The Ñancahuazú Guerrilla or Ejército de Liberación Nacional de Bolivia was a group of mainly Bolivian and Cuban guerrillas led by the guerrilla leader Che Guevara which was active in the Cordillera Province of Bolivia from 1966 to 1967. The group established its base camp on a farm across the Ñancahuazú River, a seasonal tributary of the Rio Grande, 250 kilometers southwest of the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The guerrillas intended to work as a foco, a point of armed resistance to be used as a first step to overthrow the Bolivian government and create a socialist state

After serving in Castro's government, Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia.

Che Guevara was committed to ending American imperialism, and he decided to travel to the Congo during its civil war to back the anti-capitalist guerrilla groups. Guevara's aim was to export the revolution by instructing local anti-Mobutu Simba fighters in Marxist ideology and foco theory strategies of guerrilla warfare. In his Congo Diary, he cites the incompetence, intransigence and infighting of the local Congolese forces as key reasons for the insurgency's failure.

At a meeting in Madrid, Juan Perón, who was sympathetic to Guevara but disapproved of Guevara's choice of guerrilla warfare as antiquated, warned Guevara about starting operations in Bolivia.

"...you will not survive in Bolivia. Suspend that plan. Search for alternatives. Do not commit suicide."

— Juan Perón to Che Guevara

While agitating for communist revolution in Bolivia, Guevara was captured by CIA-assisted state forces and summarily executed on this day in 1967.

On November 3rd, 1966, Guevara had secretly arrived in La Paz on a flight from Montevideo under the false name Adolfo Mena González, posing as a middle-aged Uruguayan businessman working for the Organization of American States. Once there, Guevara had difficulty getting cooperation from both local dissidents and the Bolivian Communist Party, despite besting the Bolivian military in several skirmishes.

Bolivian president Rene Barrientos was very concerned with Guevara's rising insurgency, and clamped down in the area with some very heavy-handed measures (such as the San Juan massacre). Guevara felt that such an atrocity by the Bolivian Army and Air Force would be the tipping point in his favour in rallying the miners to his communist cause, but eventually the miners signed with government-owned mining company, COMIBOL, an agreement which Guevara felt undermined his reason for being there.

Many of the inhabitants willingly informed the Bolivian authorities and military about the guerrillas and their movements in the area, which led directly to Guevara's capture on October 7th, 1967.

On October 9th, on orders from the Bolivian President René Barrientos, Guevara was executed. His last words: "Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!"

"The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality."

  • Che Guevara

On 17 February 1968, five surviving guerrillas, three Cubans and two Bolivians, managed to get to Chile. There they were detained by policing carabiniers and sent to Iquique. On 22 February, the guerrillas applied for asylum. While in Iquique they were visited by Salvador Allende, then president of the senate of Chile. After the guerrilla's meeting with Allende and other prominent leftist politicians the interior minister of the Christian Democrat government Edmundo Pérez Zujovic decided to expel the guerrillas from Chile. Due to problems in obtaining transit visas the journey to Cuba was done via Tahiti and New Zealand.

After the failure of Guevara's insurgency, radical leftists in Bolivia began to organize again to set up guerrilla resistance in 1970 in what is known today as the Teoponte Guerrilla.

Fernando Gómez, a former member of the Ñancahuazú Guerrilla, led the formation of Salvador Allende's informal bodyguard prior to the 1970 Chilean presidential election.[32] By the time of the election, the bodyguard had expanded with the addition of more ex-Ñancahuazú Guerrillas volunteering to provide security to Allende and, later, members of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR).

On one of Allende's first public appearances after his inauguration, a Chilean journalist inquired of the president who the armed men were accompanying him, to which Allende replied "a group of personal friends", giving the group the moniker from which it would thereafter be known.

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