycle Diaries, they may have learned that he was Argentine, not Cuban. But few know that just after that tour around Latin America, where he first began to develop a pan-American consciousness, he wound up in Guatemala, a country that at the time was undergoing a profound democratic revolution. Che practiced social medicine in the country’s rural highlands, ministering to the country’s most marginal. He was in Guatemala during the CIA’s 1954 coup that ended that country’s democracy, and he saw firsthand the U.S. role in restoring a regime that would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of its citizens. He always cited his experience in Guatemala as a turning point. Prior to the coup, the Latin American left, including Communist groups, still believed it was possible to work with a country’s national bourgeois to achieve social democratic reform. Afterwards, it was increasingly difficult to do so. Che himself would go on to taunt the United States, saying “Cuba will not be another Guatemala” to justify the restrictions of civil liberties in Cuba, since it was through the subversion of the press, the Church, and independent political parties that the CIA did its work in Guatemala, and subsequently elsewhere.

6. How have American policies in Latin America following Che’s death impacted his image in the region?
Che was executed in 1967, and some of the worst interventions by Washington in Latin America were still to come. Most people are aware of the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and Reagan’s wars in Central America in the 1980s. Less known is U.S. involvement in, or at least sanctioning of, coups in Uruguay in 1973 and Argentina in 1976. Following the demise of the Soviet Union, Washington moved away from its reliance on repressive Latin American proxies, banking instead on its ability to project its power through elections and economic pressure. This worked throughout the 1990s, as heavily indebted countries governed by centrists submitted to the command of the IMF. Over the past few years, roughly since Chávez’s landslide victory in 1998, the system has started to break down. The “Washington consensus,” as this set of policies came to be called, proved an absolute disaster. Between 1980 and 2000, in per capita terms, the region grew cumulatively by only 9 per cent. Compare that with the 82 per cent expansion of the previous two decades, and add to it the financial crises that have rolled across Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina over the past 15 years, sweeping away accumulated savings, destroying the middle class, and wrecking the agricultural sector, and you will get a sense of why Evo Morales is calling for the completion of Che’s struggle.

Uh, hello? Can someone please tell gorillaman that the guy was already good to be arrested for drunk driving?????

Whether or not you believe weed should be legalized, drunk driving laws exist for a v. good reason.

Hope he also grows out of the 'kill 'em all and let God sort them out' mentality... yeeesh! And I mean, if you're fomenting revolution, is it really that smart to be writing about it in open forums? I mean, if you really believe in that philosophy, you'd be starting a guerilla war until every agent of the State who opposes your view point is dead. If you're only waiting until one of them busts you, that's either laziness or cowardice. Or you're "trolling us good."

Thank goodness for either, though, wow.

... and who the hell sold those yahoos automatic rifles?????

qrell, keep making apologies, but he says "we weren't allowed to resist hijakers" and then goes on to say airlines even weren't allowed to protect their investments.

Two complete independent thoughts. And why the hell do you think pilots are somehow qualified. It's one thing to say that airlines could put guards on the planes, or arm stewards, but really, a pilot is doing their own thing. And probably and most qualified guerilla warrior. Plus there are only about two people on the plane that you do NOT want in a shoot out, that being the two that can land a plane. You want someone in the back row of the plane with a scope and a rifle with clear view.

sirex,

There are two maybe three possibilities for Iraq. The obvious one is permanent, endless occupation of Iraq, which leads to constant "state of war" and myraids of daily IEDs and plenty of people willing to cross the Atlantic to "return the favor". Endless nightmarish guerilla war and contant false flag operations to control the public which will have grown sick of the nonsense about when 2009 rolls around.

Choice number 2 is mini-Iran forms and you have one part of Iraq being Sunni, another being Shia, and Kurds probably all slaughtered. Most of the formerly Christian and Jewish Arabs are now left the country or laying in mass graves. Basically Iraq becomes a proxy was for dominance between Saudis, Iranians, and Turkey. Most likely Iraq becomes a major religious controlled theocracy and uses the "fake" democracy we taught them about to pretend to be a democracy. Look, you can't go in an put your own puppets into leadership and run a sham election to "show" a fledging democracy how it is supposed to work.


