Listen to the interview on The Progressive here.

Guevara was a fragile asthmatic, born to wealthy Argentineans who settled into a bohemian life. These political dissidents transmitted their fervor to their eldest son. By college, Guevara had embraced Marxism. He became a doctor, but was equally eager to heal the body politic. In 1953, Guevara moved to Guatemala and saw firsthand the power of American colonialism; United Fruit Company, backed by the government, had installed a literal banana republic to ensure unimpeded profits. Guevara fled, but his commitment to vanquish American-led puppet governments had been bolstered.

Guevara would soon join forces with Fidel Castro to overthrow the US supported government of Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista. When Castro took control of the tiny island on January 8, 1959, it was a jubilant time. What the authors sidestep is how quickly Castro became dictator and made Communism a yoke of the common man.

Read the full review in Chronogram

Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith are the co-authors of a new book about the U.S. role in the killing of Cuban revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Born in Argentina in 1928, Che rose to international prominence as one of the key leaders of the 1959 Cuban Revolution that overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. After a period in the new Cuban government leadership, Che aimed to spark revolutionary activity internationally. On October 8, 1967, he was captured by Bolivian troops working with the CIA. He was executed one day later. In their book, Who Killed Che?, Ratner and Smith draw on previously unpublished U.S. government documents to argue the CIA played a critical role in the killing. The authors also discuss the early life of the revolutionary hero, as documented by his own diaries.

Listen to the episode on Democracy Now!

IN COMPELLING DETAIL, two leading civil rights attorneys — both leaders of the Center for Constitutional Rights (New York) — recount the extraordinary life and deliberate killing of the world’s most popular revolutionary, Ernesto Che Guevara. Using internal U.S. governmental documentation, only recently released, the authors use their forensic skills to analyze the evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the execution of a war prisoner captured alive.

After a brief summary of Guevara’s life and struggles, they examine the U.S. documents that bear witness to CIA involvement in the tracking down of the Cuban/Argentinian fighter.

Foreign Minister Aleksey Kosygin went to Havana at the end of June 1967, and, in his meeting with Castro, complained that the guerrilla in Bolivia was “playing into the hands of imperialism.” In his answer, the Cuban leader “accused the USSR of having turned its back upon its own revolutionary tradition and of having moved to a point where it would refuse to support any revolutionary movement unless the actions of the latter contributed to the achievement of Soviet objectives, as contrasted to international Communist objectives.” It could almost be a Trotskyst critique of Stalinism…

Read the full review in Against the Current

One of the lawyers assisting Occupy Wall Street is Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, whom the Guardian quoted yesterday: “This movement is ultimately not about what happens in the courts, it’s about what happens in the streets.”

Read the full article in Mondoweiss

In 1995, Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents about the C.I.A.’s involvement in the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia. Years passed — 16 of them — and Mr. Ratner forgot that he had ever sent the letter. But he was still living in the same apartment and one day some documents from the government began trickling in through the mail. With new information he now says definitively dispels “the myth that the United States was not involved in the order to kill Che,” Mr. Ratner decided to write a small book, joining forces with another attorney, Michael Steven Smith, to produce Who Killed Che? How the C.I.A. Got Away with Murder.

Read the full article in The New York Observer

Che and the CIA in Bolivia

Why did Che choose Bolivia? Landlocked, Bolivia was Latin America’s poorest, most illiterate, most rural and most Indian country. It was also the most unstable country in Latin America, having gone through more than 190 changes in government since it became an independent republic in 1825. Like Mexico in the years 1910 to 1920, and Cuba more recently, Bolivia was a Latin American country whose revolution in 1952 was based on popular participation. And, of course, Bolivia is a neighbor to Che’s home country of Argentina.

Constantio Apasa, a Bolivian tin miner, summed up the political situation in his country in the year that Che arrived: “When the MNR (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) came to power in 1952, we felt it was a workers’ party and things would be different. But then the MNR politicians organized a secret police and filled their pockets. They rebuilt the army which we had destroyed, and when it got big enough, the army threw them out. Now the army has new weapons which we cannot match.” The 1964 military coup ended the MNR’s twelve-year reign. The military officers who now ran Bolivia were all U.S.-trained.

Che arrived in Bolivia via Uruguay in early November of 1966 disguised as a Uruguayan businessman. So deceptive was his appearance—shaved beard, horn-rimmed glasses, tailored bank suit—that Phil Agee, the CIA agent in Uruguay charged with finding Che and who would later quit the agency and become a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, wrote that Che easily avoided Uruguayan officials despite a warning leaflet Agee had prepared and passed out at the airport in Montevideo. In fact, Fidel told author Ignacio Ramonet that even Raul Castro failed to recognize Che upon meeting him before he left Cuba for Bolivia.

Read the full excerpt in Guernica