Che Guevara was a legendary figure, a doctor, writer, military theorist, international politician and central figure of the Cuban Revolution.
Born in 1934 to an aristocratic family in Rosario, Argentina, Guevara grew up reading, especially the Spanish literary masterpiece Don Quixote.
While his siblings laugh at Don Quixote's absurdity, he insists that don Quixote has a rare tinge of heroism and idealism, and that he compares himself to Don Quixote and dreams of being a hero who challenges windmills and lions.
Born into an upper-class family with a certain left-wing mentality, Guevara was particularly interested in politics from an early age.
Soon after his birth, he developed asthma, but the family tradition of restlessness, spontaneity and risk-taking was most fully carried forward in him. He liked to gallop through the fields on horses without saddles, though he often coughed out of breath.
Che Guevara loves sports very much, the most interested in rugby, he calls himself a "warrior", often rampages on the court, his head is broken and bleeding does not care, only when the intensity is too unbearable to stop, cover his depressed chest, and ask his father who is guarding the side of the court for help: "Dad, give me a shot." ”
Asthma, which made him suffer all his life, suffered more than ordinary people in his later guerrilla career, and also made his character develop a melancholy quality, and he began to think about life and death very early.
In 1948, Che Guevara entered the Faculty of Medicine of the National University of Buenos Aires, where he successfully completed his studies in March 1953.
In college, Che Guevara was talented, enthusiastic, rebellious, tall and handsome, and soon fell in love with the famous local bridesmaid Chichina.
In 1951, at the suggestion of his friend Alberto Granado, Guevara, on the advice of his friend Alberto Granado, took a year off from school to travel around South America, setting out on December 29, 1951, along the Andes Mountains through south America, through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and finally to Venezuela.
Along the way, he saw the suffering of the poor, his horizons were greatly broadened by the cruelty of reality, and Che Guevara began to think about the injustices of the world, and they, with sympathy, treated the lepers along the way, and also accepted the most selfless help of these people.
This trip to Latin America gave Guevara a real understanding of poverty and suffering in Latin America, and his internationalist ideas were gradually fixed during the trip.
He began to feel that the independent countries of Latin America were in fact a whole with common cultural and economic interests, and that if there was a revolution, international cooperation was needed.
The Latin American exercise of Guevara's thinking quietly changed, and he wrote in his diary:
I have made up my mind to share the suffering with the people... I will use all my blood to realize the future that the proletarians are fully pursuing.
The people who wrote these diaries died when they re-set foot on Argentine soil. I am no longer me.
Eight months after leaving home, Che Guevara flew back to Argentina in September 1952, and the family went to the airport to meet him.
After graduating from college, Che Guevara bid farewell to his mother, and at the same time gave up his beautiful love affair with Chicina, bid farewell to the most beloved girl in his life, and embarked on the journey of his life.
On July 7, 1953, Guevara embarked on his second trip to Latin America. "A warrior has set off!" He shouted and jumped on the honking train.
After a revolution in Bolivia, Che Guevara traveled from Ecuador to Guatemala. Passing through Costa Rica, the only democracy in Latin America at the time, Guevara was deeply attracted.
Che Guevara arrived in Guatemala on December 24, 1953, when Guatemala was under the leadership of a young left-wing President, Abens, and was embarking on a series of reforms, especially land reform, which were directed at the United Fruit Company.
On March 28, 1954, the CIA formed a mercenary army of Guatemalan soldiers in Honduras, and The regime of Albans was soon overthrown, and Armas became president of Guatemala, beginning a brutal crackdown on leftists, and within a few months about 9,000 people were arrested or killed.
In Guatemala, Che Guevara witnessed the CIA coup there and has strengthened his faith ever since.
Che Guevara became a supporter of Abens, and when Hebans fled, Guevara followed him in mexico in seeking political asylum.
There, he met Raúl Castro, who later introduced him to his brother Fidel Castro.
