Word: che
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When Bolivian troops seized and killed Ernesto ("Che") Guevara last October, they got an unexpected dividend...
...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...
...dissenters ranging from Maoists to hippies, from middle-aged suburbanites in SANE to adolescent hotspurs in the Students for a Democratic Society have stormed Pentagon and draft board, marched and picketed and advertised. Already infected with malefic characters whose political education ended with 19th century nihilism as updated by Che Guevara, the peace movement has too often degenerated into caterwaul and caricature and, even worse, noncommunication. McCarthy's candidacy will at last give legitimate dissenters a civilized political voice...