U.S. Military Intervention in Bolivia
Thirty years ago, on October 8, 1967, gunfire echoed through a steep ravine of the Andes Mountains in southern Bolivia. The guerrilla band led by Ernesto "Che" Guevara – a chief lieutenant in the Sierra Maestra, author of a book on guerilla tactics, one-time president of Cuba’s National Bank and later Minister of Industries under Castro, and who renounced his Cuban citizenship and set off to devote his services to the revolutionary cause in other lands – was pinned down and surrounded by U.S.-trained Bolivian Army Rangers. Less than a year earlier, Guevara and a team of cadres had secretly traveled from Cuba to Bolivia to launch a guerrilla war, hoping to topple Bolivia's pro-U.S. military government. Guevara had gone up into the mountains with about 50 supporters. Within months they were discovered by Bolivian troops and an intense pursuit started. Trying to escape the government forces, Guevara divided his supporters into two groups, and was never able to reunite them. His diary records that, by late August, his group was exhausted, demoralized and down to 22 men. On August 31 the other group was ambushed and wiped out crossing a river. On September 26, Bolivian army units ambushed Che's remaining forces near the isolated mounta . . .
Publicly, the Bolivian government insisted his body had been burned. The Bolivian officer who took Guevara prisoner had been trained at Fort Bragg – at a U. government had armed the Bolivian military and riddled it with their paid agents. Universal suffrage was granted, but Paz Estenssoro was ruthless to his political foes, many of whom he imprisoned. The army did nothing to check rebellious soldiers, workers, and students; Villaroel was seized and hanged from a lamppost in front of the presidential palace. Guevara himself was wounded in the leg. A provisional liberal government was installed and recognized by the United States and Argentina. In addition, by the end of 1963 Bolivia had more graduates from the United States Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, than any other Latin American country. After the Bolivian government of President Enrique Penaranda declared war on the Axis powers in April of 1943, a group of dissident army officers lead by Colonel Gaulberto Villaroel and supported by the MNR [Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario)], the Argentine government, and German agents in Buenos Aires, staged a successful coup, deposing Penaranda on December 21, 1943 and installing Villaroel as president. The next day, October 9, a helicopter flew in a man called "Felix Ramos" who wore the uniform of a Bolivian officer. Rodriguez, who was masquerading as a Bolivian army captain, had previously led a CIA death squad in Vietnam (later, this same Felix Rodriguez would be personally appointed by George Bush Sr. ” Another assessment, an interpretive report for the Secretary of State Dean Rusk that was written by Thomas Hughes, the Latin America specialist at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, summarizes the importance of “the defeat of the foremost tactician of the Cuban revolutionary strategy.
Common topics in this essay:
Paz Estenssoro, Cuba Bolivia, Intelligence Research, Liberación Nacional, Latin American, School Americas, Initially United, Gustavo Villoldo, United Argentina, La Higuera, paz estenssoro, bolivian army, bolivian officers, che guevara, 2nd ranger battalion, green berets, military junta, bolivian officer, latin america, la paz, tin-mining industry, |
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