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Fertile Ground: Che Guevara and Bolivia, A First-Hand Account by Rodolfo Saldaña

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Did the capture and execution of Che Guevarra prove that the military actions he led in Bolivia in 1966-67 were doomed to failure?

This interview with Bolivian participant Rodolfo Saldaña reveals the opposite. His captivating description of how fertile the ground was in Bolivia and throughout South America for revolution includes the mass support and financial aid given to the guerrillas by tin miners, peasants, and students. He explains how the U.S. backed the military junta, and the real reasons for the defeat.

Saldana's fits Che Guevara guerrilla struggle in Bolivia oin 1966 and 1967 into the context of workers struggles that had been shaking that country since the 1940s. He shows how Bolivian revolutionists, workers, students, and peasants welcomed Che's struggle and how the class struggle in that country advanced by Che's struggle. At the country's biggest tin mines, entire unions pledged one day's salary to support Che. Saldana, a founder and leader of the Bolivian Communist Party until he broke with them to work with Che's guerrilla, shows how the Bolivian CP sabotaged Che's struggle. With economic and social conditions in Bolivia and other parts of Latin America much worse than they were in the 1960s, this book should be read as a manual for future upsurges of struggle by workers and peasants in Bolivia and throughout the Americas.

Kudos to the Pathfinder editors for finding Saldaña and recording his story before he died. Saldaña describes the day-to-day life of revolutionary organizers among workers and peasants in Bolivia in the early 1960s. The book gave me a deeper appreciation for the revolutionary possibilities that existed in Bolivia, which in turn led to Che opening the guerrilla front there in 1966.

"Fertile Ground" is a book published by Pathfinder, the publishing arm of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party.

The SWP used to be very critical of the guerrilla struggle launched by Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1966-67, and similar efforts in other Latin American nations. The theory and practice of Guevara is sometimes called "focoism", since one of its distinguishing features is the idea that a small guerrilla nucleus (foco) can create the conditions necessary for a successful revolution, even if such conditions are initially lacking. In other words, focoism is based on a misreading of the Cuban revolution. It's probably connected to the general, pseudo-Maoistic voluntarism characteristic of Che Guevara's thought in general. During the 1980's and 1990's, however, the SWP became more and more uncritically pro-Cuban, and "Fertile Ground" is an attempt to square the circle, by claiming that Guevara's adventure in Bolivia wasn't really focoist, after all. I can't say that this revisionist history is very convincing, although I admit that the book is interesting for other reasons.

The bulk of the book is an interview with Rodolfo Saldana, an indigenous Bolivian Communist militant who left the Bolivian Communist Party and instead became a founding member of the ELN, Che Guevara's guerrilla front. For a while, he was in charge of ELN's urban support network. He managed to escape to Cuba after the capture and murder of Guevara in 1967, only to return for a second attempt to launch a guerrilla war in Bolivia. That attempt, too, ultimately failed.

Saldana claims that the mineworkers at Bolivia's main tin mine, Siglo XX, voted overwhelmingly to support Che's guerrillas and even recruited a number of volunteers. This precipitated the Noche de San Juan massacre, during which Bolivian troops attacked the miners and their union hall to restore "order". According to Saldana and the publishers, this was the fertile ground, together with the fact that Bolivia has always been a seedbed of labour radicalism and nationalist populism.

The argument is unconvincing. There were indeed mass struggles in Bolivia during this period, eventually culminating in a revolutionary situation in 1970-71, but it was concentrated in the cities and minefields, and led by the labour unions, leftist parties and nationalist military officers. In other words, "business as usual" as far as Latin America is concerned. It's difficult to see what role a rural guerrilla foco could possibly have played in all this. And since Saldana's mission was to recruit a few mineworkers *away from* the union-centred struggles, it's painfully obvious that the ELN's strategy was at bottom just as focoist as the critics have charged. It wasn't the ELN, after all, which toppled the Bolivian military dictatorship. Indeed, they seem to have pretty much ceased to exist during the crucial months of 1970-71!

Frankly, it's unclear whether the SWP really believes in the contents of their own book, or whether they simply want to capitalize on Che Guevara's status as a revolutionary icon. Nevertheless, "Fertile ground" can be of some interest to students of Bolivian and Cuban history, and for those interested in Che Guevara's life in particular.

In this firsthand account, Bolivian tin miner and revolutionary militant Rodolfo Saldan~a explains how the
guerilla lead by Che Guevara - which Saldan~a helped lead the support network for --was rooted in the
revolutionary upsurge of workers' , students' and farmers' struggles in the mid-late '60s in Bolivia and the
mass movements against dictatorship and Yanqui Imperial domination in the neighboring countries of Peru
and Argentina . As he explains from first-hand experience, Che's efforts were not isolated, driven by
desire for martyrdom, or sabotaged by Fidel Castro, as so many of Che's ' biographers' have claimed.
Excellent preface and introduction by Cuban General Harry Villegas and Pathfinder Press' Mary-Alice
Waters place the lessons of Che's final efforts in the context of the struggles of workers, farmers and youth
of today against capitalism and the Yanqui Empire.