People’s war antithesis: Che Guevara and the mythology of Focismo

Abstract

This paper re-evaluates the role and significance of Che Guevara and focismo in the strategic debate on insurgent warfare. It argues that Guevara’s approach to making revolution in Latin America and the Third World emerged out of his own earlier escapades as a restless tourist travelling through South and Central America in the early 1950s. Guevara’s life was one marked by a struggle to define an identity in a continent that he saw as dominated by the informal imperial power of the US. Focismo crystallised in the years after the Cuban Revolution in 1959 into an ideological concept supportive of the Castro regime’s claims to provide a distinctive new model of Third World revolution in opposition to those of the Soviet Union and China. Focismo has survived in the contemporary era as an approach that partly describes some modern terrorist and Jihadist movements in the Middle East.