Chasing Che (5 page)

Marxists call this doctrine “deepening the contradictions.” You deliberately seek a vicious response from security forces; the worse the repression, the better the prospects for revolution. The connection between guerrilla assaults and counterrepression was direct and
explicit in Che’s thinking: “The objective conditions for the struggle are beginning to appear in Argentina,” Guevara told a fellow Argentine in the early ‘60s. “There’s unemployment and therefore hunger, and the working class is starting to react to this. Such reaction sets off repressive measures, and repression stirs up hatred. That’s the exact point at which objective conditions need reinforcement with subjective ones, that is, with an awareness of the possibility of victory by violent means.…”

But even Che, who knew the taste of his own blood, could not foresee the ferocity of the reaction he would induce, and therefore the cost of these doctrines. “See you at the final victory,” he used to salute his comrades, because he believed not just in the possibility of victory, but in the inevitability of it. Yet in the end the theoretician and guru of guerrilla warfare had miscalculated how deep the contradictions could get. In the end, the contradictions got about shoulder deep.

S
EARCH RENEWED FOR REMAINS OF “CHE” GUEVARA
,
El Chubut
trumpeted. Improbably, just weeks before I had set out for South America to retrace his youthful motorcycle journey, Che’s body had been located after thirty years of mystery. An American biographer, Jon Lee Anderson, had learned the secret while interviewing the Bolivian military men present when Guevara had been buried secretly in the little town of Vallegrande, in southeast Bolivia. Now these same military men, retired and fat, led an encampment of about sixty journalists and several members of Dorretti’s Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team back to the field. On December 1, as I was loading my motorcycle onto a container ship in the Baltimore harbor, the digging began. The exhumation was going slowly—so far they’d turned up three
other
guerrillas, but no Guevara—but the Bolivian minister of the interior assured the world that the body would be found momentarily now that work had resumed after Christmas.
S
EARCH FOR CHE COMPLICATES
, another paper declared. But it was just a matter of time before he would be among us again.

The imminent resurrection of such a potent figure in Latin history had sparked a necrophilial argument among three nations. In Buenos Aires, the Socialist Party introduced legislation requesting that the body be brought home to Argentina to provide “a necessary period of analysis, criticism and reflection.” Cuba declared that Guevara’s remains should be shipped “home” to Cuba. Bolivia announced that the body already was home, since Guevara himself had said that “wherever a man falls, that’s where he stays.” All parties had mixed motives: the Argentine left wanted a symbol of its own victimization; the Cubans wanted a relic to breathe life into their comatose revolution; the Bolivians hoped to generate tourist revenues.

And, according to another report in
Clarin
, Che himself was about to invade Argentina. This Che was no dead body but the Spanish heartthrob Antonio Banderas, who was due in Buenos Aires momentarily to play Che in the film version of
Evita
, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s trashy musical. In the original stage version, Mandy Patinkin had played the role of “Che Guevara,” a young idealist in a beret who occasionally burst into song while wandering the set trying to interest Evita in an insecticide he had invented (as a teenager, Guevara really had peddled his own bug killer, but not to Evita). There was a vague implication that the failure of his insecticide plan shattered the young Guevara’s idealism, pushing him toward guerrilla war.

The apt casting of Madonna as Evita had infuriated Argentines, and now the appropriation of Guevara’s image added salt to the national wound. In a calculated concession to Argentine fury, the British director announced that Banderas would not play a character called “Che Guevara” but merely a character called “Che.” In a city of semioticans this was a dodge with real implications: by removing the specific reference to Guevara, the character became universal. All Argentines are known as “Che” to people in neighboring countries,
just as all Frenchmen are called “Pierre.” By playing “a Che” rather than “the Che,” Banderas was suddenly a stand-in for the entire nation, a common man. The insecticide subplot was discarded, and Banderas instead became something of a Greek chorus, following Madonna through the movie with a swaggering commentary on her empty promises to the Argentine people. Though this might have insulted Evita’s remaining defenders, it was a closer fit with the actual character of Ernesto Guevara.

