Only the dead stay young, and some even become immortal. Che Guevara died more than half a century ago, but because, as Jean-Paul Sartre knew, he was “the most perfect human being of our time,” the melancholy revolutionary lives on on T-shirts, designer handbags, and coffee mugs. Sometimes he even has to advertise car rental. Now the man who secured his posthumous fame has died, his murderer.
Mario Terán is said to have been drunk when he went to the execution on October 9, 1967, and because of his excitement he is said to have hit the revolutionary only with the third or fourth shot in the heart. It was the worst moment of his life, he later claimed. Che Guevara looked at him with his big eyes until he got dizzy. But as is the case in these heroic sagas, the executioner gets scared and his victim uses the opportunity for a melodious final word: “Shoot at last, you coward, and see how a man dies!”
As futile as the whole enterprise was that urged the trained doctor to leave the revolutionary government established in Havana and continue the guerrilla struggle first in Africa and then in Bolivia, his death in the washhouse of a remote mountain village in the Cordilleras has dr Ernesto Guevara to a martyr’s glory that can only be found in Catholic legends of the saints. He had failed, he had not succeeded in inciting the Indians to revolt against the military government financed by the cocaine trade and led by the USA. With the kind assistance of the CIA, he was tracked down and brought down, but that death became his triumph.
“Only violence can help” – but it didn’t help
The kitsch of death followed immediately: The notorious final rhyme Wolf Biermann raised him to “Jesus Christ with the gun” and wrote extra militantly: “We are left with what was good and clear / that you always looked through / and love, hate, but never saw fear:/Commandante Che Guevara.” Peter Weiss beat his chest and cried into the typewriter: “Are we complicit in this death? Are we the traitors? Or were we just self-conscious in our everyday lives, indifferent, confident and unconcerned about that distant revolution?” The poet knew what was due now: “Only violence can help.”
But the violence didn’t help. Bolivian President René Barrientos Ortuño, who signed the death warrant, died in a mysterious helicopter crash in 1969. Roberto Quintanilla, who as head of the secret service ordered that the hands of the dead man be cut off for identification, went to Hamburg as consul, where Monika Ertl, the daughter of a Riefenstahl cameraman, tracked him down and killed him with the pistol of the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and avenged the guerrilla . But that’s not the end of the story: Che, laid out like Christ, continued to work miracles long after his death: in 2006, the retired sergeant, who had been given a new name for his safety, benefited from the Operacion Milagro, where Cuban doctors treat poor people in Latin America for free. Terán regained his sight. “History is the canaille,” says a poem by the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, “she lies in bed with the big whore.” Che killer Mario Terán died peacefully on Wednesday at the age of 79 in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.