People’s war antithesis: Che Guevara and the mythology ofFocismo

This paper re-evaluates the role and significance of Che Guevara and focismo in the strategic debate on insurgent warfare. It argues that Guevara’s approach to making revolution in Latin America and the Third World emerged out of his own earlier escapades as a restless tourist travelling through South and Central America in the early 1950s. Guevara’s life was one marked by a struggle to define an identity in a continent that he saw as dominated...