October 09, 2007
By JAIME HOLGUIN, The Associated Press
It was 40 years ago that Ernesto "Che" Guevara, one of the most iconic Latin American leaders of the 20th Century, was killed by Bolivian army forces in the small mountain community of La Higuera.
Guevara had traveled to Bolivia to try to foment an uprising against the military government of Gen. Rene Barrientos Ortuno. The day after his capture on Oct. 8, 1967, Guevara was executed on Barrientos' orders.
"The circumstances of his death, we're still learning about those," says Paul Dosal, a history professor at the University of South Florida. "Clearly there were at least three CIA agents providing intelligence support to the Bolivian army on the location and direction of Che's small guerrilla band."
Guevara's death was documented by a handful of images showing him just after he was killed. Dosal, who wrote the book "Comandante Che," says his body was put on display for a reason.
"The CIA and the Bolivian military wanted to send a message to everybody -- one that they had captured Che Guevara ... but also to send a warning to everybody else."
The idea was to deter anyone from following in the footsteps of his ideals and strategies.
"The great irony is of course that many of the Bolivians who saw that saw something very different," Dosal says. "In fact, some of them thought that he appeared very Christlike.
In this slideshow highlighting those post-mortem photographs, Dosal talks about Guevara's final days.
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See the slideshow: http://asap.ap.org/data/interactives/_news/che/
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Jaime Holguin is an asap reporter.
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