Ernesto "Che" Guevara was one of the most famous media figures of the 1960s. A high-ranking Cuban official and confidante of Fidel Castro, Guevara was appointed head of a Cuban delegation to the UN in 1964 and in the process became a public celebrity...
About three years later he was dead. And though I searched long and hard for the particulars of Guevara's last stand, the best source documents available on the web are the debriefing of Felix Rodriguez, a CIA agent of Cuban extraction who was sent to Boliva to help track him down and the after-action debriefing of the 2nd Bolivian Ranger battalion by US Southern Command. A bare-bones synopsis of Che Guevara's military career in Bolivia can be found here. Basically, Guevara entered Bolivia in late 1966 and started up a platoon-sized guerilla group. The group went on to kill 30 Bolivian army personnel before being surrounded and wiped out together with it's leader in late 1967. Action against Guevara's guerilla unit was conducted entirely by Bolivians, with some training assistance but with no actual command or direct involvement by US personnel. As a feat of arms, Guevara's effort in Bolivia is remarkably undistinguished and there must be dozens of guerilla leaders alive in the world today with a better showing...
Che Guevara is a testament to the power of a media symbol. As a purely military force he was negligible. As an organizing force and agitator of Bolivians he was an abject failure. But as an international Marxist symbol and poster-boy Che was eminently successful. Millions of people have worn his likeness on a T-shirt believing that he was a brilliant revolutionary and guerilla when in fact he was neither. But that would be missing the point. Guevara was the prototypical example of the triumph of image over reality. What did it matter if he wrote nothing of lasting ideological value? What did it matter if he was a comparative military failure? He was a surpassing public relations success and that made up for everything else. The power of Che lay not in his M2 carbine, which was shot out of his hands by the Bolivian Rangers. It lay in his beard, beret and his photogenic camera angles. Long before the word "spin" came into common usage Guevara was all spin -- a spin which will outlast the memory of those who defeated and slew him.
Though he died nearly forty years ago Che, from a media perspective, is thoroughly modern. He is so modern it would be possible to argue that both Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi are simple extensions of his great archetype. Zarqawi, for example, is by almost any measure a complete military failure unless one counts massacring women and children as some kind of martial accomplishment. Zarqawi is even incapable of clearing a stoppage from a light machinegun he fires on video. But no matter, because it is the video not the machinegun which is the real weapon. It is the T-shirt graphic not the man depicted on the T-shirt which is important. News no longer describes war; it is war which inscribes news.
Ten Shots at a "Celebrity Revolutionary"
Originally Posted by 120mm
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