Anyways, Iraq right now IS a bloodbath. You can theorize that it will be worse, but it couldn't get much worse. There just aren't enough people left to kill. They are dying everyday, at the hands of insurgents, bombs, the army, the iraq army, the private contractors, the sectarian bloodbath..

We created this problem. It was nonsense to invade (just drop a bomb on Saddam if you wanted to overthrow him). It was nonsense to occupy. It is nonsense to continue to stay in the middle of a civil war. The US can NEVER solve this, especially the way they act in the region (Palestine, ignoring Saudi actions, paying the Pakistanis, paying the Taliban, overthrowing people they previously paid and supported)...

There is no "handful of killings" in Iraq. Go to the BBC or something and read a daily account of the scores of murders daily.

....he's obviously overwhelmed, with simple semantics...."Self" to him meaning "me"


hey fella/ine, word of advice regarding social decorum.....prostrate thyself upon the benevolence of the admins, for your enthusiasm to be a part of the sift guerilla-styley, would be easy enough to embarrass publicly..

"PS. Thanks for taking all the fun out of this site."

...and thank you, for keeping the fun alive!!!

Please remove this horrible guerilla marketing advertisement.

Fletch, don't be dense. Are you trolling? I did not claim they are in PETA (snip me repeating myself)...

PETA means People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. They go around performing self-glorifying acts, and people align themselves with the cause mainly as a fashion statement. Then you have the devotees, like I suspect the people in the clip are. They try to get into the game with guerilla actions that interfere with other human beings' lives. So whether they're in PETA or not, they're certainly in the spirit.

Of course I don't think PETA is a military organization. "Normal civilians" are those who don't consider themselves on any mission, and just go about life without interfering with others. Maybe that's too nuanced for you.

And whether the guys felt oppressed or not, the girl was certainly doing her best to oppress them.

The Salami Fighting Association is a parody by Pepe Deluxe, a great fucking band.

This guy is just some fat ass in a jock strap and green paint, with maybe a little guerilla PR thrown in for good measure.

*upvote for the title, though. Heh.

I absolutely agree with your last statement, lucky, however by not publicising the criteria won't that be making suspect the choice itself? There are those who might say that the site administrators (siftbot) are working some secret guerilla marketing agenda paid for by youtube, or myspace or the Cartoon Network. How can we defend our policies if we don't know what they are?

I'm just playing devil's advocate here...sorry.

In response to your comment about there being no clear plan, the plan is for the additional troops to be a police force. This is right out of the counter-insurgency playbook. Look at successful counter-insurgencies throughout history and they all applied overwhelming force to police the populace, provide security, and prevent insurgent forces from operating freely. This may not be the dashing, clear mission objective such as "take Hill 317" or "defend this bridge until relieved" but again successful counter insurgencies have all used military forces in a police role.

To be honest I do not think 21,000 additional troops will be sufficient to establish the baseline of security necessary for an effective counter-insurgency. It is worth a try however because there is still a possibility it might slow down the escalation of sectarian violence, and if we cannot slow down said violence then nothing else we do will really matter. My key point here is that the additional troops for security purposes is straight out of the counter-insurgency playbook. Watch the movie Battle for Algiers sometime. Granted France eventually lost Algeria but they conducted a successful counter-insurgency against the FLN in Algiers several years prior to the mass uprisings that would eventually lead to independence. If you watch the movie, you will see that the French had a military presense on virtually every street corner. Attacks still got through, but the ability of the FLN to operate freely throughout the city was severely, severely limited.

"I agree that a force addition looks good on paper, but it looked good on paper back in Vietnam, the additional force elements there were just not enough to back out of what turned into a civil war. The same situation is being repeated here."

