Bolivia: Why Guevara Failed

Bolivia’s recent guerilla episodes, whose protagonists and victims were Che Guevara and Regis Debray, are notable less for their cruelty—to which we have become only too accustomed—than for their chaos and confusion. A gratuitious incoherence permeates all the upheavals in a country which, in the twentieth century, is still struggling to emerge from medieval conditions, and where a new regime, weak yet authoritarian, is subject to diverse and contradictory pressures.

The R...