Despite being dead—actually, because of it—Che was more popular than ever. A brewery in London made Che Beer. Swatch produced a line of watches bearing his picture and the word
REVOLUCIÓN
. You could buy Austrian skis painted with his likeness, or Canadian refrigerator magnets. It wasn’t just the fluent capitalism of the First World that appropriated Che’s image. The Cubans minted money on Che T-shirts, Ecuadoreans manufactured Che mud flaps for South American trucks, and Che was again one of the most popular figures in Argentina, where the government had once hunted his simulacrums through the slums. A weekly magazine reported that, thanks to the exhumation in Bolivia, his name had been cited in more Argentine media reports than anyone but the country’s finance minister, who was still alive.

I was staring at that list, wondering why history bothered coming back around, when I noticed who was third in the rankings. Right below the little iconic photo of El Che in his beret was a picture of a handsome, fair-haired man named Alfredo Astiz. Known to the press as “the Blonde Angel,” Astiz had been a young naval lieutenant during the peak of the Dirty War. He had specialized in penetrating “subversive” groups like Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. He was directly responsible for the kidnapping and death of scores of people, including two French nuns abducted from a Mothers meeting. He shot one prisoner in the head and stood by watching while many others were tortured. Although not as cruel as some of his colleagues, Astiz had been cruel enough. Yet he had paid no price for his actions. He survived an unsuccessful prosecution for murdering a seventeen-year-old girl, and his navy career prospered. Despite surrendering
his command in the Falklands war without firing a shot, Astiz became a lieutenant commander. He bragged in a television interview that he was untouchable. He was seen now lounging at the beach or dancing in discos.

Astiz was back in the news because the French government was attempting to prosecute him for the murder of the two French nuns. Argentina refused the French request, and the gesture would later come to nothing. It was merely a coincidence of timing that Astiz was in the papers during the same weeks that Che’s burial site had been identified, yet there was something oddly symbolic about their mutual return to prominence. There they were next to each other in the news columns, two such different men—Marxist guerrilla and navy officer—yet both Argentine, both sons of the cultured leadership class, both combatants in a secret war. They were opposites in theory but startlingly close in origin, men who had lived clandestine lives in the service of political warfare, men obsessed with honor who nonetheless made the many compromises that a commitment to violence requires. They shared in a heroic subculture, in the rituals of extreme danger, intrigue, and secrecy. Like warriors everywhere, Astiz gained stature through the existence of his enemy; the radical left and the radical right existed in a kind of symbiosis, flip sides of the same coin, the one necessary to the other. This point was not lost on Astiz, of all people. In the text accompanying the photo, he was quoted as saying that he “admired” Che Guevara for his idealism and unwillingness to compromise. He might have been a communist subversive, but he was still
El Puro
, the pure one.

I had come to South America to find some youthful, original Guevara, perhaps a young man who predated the various encrustations of legend, the Ernesto who came before the Che. But with even a right-wing military murderer declaring himself a fan of the man, it was beginning to seem I had set myself an impossible task. You could ride across South America, you could see what he had seen, you could even reach all the way to his grave site in Bolivia. But if everyone agreed that Che was a hero—right-wing killers, Hollywood executives, guerrillas in the field, marketing experts, Fidel Castro,
and church fathers—then no one really agreed on anything. Who, really, was Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna? And who is Che?

“O
h, it’s a very bad moment for Che,” the T-shirt salesman told me. “Nothing but smalls.” He was a rotund, mustachioed fellow who cared more for rock bands than politics. It was lunchtime now, and en route to the Richmond for my daily defeat I’d spotted his shop in a commercial gallery and paused long enough to see how the Che shirts were moving.

“I sell three or four of these an afternoon,” he went on, “five on Saturdays. There’s a Che mania right now. It started a couple of years ago when a few bands that are fashionable with very young people—Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Rage Against the Machine—started having Che banners at their concerts and so on. Then it really picked up with the search for his remains in Vallegrande. Now, with Antonio Banderas coming to town, forget it.”

I asked him what the movie would be like. “They say he isn’t going to be Che Guevara, just a typical Argentine Che. But I don’t believe it. It’s going to be just like when I saw the musical in London, Che and Evita dancing together. I have some Che backpacks if you want.”

