Forty years ago today, Che Guevara was shot in Bolivia. Walt Rostow wrote a memo to President Lyndon Johnson in which he wrote that the killing “shows the soundness of our ‘preventative medicine’ assistance to countries facing incipient insurgency.” But apparently this was not a unanimous view.
CIA operative Felix Rodriguez now tells the Independent, “I went into the room, I stood in front of him and said ‘Commander Guevara, I’m sorry, I tried my best. But this is an order from the Bolivian high command’. He perfectly understood what I was saying; he turned white like a piece of paper, I’ve never seen anybody look depressed like he did. But he said, ‘It’s better this way, I should have never been captured alive.’ It was one o’clock in the afternoon, Bolivian time, when we left that area. And between 1.10 and 1.20, I heard the burst.”