The Daily Minutiae

-"Letterbomb," Green Day

-"Nicaragua, Nicaragüita," Carlos Mejía Godoy

"[The guerilla fighter] will also make use of what he learns as the months or years of the war strengthen his revolutionary convictions, making him more radical as the potency of arms is demonstrated, as the outlook of the inhabitants becomes a part of his spirit and of his own life..."

-Guerilla Warfare, Ernesto "Che" Guevara

I've seen kids walking around campus lately wearing Che Guevara t-shirts.  Right there, superimposed on solid red, that infamous face.  After finally seeing The Motorcycle Diaries, I questioned one of the students what they thought about the movie or if they'd read the book.  The gist of the reply was, "No.  Uhh, what's that?  Oh, no.  Che's just a cool dude."

A cool dude, I could go with that I guess.  It struck me odd that so many people were so ignorant about what they were so openly celebrating, but that happens.

The truth is, things are a lot different from Che's time.  The Latin American revolutionary hero has since faded away.  There are no ideological revolutions and upheavals, only a few diagnosed terrorist groups, just as many unhappy people as there were before, and millions more Che Guevara t-shirts.

Che's political reform was a kind of militant humanism which took every man into account and used them as tools for common good.

Compare that to FARC, the biggest thorn in the side of Colombia's government and probably the largest terrorist group in the Spanish-speaking world.  FARC was once the military wing of the Colombian communist party, but then turned to ransom and drug trafficking to fund themselves among other ways.  

Nowadays, FARC has very little political if any.  They resort to car bombing and kidnappings to flex their muscle.  One of the most interesting things I found in Guerilla Warfare is that Che wasn't in favor of terrorism and thought armed uprisings were last resorts.  He writes early in the book: "It is necessary to distinguish between sabotage, a revolutionary and highly effective method of warfare, and terrorism, a measure that is generally ineffective and indiscriminate in its results, since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution."

Most of the book isn't written like this.  The majority of it is tried and true ways to start a guerilla unit, not anything page-turning.  What's more interesting is the fact he sounds like a broken record, which shows how common sense combat was to him.  He was a pure revolutionary.

So what I want to know is, how did Guevara's armed humanism get perverted into terrorism and drug trafficking?

I've stumbled on something that really horrifies me this morning.

Since I moved in here at OU, I've kind of seen how impassionate about things I am, a very anyway-the-wind-blows attitude.  All these people and all these strong opinions, some things just seem so trivial.  I'm really a natural talker, but some things would just never occur to me to talk about.

It was in Spain of all places when I heard of The Motorcycle Diaries, and for three years since I've written it off as "some revolutionary flick," but because of my recent Spanish double major choice, I walked into Alden Library for the first time and checked it out.  I did it more as a matter of principle ("That would be pretty bad to have a Spanish degree and not have seen The Motorcycle Diaries.") and even as I plopped it into my computer, I sat back and really sort of facetiously said, "Ok, let's get ready to have our lives changed."

Say what you want, but there's nothing like a Latin American hero.  For those of you unlucky enough to not have seen the movie yet, it chronicles a pan-South American journey taken by Ernesto "Che" Guevara that eventually inspires him to become a leading voice in communism in South America.

The entire trek parallels the story of Buddha: an upstanding young man leaves home to find extra meaning in life and he encounters the sick, the poor, the dying and is ultimately transformed.  In a way, it's also kind of a modern day Don Quixote with Ernesto and his sidekick Alberto traveling together.  I really want to swim across the Amazon now.

What horrifies is feeling I had two hours after mocking the hype about the movie.  Only one notion penetrated my thoughts.  "Yep," I said, "This is it."  No meditations, no second-guessing: Latin America.