The great people live glorious
life and they die even in more glorious way. To them ideology happens to be more
important than their life and everything. And they sacrifice same but do not
compromise on their cause. I often recall account of Che Guevara’s death and
wonder can there be a glorious death than that??
Bolivian Special Forces captured a twice-wounded Che Guevara on October 8, 1967.
He was tied up and taken to a dilapidated mud schoolhouse in the nearby village
of La Higuera on the night. For the next half day, Guevara refused to be
interrogated by Bolivian officers and would only speak quietly to Bolivian
soldiers. One of those Bolivian soldiers, helicopter pilot Jaime Nino de Guzman,
describes Che as looking “dreadful”. According to Guzman, Guevara was shot
through the right calf, his hair was matted with dirt, his clothes were
shredded, and his feet were covered in rough leather sheaths. Despite his
haggard appearance, he recounts that “Che held his head high, looked everyone
straight in the eyes and asked only for something to smoke.” De Guzman states
that he “took pity” and gave him a small bag of tobacco for his pipe, and that
Guevara then smiled and thanked him. Later on the night of October 8, Guevara,
despite having his hands tied, kicked Bolivian Officer Espinosa into the wall
after the officer entered the schoolhouse and tried to snatch Guevara’s pipe
from his mouth as a souvenir while he was still smoking it. In another instance
of defiance, Guevara spat in the face of Bolivian Rear Admiral Ugarteche who
attempted to question Guevara a few hours before his execution.
The following morning on October 9, Guevara asked to see the maestra (school
teacher) of the village, 22-year-old Julia Cortez. Cortez would later state that
she found Guevara to be an “agreeable looking man with a soft and ironic glance”
and that during their conversation she found herself “unable to look him in the
eye” because his “gaze was unbearable, piercing, and so tranquil”. During their
short conversation, Guevara pointed out to Cortez the poor condition of the
schoolhouse, stating that it was “anti-pedagogical” to expect campesino students
to be educated there, while “government officials drive Mercedes cars”, and
declaring “that’s what we are fighting against.”
Later that morning on October 9, Bolivian President René Barrientos ordered that
Guevara be killed. The executioner was Mario Terán, a half-drunken sergeant in
the Bolivian army who had requested to shoot Che on the basis of the fact that
three of his friends from B Company, all named “Mario”, had been killed in an
earlier firefight with Guevara’s band of guerrillas. To make the bullet wounds
appear consistent with the story the government planned to release to the
public, Félix Rodríguez ordered Terán to aim carefully to make it appear that
Guevara had been killed in action during a clash with the Bolivian army.
A few minutes before Guevara was executed, he was asked by a Bolivian soldier if
he was thinking about his own immortality. “No,” he replied, “I’m thinking about
the immortality of the revolution.”
When Sergeant Terán entered the hut, Che Guevara then told his executioner, “I
know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot me you coward! You are only going to kill a
man!” Terán hesitated, then opened fire with his semiautomatic rifle, hitting
Guevara in the arms and legs. Guevara writhed on the ground, apparently biting
one of his wrists to avoid crying out. Terán then fired several times again,
wounding him fatally in the chest at 1:10pm according to Rodríguez. In all,
Guevara was shot nine times. This included five times in his legs, once in the
right shoulder and arm, once in the chest, and finally in the throat.
Months earlier, during his last public declaration to the Tricontinental
Conference, Guevara wrote his own epitaph, stating “wherever death may surprise
us, let it be welcome, provided that this our battle cry may have reached some
receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons”.
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Note: Source of the article is Wikipedia.