Best Books on Bolivia, Che Guevara and Cold War in Latin America

In October 1967, Ernesto Che Guevara was captured in a ravine in the Bolivian highlands and executed the following day on orders that reached all the way to La Paz and, almost certainly, to Washington. His body was buried in secret, not found until 1997. He had spent eleven months in Bolivia trying to ignite a peasant revolution and had failed at almost every level: the local Communist Party refused to support him, the Bolivian peasants did not respond, and his small guerrilla band was systematically hunted by Bolivian Rangers trained and advised by a CIA officer named Felix Rodriguez. The Bolivia campaign is one of the Cold War's most instructive failures, and the books about it tell you as much about revolutionary theory as about the Cold War itself. ## 1. Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson Anderson's biography is the definitive English-language account of Guevara's entire life, and the chapters on Bolivia are the best single account of the campaign in any language. Anderson had access to Guevara's diaries, to participants on both sides, and to CIA files released under Freedom of Information requests. He is fair to Guevara's ideology without being hagiographic about his failures as a military commander in Bolivia. This is the starting point. [Check price on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802145582?tag=31813-20) ## 2. The Bolivian Diary by Ernesto Che Guevara Guevara kept a diary throughout the Bolivia campaign, and it was published within months of his death. The diary is the primary source document for the campaign. Read against Anderson's biography, it shows how badly the situation had deteriorated by mid-1967 and how aware Guevara was of his isolation. The diary is not a polished literary work but it is irreplaceable as a historical document. [Check price on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1920888381?tag=31813-20) ## 3. The Death of Che Guevara by Jay Cantor This is a novel rather than a history, but it deserves a place on this list because it engages more honestly with the political and personal contradictions of Guevara's project than most ideological accounts do. Cantor imagines the interior lives of Guevara and Regis Debray, the French intellectual who was captured in Bolivia and became a cause celebre for the European left. It is dense and demanding but rewards the effort. ## The CIA and the Bolivian Rangers Felix Rodriguez, the CIA officer who advised the Bolivian Rangers and was present at Guevara's execution, wrote his own account in a memoir called Shadow Warrior. It gives you the other side of the campaign, the counterinsurgency planning, the intelligence work, and the decision-making around the execution, from the perspective of the man who made the final radio call. It is a useful corrective to the exclusively leftist literature on Guevara, though Rodriguez brings his own considerable biases. ## The Cold War Context in Bolivia Bolivia in 1967 was not a country where a Marxist insurgency was likely to succeed. The 1952 revolution had already carried out significant land reform, which meant the grievances that typically fuel peasant insurgencies had been partially addressed. The Bolivian Communist Party was aligned with Moscow rather than Havana and was deeply skeptical of Guevara's foco theory of guerrilla war. The US interest was primarily in preventing Bolivia from following Cuba, and the training of the Bolivian Rangers by Special Forces advisors was part of a broader program of building counterinsurgency capacity throughout Latin America that had begun after the Cuban revolution in 1959. ## The Broader Cold War in Latin America The Bolivia campaign cannot be understood without the Cuban revolution, the Bay of Pigs, and the entire US policy framework for the hemisphere that ran from the Alliance for Progress to the covert support for military governments in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. For that broader picture, Greg Grandin's Empire's Workshop is the most useful single volume, covering US intervention in Latin America from Guatemala in 1954 through the 1980s Central American wars. ## Further Reading For more books on Cold War history and the politics of Latin America, browse the [history category](/category/history) on Skriuwer.