Guevara soon became a well-known professional revolutionary who, summing up the lessons of Guatemala, said that all reforms in Latin America, no matter how reasonable, would be suppressed by the United States if they "violated" U.S. interests.
He believed that the reason for The fall of Albans was his failure to arm the peasantry, and Guevara outlined the tactics of the revolutionary organization in his first political treatise, "I Saw the Downfall of Harkobo Abens."
He argues that the revolutionaries in Latin America must build an army loyal to the government, not independent of it, and that they must reject warmth, which is self-defeating in the face of american hostility.
Seven years later, when the CIA tried to repeat the same trick in Cuba, Guevara and the Castro brothers unceremoniously foiled their plot.
At the time, the Castro brothers were preparing for an armed struggle to return to Cuba and overthrow the Batista dictatorship, and Guevara quickly joined the castro-led military organization.
During the battle, Guevara's superhuman courage and perseverance, excellent combat skills, and ruthlessness towards his enemies were appreciated by Castro, who soon became Castro's most effective and trusted assistant.
After the formation of cuba's new government, Che Guevara was granted the status of "Cuban citizen" and was also appointed inspector general of the military prison in Castel Cabaña, responsible for eliminating batista-era war criminals.
In October 1959, Che Guevara, who did not understand economics, was appointed president of the National Bank of Cuba and began a socialist transformation of the Cuban economic system, nationalizing enterprises and implementing land reforms.
In 1961, Guevara was appointed Minister of Industry, helped Castro establish a socialist system in Cuba, and signed a trade agreement with the Soviet Union after Cuba was blockaded by the United States economy.
During this time, he also became known to the West for his tough stance toward the United States, and during the Cuban Missile Crisis he was part of a Cuban delegation to Moscow in 1962 to negotiate and eventually signed the Soviet Union's plan to deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba.
Che Guevara believed that the placement of Soviet missiles would defend Cuban independence and save Cuba from U.S. aggression.
During his time as a senior official in Cuba, Che Guevara resisted bureaucracy, lived frugally and refused to give himself an increase in salary, never going to nightclubs, movies or beaches.
On weekends, Guevara also actively participated in volunteer labor, going to havana's factories or to the sugar cane plantations in the suburbs, and once, while visiting the home of a Soviet official, when the official brought out extremely expensive porcelain tableware to entertain Guevara, Guevara said to the host: "It is ironic, how can I be worthy of using such high-grade tableware?" ”
In December 1964, Guevara represented Cuba at the 19th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, and then visited eight African countries and China, including Algeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
After Che Guevara's return to Cuba on 14 March 1965, his disagreements with Castro on issues such as relations with the Soviet Union and assistance to the Revolution in the Third World grew, and he resigned soon after.
Guevara left Cuba by plane on 1 April 1965, and on 23 April he crossed Lake Tanganyika from Tanzania to the Congo.
Some sources indicate that, prior to leaving Cuba, he persuaded Castro to support his operation in a secret meeting with Castro.
When he arrived in the Congo, he was assisted by laurent-Désiré Kabila, the leader of the Congolese guerrillas at the time.
From then on, Che Guevara began to teach guerrilla tactics to the Congolese intifada army, and his plan was to use the liberated areas on the west bank of Lake Tanganyika in the Congo as a base to train revolutionary armies in Congo and neighboring countries.
By this time, Che Guevara was 37 years old and had no formal military training (his asthma saved him from military service in Argentina), and much of his combat experience came from the Cuban Revolution.
During this time, Che Guevara's whereabouts had entered the CIA's field of vision, and CIA agents, along with Congolese government forces, began monitoring the external communications of Che Guevara's forces in order to preemptively strike and cut off their supply lines before Che Guevara's guerrillas attacked.
At that time, Che Guevara hoped to instill Cuban revolutionary ideas and guerrilla tactics in the local Simba people, and train them to be a group of brave and warlike guerrillas.
But Che Guevara found that the rabble-rousers, organized by the natives, were stupid, undisciplined, and internally strife, which, in the end, led to the failure of the uprising.
