'Che Guevara - you're all target now' - Revol

CHE GUEVARA
byname of ERNESTO GUEVARA DE LA SERNA (born June 14, 1928, Rosario, Arg.- died October 1967, Bolivia), theoretician and tactician of guerrilla warfare, prominent Communist figure in the Cuban Revolution (1956-59), and later guerrilla leader in South America.

Guevara was the eldest of five children in a middle-class family of Spanish-Irish descent and Though suffering from asthma, he excelled as an athlete and a scholar, completing his medical studies in 1953. He spent many of his holidays travelling in Latin America, and his observations of the great poverty of the masses convinced him that the only solution lay in violent revolution. He came to look upon Latin America not as a collection of separate nations but as a cultural and economic entity, the liberation of which would require an intercontinental strategy.

In 1953 Guevara went to Guatemala, where Jacobo Arbenz headed a progressive regime that was attempting to bring about a social revolution. (Around this time Guevara acquired his nickname, from a verbal mannerism of Argentines who punctuate their speech with the interjection che.)

The overthrow of the Arbenz regime in 1954 in a coup supported by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency persuaded Guevara that the United States would always oppose progressive leftist governments. This conviction became the cornerstone of his plans to bring about Socialism by means of a worldwide revolution.

In the autumn of 1966, Guevara went to Bolivia, incognito, to create and lead a guerrilla group in the region of Santa Cruz. On Oct. 8, 1967, the group was almost annihilated by a special detachment of the Bolivian Army. Guevara was captured after being wounded and shot soon afterward.