Portal:Latin America/Featured History/Week 26, 2006

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna commonly known as Che Guevara or el Che, was an Argentine-born physician, Marxist revolutionary, politician, and leader of Cuban and internationalist guerrillas. As a young man studying medicine, Guevara traveled "rough" throughout Latin America, bringing him into direct contact with the poverty in which many people lived. Through these experiences he became convinced that only revolution could remedy the region's economic inequality, leading him to study Marxism and become involved in Guatemala's social revolution under President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán.

Sometime later, Guevara became a member of Fidel Castro's paramilitary 26th of July Movement that seized power in Cuba in 1959. After serving in various important posts in the new government and writing a number of articles and books on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 with the intention of fomenting revolutions first in the Congo-Kinshasa (later named the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and then in Bolivia, where he was captured in a CIA-organized military operation.

After his death, Guevara became an icon of socialist revolutionary movements worldwide. An Alberto Korda photo of Guevara has received wide distribution and modification.