He suffered so much in the African bush, and after seven difficult months, the frail Che Guevara, frustrated with his surviving Cuban comrades, left Congo for Bolivia, another country in Latin America.
In early November 1966, Che Guevara disguised himself as a Uruguayan businessman and traveled to the Niagavasu region of Bolivia, unaware that Che Guevara had discovered his fake passport by a Stalking CIA agent.
The CIA did not immediately take action against Che Guevara in order not to hit the grass snake.
After arriving in Bolivia, Guevara led the guerrillas to camp and train on farms they had bought in advance, while digging caves in the nearby mountains to store supplies.
Later, the local Bolivian left-wing organization handed over the dense forest area to Guevara as a training area, and Guevara and his comrades-in-arms reorganized the local guerrilla group in the manner of the Cuban Revolution and formed a revolutionary armed force, the "National Liberation Army of Bolivia", to fight against the regular army of the Bolivian government.
Bolivian President René Ballientos received the news and threatened to kill Guevara and ordered Bolivian government forces to search for Guevara and his followers.
Che Guevara thought it would be all it would be all it possible to defeat Bolivia's poorly equipped government forces, but he did not expect that the CIA would intervene.
When the U.S. government learned of Guevara's guerrilla warfare in Bolivia, it immediately sent CIA agents into Bolivia to aid the Bolivian government and encircle Guevara's revolutionary forces.
At that time, the United States also sent some people from the Army's special forces to serve as military advisers in the Bolivian army, helped train the Bolivian army, and trained a special task force to deal with dense forest operations.
In fact, Guevara was in a difficult position for the Bolivian guerrillas, who received neither the support of the local population nor the assistance of the Bolivian left-wing organizations.
After entering Bolivia, CIA agents arrested a large number of peasants and workers who believed to be related to Guevara's guerrillas, tortured them, and inquired about the whereabouts of Che Guevara and his guerrillas.
At the same time, the two short-wave transmitters used by Che Guevara's guerrillas to communicate with Cuba were broken again, and the tape recorder used to decode the shortwaves emitted from Havana was also lost during a river crossing, thus preventing him from contacting Havana and being completely isolated, to the point of isolation, and Che Guevara's situation was very dangerous.
On 1 February 1967, Guevara led 27 guerrillas (including 15 Cubans and 12 Bolivians) on a long march north of niagavasu and the Rio Grande, scouting the local enemy situation, contacting local farmers, and choosing locations to develop their forces. At the same time, Che Guevara was also preparing to make contact with the urban guerrillas in Bolivia, before which he had made several contacts, but until Che Guevara was arrested, it was not successful.
Che Guevara led his guerrillas in the area north of the Rio Grande to wage a revolution of the local peasants.
Unfortunately, a farmer named Onorado Rojas betrayed them, and he reported the whereabouts of the Che Guevara guerrillas to the local government.
Government forces and CIA agents immediately followed the encirclement, and many of the guerrillas were killed during the transfer, and to make matters worse, when Grava led the guerrillas back to camp in Níakawasu in late March, some of the advance team members violated the principles of guerrilla warfare and came to the home of Vargas, an employee of the Bolivian Petroleum Company, carrying guns with them, falsely claiming to be Mexican geologists.
As soon as the men left, Vargas followed them along the route and reported them to the authorities, exposing their whereabouts to surveillance by government forces and CIA agents.
When Che Guevara returned to the camp with his party, he found two men deserting, one of whom was a spy of the Bolivian government army.
Not long ago, Che Guevara recruited eight new members, both of whom were recruited that time, and unexpectedly recruited a traitor.
In the days that followed, the Bolivian authorities determined with great precision the location of the guerrilla camps, encircling and suppressing the troops, moving forward purposefully, and reconnaissance planes hovering over their area all day long.
The road down the hill to the town was blocked and the food supply was cut off. In order to crush the siege of the government forces, Guevara led a guerrilla force in ambushing a searching army in the canyon of Nyakawasu, killing 7 people and taking 7 prisoners, including a major and a captain.
