By Pablo Daniel Magee
You don’t want to rush things and jump to illegitimate conclusions when you spend eight years writing a book. Although all the facts about Che Guevara I had gathered up to then looked fairly convincing, I still had to go through some thorough fact checking before announcing to the World that Che had set foot on Paraguayan land. Those who know Che’s story are aware that he grew up near Paraguay, and that the first political conversations he heard were about the injustice of the Chaco War, when Bolivia, financed by US private companies, invaded Paraguay to get their hands on the Chaco region where, supposedly, oil was awaiting. This event is at the very core of Che’s political consciousness. Therefore, it’s not unreasonable to think that sometime before his own revolutionary incursion in Bolivia, he would have wanted to know that in the event of a success, he could have continued liberating South America through Paraguay, which was always a geo-strategic centre for both the USSR and the United States during the cold war.