Banned Books: CHE

In 1967, Ernesto Che Guevara was executed by a Bolivian soldier after his capture during a failed guerilla uprising.  Che was attempting to duplicate the success he, Fidel Castro, Camillo Cienfuegos and the rest of the tiny crew of the Granma had achieved in Cuba start in a remote location, then build support amongst the peasants to create a people’s army that can throw out the fascists and establish a new socialist republic.  But the model that worked so well in Cuba was a complete failure in Bolivia, and Che died in the tiny village of Vallegrande.  His ideas about socialism and guerilla war, however, didn’t die with him.

In 1968, Argentine comics writer Hector Oesterheld (1919-1977) and artists Alberto Breccia (1919-1993) and Enrique Breccia (Alberto’s son, 1945) produced a biography of Che in comics form.  (To find out more about the amazing Breccia family, check out www.mundobreccia.com.) This book, called simply Che, was told in alternating chapters those drawn by Enrique showing the campaign in Bolivia, while Alberto showed Che’s life before the Bolivian expedition, and the forces that shaped his socialist revolutionary ideology. 

Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia were already extremely popular comics creators in Argentina, best known for their series Mort Cinder.  Enrique Breccia is a well-respected cartoonist today, but astonishingly, Che was his first published work.  His poster-like pages in Che are incredibly bold and accomplished.  Alberto Breccia had been drawing comics since 1938, and during the ‘60s his style became more abstract and experimental.  Oesterheld was equal parts Stan Lee and Albert Camus; his comics were tinged with existentialism and fatalism.  In his most popular comic, El Eternauta, when aliens invade the earth they win!  But Oesterheld had also steadily moved leftward politically, and it was his hope that Che would be an inexpensive tool to educate the masses.  Breccia and Oesterheld planned a series of biographies of famous Latin American revolutionaries, including Zapata and Sandino.

This did not happen. In 1974, Isabel Peron, the widow of Juan Peron, took power.  She authorized the creation of extra-legal death squads to battle against the rising violence of the Montoneros, a left-wing guerilla movement.  The book Che was banned and became dangerous to own.  The original plates and all existing inventory of the book were burned.

And when it looked like things couldn’t get worse, there was a military coup in 1976.  The junta unleashed the infamous dirty war between 1976 and 1983, they kidnapped, tortured and executed 30,000 persons seen as threats to the regime.  Amongst these were the publisher of Che, Oesterheld, and his four daughters.  One of his daughters was pregnant at the time of her kidnapping and gave birth to a son in prison before being murdered.  The son was to have been given up for adoption the fate of so many children of subversives in the Dirty War but fans of Oesterheld’s comics in the Argentine government made certain that the son was returned to Oesterheld’s widow.

After the disastrous Falklands War, the junta surrendered power to a democratic civilian government in 1983.  Che subsequently was published in Spain, Italy and Belgium.  A new Argentine edition was finally published in 1997 by Imaginador.  Argentina is a free and democratic country, but the ghosts of the Dirty War continue to haunt it, and many of the murderers still sit safely in their barracks.  We Americans believe that this could never happen here, in part because we have the First Amendment.  But the constitution is just another piece of paper without politically engaged people willing to fight for their rights.