Except that Vietnam was a conflict between two sovereign nation-states. Granted both states were ethnically linked, but it was an external conflict between two states rather than an internal conflict in one state. In the event that the Soviet Union ever invaded Western Europe, US Special Forces teams would have been deployed throughout eastern Europe to make contact with dissident forces and train, equip and lead them on guerilla operations in the Soviet rear. In Vietnam, the North was doing the exact same thing to the South in preparation of a conventional invasion. The reason why we failed in Vietnam was because we treated the conflict as if the South had a domestic insurgency, rather a foreign infiltration by the North. Granted Iran is playing a part in supporting the Shiite militias, but such support pales in comparison to the guerilla combat operations that the PAVN was conducting in South Vietnam.

"If the 21,000 force commitment fails. What then?"

Then it fails and we try plan B, which I would hope would be a partitioning of the country.

"The US will have no maneuvering "

So are you saying we should hold said 21,000 troops in reserve for deployment in some later, alternative strategy? If not, then how does deploying the troops now limit our ability to maneuver? Look, the NIE makes it pretty clear that withdrawal in the next 12 to 18 months is not an option. In the face of that we either commit our available resources in one last push to make this thing work, or we can immediately turn to other options such as partitioning the country. Either way we will be in this for the long haul. With that in mind, giving the surge a try for 5-6 to months is worth a shot. If the security situation improves then we follow up on such success, if we see no improvement then we pursue the other less favorable options (i.e. partition). In the event it doesn't work, having additional forces on the ground gives us additional flexibility to pursue an alternate strategy. If said troops are not needed for an alternate strategy they can be redeployed, if they are then they are already in country availible for use.

"there will be another crushing morale plummet as US forces will pull out like they did in South Vietnam."

In the likely event that Iraq completely falls apart then such a moral plummet will occur regardless of whether or not the troop surge occurred.

Look, I am very pessimistic about our chances for success in Iraq. I think success would still be entirely possible were there still support for the War. I think the troop surge could possibly work, but probably won't. And I think if the surge fails we should look into a soft partition of the country, which is far less than ideal but will serve our interest of regional stability for better than a failed Iraqi state. In all likelihood I think the failed state is the outcome we're going to get however. The last three years in Iraq have basically been wasted, and I blame the bush administration entirely for that. If we are to succeed we basically need to start from square one. There simply isn't patience among the American people any more for such a long term commitment to Iraq however. I suspect that if the troop surge does not succeed, which is highly probably, patience for the war will be entirely over and a rapid withdrawal will follow leading to the collapse of the Iraqi government and a destabilization of the region. With that in mind what I think we should do is entirely a moot point because there will never be an opportunity to do any of it.

unlimited expandabilities......for landfills in every city, every country!!!!

"Hardware is for guerilla fighters."

The train from Nouadhibou to Zouerat is the longest train in the world. The iron ore train carry thousands of tons of crusehed rock in a chain of wagons up to three kilometres long. Their schecules and frequencies depend partly on the speed of the extraction at the mines, and even in the past, attacks by Polisario guerillas from over the border in Western Sahara.

There are 3 or 4 diesel-electric General Motors 3300V locomotives at the head of the train and about 200 cars each carrying up to 84 tons of iron ore, and a variable number of service cars. The total traffic averages 16.6 billion tons per year.

A collecrion of Guerilla News Network mini-documentaries compiled into 'Ammo for the Info Warrior'. Covering the CIAs drug smuggling and cover-up, government accountability for wars, the shameful marketing of rap music, US use of mind control; Bush and his cronies plus the emergence of propaganda into Public Relations.

I found it both very informative and entertaining - especially the Bush compilation near the end.

From "Poetic Terrorism" by Hakim Bey

PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.

An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.

Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.

Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.

Hmm, i wonder who´s the author of such videos or who pays for them. I´m sure these kind of "voting ads" are paid for by the dem/rep parties.

Sort of Guerilla marketing most probably i think.