Word: che
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After he was sentenced to 30 years in prison in November for aiding Che Guevara's guerrillas in their unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Bolivian government, French Intellectual Régis Debray, 27, was accorded extraordinary privileges for a prisoner. At the small provincial town of Choreti, he is living under guard in Bolivian officers' quarters, getting the same food and accommodations and busily reading and writing, apparently on philosophical themes. Debray continues to be an un usual prisoner in other ways. Last week Bolivia's President René Barrientos Ortuño offered to trade...
...Among Che's possessions they found a 30,000-word diary, written in his own hand in Spanish and detailing all his activities from the time he arrived in Bolivia in 1966 almost up to the day of his capture. The government used excerpts from the diary to convict French Agitator Jules Regis Debray for aiding the guerrillas. It also arrested some 20 Bolivians who were mentioned as collaborators. Then, once the political usefulness of the diary had been exhausted, it was put up for sale...
...contains much of interest for a student of guerrilla tactics. Che's ambitions far outran his means to implement them. He wrote that he wanted not only to create a "second Viet Nam" in Bolivia but also to start a guerrilla movement in Argentina. Almost from the outset, however, he was harassed by government forces from without and backsliding Communists from within. His diary bristles with complaints about the Bolivian Communist Party, which he characterizes as "distrustful, disloyal and stupid." For solace, apparently, he wrote some poetry and a short story about a young Communist guerrilla who learns...
...publishers and individuals thought enough of this material to rush to Bolivia to bid for it. Michele Ray, the French freelancer who was held for three weeks by the Viet Cong, offered $400,000 from a mysterious source on the grounds, as she put it, that the "last thing Che would have liked was to have his diary in the hands of Americans." For a while, the bidder most likely to win was a consortium headed by Manhattan-based Magnum Photos. Offering $125,000 for the right to publish excerpts from the diary, the group included the New York Times...
Late last week, though, the consortium fell apart. One reason was that some of its members feared a court battle over the ownership of the diary. The Bolivian government, to be sure, had issued a decree claiming it owned all documents captured from the guerrillas. But Che's family might make a fight for the diary. There was the additional danger of pirated versions being circulated before the consortium members could publish. Already, several Bolivian army officers had made photocopies. Whoever finally buys the diary, it will probably be February at the earliest before readers around the world...