I didn’t want. My own clothes and luggage had reappeared mysteriously at the airport, and I no longer needed shirts or gear, however iconic. I walked to the Richmond, but the man in tweed was absent from his usual seat. I let a coffee burn into my stomach and read the papers. Above the fold was an article detailing the triumphant march of stock prices on the Argentine
bolsa
. Below the fold an intrepid reporter had settled the mystery of Argentina’s disappearing cats. As a rather gory photo showed, the children of the new shantytowns were roasting them over trash fires. With a kind of routine reluctance I called the customs broker from the house phone. “It’s here,” he said. I glanced at my watch: their office closed at three, and with luck I might just have time to do the paperwork and ride
away. I jumped into a yellow-and-black Fiat cab and headed for the port, a route that passed behind the Casa Rosada. The taxi was running fast—this is a nation of frustrated Formula One fans—and up at the Plaza de Mayo I caught a sudden glimpse of a tiny crowd, some banners, and a cloud of smoke drifting through the air.

“Tear gas,” the driver announced. “Roll up your window.”

We barreled along toward the port, passing a dark green beast lumbering the other way up the avenue. It was an armored truck topped with a comically tiny spout for shooting water at the
delincuentes
. I asked the driver what cause had brought peaceful Argentina back to the brink of civil unrest.

“Well,” he said, meditating for a moment while cutting off a bus. He looked in the mirror, not to check the bus but to see my face. “What day of the week is it?” he asked. Thursday, I said. “I think on Thursday it’s the teachers.”

Across Latin America, for the first time in a generation, the left had gone silent, reduced to these clockwork motions of the If-it’s-Thursday-they-must-be-teachers variety. Once upon a time the ratio of missing cats to rising stocks would have provoked a guerrilla movement or at least the magical-realist flights of rhetoric upon which the hemisphere’s left depended for life. But even the Spanish language had been captured by the values of capitalism now. Regional debate bristled with financial acronyms like NAFTA, GATT, and MERCOSUR. Latin America had become a net importer of capital for the first time in decades, hyperinflation was almost forgotten, and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund dictated endless cuts in social spending to governments throughout the region. Even Fidel Castro was talking about efficiency and profit repatriation, and you could earn a master’s of business administration at the University of Havana. It was a moment of transition in Latin America, when generations of history were being undone, when old arguments fell silent. This did not mean that the suffering and deprivation across Latin America were lessened, as the missing cats demonstrated. Global capitalism generated great wealth and then distributed it with blind indifference to need. Worldwide
there were one and a half billion people living on less than a dollar a day; that number
increased
by about two hundred million in 1993. “People who find themselves at the juncture of worlds passing and worlds coming.” Henry Adams noted long ago, “tend to be crushed like insects.”

Latin America got the good along with the bad, and the world coming was in heavy evidence at the port, where the docks were so crowded with European luxury cars—Range Rovers for the
estancia
set and Alfa Romeos for the soccer players—that it took half an hour of wiggling between mirrors to find the dock foreman. He grunted when he heard what I wanted and led me into a long brick warehouse, up a ramp, and into a garage filled with new cars. In the corner was a motorcycle covered with plastic. He whipped off the cover with a great flourish to reveal a gleaming Honda chopper.

It was a lovely motorcycle, but not mine. The foreman implied that I should just shut up about my BMW dirt bike and take the Honda, but I persuaded him to keep looking, and we rode a passing forklift down the waterfront a block, each of us clinging to a side of the machine until it reached a prefabricated steel hangar. Inside were pallets of shrink-wrapped VCRs and, behind them, a twelve-year-old, blue-and-orange BMW R80 G/S that looked familiar. The saddlebags were still attached, which astonished the foreman (like most Argentines I’ve met, he felt that his countrymen were a race of thieves). I rifled quickly through the contents—a tent, sleeping bag, fishing rod, and a six-month-old copy of
Notas de Viaje
, or “Notes of a Trip,” written by none other than Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The book was his own road diary from the 1952 trip, a guide to where he had been, what he had seen, how he had felt. It was to be my road map to the past and present of South America.