Che Guevara and the FBI: U.S. Political Police Dossier on the Latin American Revolutionary

by Michael Ratner (Editor)

Published for the first time are the U.S. secret police files on the legendary revolutionary Ernesto Guevara, showing how the FBI and CIA monitored his movements and activity in the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Africa and Latin America. A Freedom of Information Act request succeeded in obtaining the FBI file on Guevara, containing a wide selection of CIA and other secret documents. With an introduction by the editors, U.S. attorneys Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith, this book poses the obvious why did the FBI have such a dossier? 'Che is fairly intellectual for a Latino,' reads a 1958 CIA document on Guevara during the period of the guerilla war in Cuba. Watched closely after the 1959 revolution, Guevara's every public word was recorded and transmitted to the FBI and CIA, with particular note taken of his anti-U.S. statements. Later documents concern Guevera's disappearance from Cuba in 1965 and his resurfacing in Africa and Bolivia as a guerilla leader. The sensational materials included in these secret files add to suspicions that U.S. spy agencies were plotting to assassinate Guevara when he was a Cuban government leader in the early 1960s and suggest that they were involved in the pursuit and murder of Guevara in Bolivia in 1967.
For all those interested in Che Guevara, Washington's relationship with Latin America and the workings of the U.S. spy agencies, this book is a significant new contribution.

213 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1997

About the author

Attorney and President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit human rights litigation organization and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) based in Berlin.

He was co-counsel in representing the Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United States Supreme Court, where, in June 2004, the court decided his clients have the right to test the legality of their detentions in court.

Reviews

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an excellent resource when I wrote a paper about the threat of Che Guevara, and how the US created it. It was a good resource, because I need to site specific lines about the FBI watching Guevara and how they defined his presence in Guerilla movements, but don't expect to pick up this book and find the complete secret plot to assasinate Che or something like that. There is still a lot of information blacked out, and they are pretty standard docs. It is nice though, that these books are released, the FBI/CIA has a series of released docs for certain incicents, which were made into books.

[Roger Cottrell]

I bet I know what it doesn't say. That Guevara only arrived on the political scene in Bolivia after the defeat of the working class, thereby writing off the proletariat and fetishising the guerrilla struggle. That he shook hands with Ramon Mercarder (who murdered Trotsky) and signed himself Stalin II. Nonetheless, if this book demonstrates how Guievara's murdere ended up working for the White House's Situation Group, via Civil Military Assistance as a facsit Contra terrorist in Nicargua it will have earned its keep.