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Che's legacy contains an indiscriminate blending, overlapping and confusion of intellectual and practical contributions to different areas of behavior that should be separated and distinguished. First, there is Che the insurrectionary theorist, strategist and tactician. This is the main thrust of his legacy, and it weighs heavily on his post-1967 followers and on interpreters of the Latin American left. Second, there is Che the economic theorist and planner. This second body of material is predicated on the first, peripheral to it and thus far applicable only to the Cuban experience. Third, there is Che the guerrilla hero, the martyr and myth. This romantic and glamorous aspect of his legacy has captivated young people and misled them into believing that revolutions are made simply by taking up the gun. Experienced revolutionaries are not deceived by the heroic image of Che as the new man of the twentieth century; indeed, they have frankly discouraged this cult of personality as an expression of youthful but misdirected idealism. In Latin America, as elsewhere, it is apparent that seemingly unending and often dull tasks are necessary to the building of a revolutionary movement.

The New Left in Latin America is virtually indistinguishable from the political currents generated by the Cuban Revolution in response to the common Latin American predicament of underdevelopment. The social basis of revolutionary movements in Latin America may be traced to a number of broad factors. A frustrated sense of patriotism is the response to the dominating role of foreign, mainly US-based, corporations which appear to manipulate Latin American governments in their own interest and have the effect of distorting the independent development of native economies. The symbols of prosperity in foreign business communities contrast starkly with the very low wages and squalid living conditions of native employees, while Latin American governments find themselves financially and technologically dependent on the US for the development of their national industries. On the analogy of the first War of Independence against Spanish colonialism (1810-25), Latin American revolutionaries conceive of the present struggle against US imperialism as a Second War of Independence. In Latin America power lies with a landed oligarchy, native capitalists linked to foreign interests, and the armed forces which often have imposed unpopular governments on their countries in violation of electoral results. Corrupt electoral practices, governments which give only lip service to their constitutions, and military dictatorships which arbitrarily establish their own grounds of legitimacy -- all these form the background against which the New Left has been active.

If revolutionary violence has become an accepted political tactic in Latin America, its origins should be related to the institutionalization of violence by Latin American governments, which attribute their difficulties to popular discontent and to communist subversion rather than to their own failures. Largely impotent to solve their countries' fundamental social and economic problems, they have turned to the US for aid, thereby accentuating their dependence. They have mistaken symptoms for causes and in many cases escalated repression against their own people. The origins of guerrilla warfare on the continent, therefore, are to be traced not only to the political currents unloosed by the Cuban Revolution, but to an institutionalized tradition of violence to which the Cuban Revolution itself was a response.

Historically, Guevarism represents the culmination or convergence of popular responses to this violence. Its foundations were laid in 1960 with the publication of Che Guevara's manual on Guerrilla Warfare. Selected as early as 1959 to supervise the allocation of Cuban manpower, money and munitions to those insurrectional centers struggling against other military dictatorships, Che took charge of internationalizing the Cuban Revolution and of converting the Cordillera of the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of Latin America.

Later, with the launching of Che Guevara's Bolivian campaign in April 1967 and the almost simultaneous publication of his 'Message to the Tricontinental', Guevarism emerged as a revolutionary tendency independent of the Cuban Revolution. By launching the Bolivian guerrillas, Che was to become identified by many as a new Bolivar at the head of an international army for the liberation of Latin America from the indirect economic and political tutelage of the United States. Although that army was financed and recruited with Cuban assistance, Che was in sole command. The effort to create a Latin American ' Vietnam' in Bolivia transformed Guevarism from a current within the Cuban Revolution into a closely related but distinct revolutionary tendency, whose differences with Castroism were to become conspicuous only after Che's death.

Since then, Che Guevara's followers have divided into sharply opposing political factions. Today Guevarism is represented by a composite of political movements and is far from constituting a coherent political trend. As a consequence, the partisans of Fidel Castro and many Guevarist movements no longer see eye to eye. In Peru, Fidel's followers are on the side of the military junta; most Guevarists are opposed to it. The Cuban government has mostly praise for the nationalist regime of Omar Torrijos in Panama, while Guevarist groups continue to resist the military dictatorship. And in Mexico, whose populist government has remained on friendly terms with Castro, Guevarist-inspired urban and rural guerrillas have proliferated without restraint. . .

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