However, under the heavy pressure of the government army and the pressing of the troops, Che Guevara had to lead the guerrillas to evacuate the farm camp and move northeast to the village of Gutierrez.
On 10 April, near Iripati, they engaged in a beautiful encounter with government forces, in which 10 were killed and 30 captured.
This battle greatly shocked the Bolivian Government and immediately declared martial law in the south-eastern region and banned all activities organized by the Bolivian Left.
At this time, the CIA agents also took the opportunity to move, keeping a close eye on Che Guevara's whereabouts.
In fact, as early as half a year ago, the CIA was secretly investigating Che Guevara's whereabouts. By March 1967, the CIA had officially confirmed Che Guevara's activities in Bolivia and presented it to the White House.
At that time, President Johnson personally convened a meeting of the National Security Council to study the matter.
The military, represented by General Johnson, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Botte, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, advocated the immediate establishment of a special forces command and the dispatch of U.S. troops into Bolivia with a view to eliminating the guerrillas in one fell swoop.
Helms, the director of the CIA who has been in office for less than a year, believes that at present, Che Guevara's power is not large, and there is no need to use the regular US army, and the CIA can completely deal with the Che Guevara guerrillas and solve the problem in a secret war.
At that time, anti-war sentiment in the United States was increasing, and if bolivia were to send troops again, it would have serious political consequences and would inevitably affect the Vietnam War.
Therefore, President Johnson decided that the CIA would coordinate the covert operation against Che Guevara, and at the same time, he also decided that the military intelligence agency of the US Southern Command in the Panama Canal Zone and its special mobile units would be under the jurisdiction of the CIA, and all operations would be at the disposal of Helms.
Immediately after receiving the president's authorization, the CIA set up a special operations group headed by Brigadier General William Skel, head of the intelligence agency of the U.S. Southern Command.
His deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Raymond Weber of the Special Forces, was directly commanded by Major Ralph Shelton, a veteran CIA counter-guerrilla warfare expert nicknamed "The Old Man."
The CIA then dispatched 16 agents and guerrilla warfare experts, and selected 50 "green berets" from Lieutenant Colonel Weber's special forces combat regiment as backbones to arrive in Bolivia by plane to join the CIA's special forces at the La Paz intelligence station.
The real identity of Colonel Edward Fox, military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia, is the head of the CIA intelligence station in La Paz.
In a military coup d'état of 1964, he installed Lieutenant General Barientos, commander of the Bolivian Air Force, on the presidency, and General Ovando, the current commander of the Bolivian Army, was also supported by Colonel Fox.
As a result, Bolivia's military power at the time was almost entirely under the control of the CIA.
After the "old man" Sheldon led the whole class to Bolivia, he immediately stationed himself in a barracks on the outskirts of La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, and then trained 120 Bolivian special forces personnel here as the backbone of the encirclement and suppression of the guerrillas, and conducted intensive training for bolivian officers and men in anti-guerrilla warfare, directly commanding them to fight.
On April 12, 1967, the CIA established an anti-guerrilla warfare training center at the abandoned La Esperanza Sugar Factory, north of Santa Cruz, to form and train Bolivian assault battalions.
They mainly drew a large number of soldiers from the 4th Division in Camiri, and later selected some personnel from the 8th Division in Santa Cruz, as well as some air force and paratroopers, totaling more than 2,000 people, with more than 20 "green berets" under the command of the CIA and a small number of Cuban exiles acting as managers and military instructors, and they were trained in phases, training about 600 officers and men in each period.
After the training, the CIA distributed photographs and portraits of Che Guevara and his partisans to each commando officer and soldier, and equipped the Bolivian assault battalion with reconnaissance planes, fighter jets and helicopter gunships to begin encircling and suppressing Che Guevara's guerrillas.
At that time, CIA counter-guerrilla warfare experts developed a "loose outside and tight inside" plan to gradually reduce the encirclement.