By Pablo Daniel Magee *
I was a rather young teenager when I first bought a poster of the Che Guevara. As a French high school rebel in my own right, and, as it was the case for many of my friends back then, exhibiting the figure of this iconic revolutionary seemed appropriate to confirm to anyone who wouldn’t have realized it already, that I was against every value the capitalist system stands for. Of course, at the time, I knew very little about the face hanging on my wall, and much less about the broader meaning of the star showing on his hat. But having him there just seemed like the cool thing to do. In fact, my revolutionary writer of a mother owned two books written about the Che. One was by Jorge G. Castañeda titled The life and death of Che Guevara, and the other by renowned French historian Pierre Kalfon, was soberly called Che. Reading those gave me a much better idea of who the myth was, and somehow comforted me in my choice of a hero, despite all the many disturbing facts I had also read about the Cuban revolution, which caused Jean-Paul Sartre to distance himself from the island, and I did my best to turn a blind eye to. After all: war is war (sic). In my mind back then, the cool thing to do became the right thing to do.
By the time I was studying journalism at the University of Greenwich, in London, I was well read in the field of Guevarist ideology and would have been eager to jump onto any boat to free a hypothetic island needing to be liberated. Luckily for me, I found none. That’s about when I ran into British photographer Keith Kardwell. He was showing his work in London, and I stayed speechless when discovering a photograph he had taken of photographer Alberto Diaz Korda. THE Alberto Diaz Korda, famous for taking the iconic photo of Che. There was the bearded man, sitting in his Cuban living room in front of the original fully blown out print. Kardwell had a hot temper and got very annoyed at me for looking at his work for too long (go figure!). When I manifested my true interest in the photograph and put some of my hard-earned knowledge on the table, he apologized and offered me an original print of the piece. I had officially upgraded my worn-out poster for something more suitable for someone of my rank in the Revolución.
Shortly after, my philosophy professor in London saw the print in my living room, and spontaneously told me she had worked for Henry Kissinger in the mid 70s and had taken part in reunions with CIA representatives talking about the involvement of the United States in the military coup lead by General Pinochet in Chile. What was also discussed during these reunions was the help the US Secretary of State was giving to something called The Condor Operative: “some kind of a criminal organization involving several countries in South America during the Cold War”. Very much interested in the history of South America, the Che in me woke up and burnt my computer out before assaulting the university library, trying to get a better picture of the Condor… until I graduated and had to take on a real job, which brought things to a halt for a few years.
Nonetheless, South America kept calling me and I ended up traveling to Paraguay for a quick blitz of air in the capitalist normality of my life. Completely by chance, one evening, I was invited to dinner by a bunch of friends and landed on a chair right next to a mysterious little man who started telling me about the Condor Operation and how he’d found the 4 tons (mind you) of archive proving the existence of that conspiracy. The story Doctor Martín Almada told me that night was so incredible, that my inner Che woke up again and I resigned from my very conventional job as a redactor in a communication company specialized in fine French wines (still not bad) to move to Paraguay and start writing a book about Almada, Condor, and the bigger picture.
No need to say my world (except my revolutionary writer of a mother) thought I was crazy and perhaps I also had my own doubts about my sanity, but I had finally found an island I could free with my pen rather than with a gun, which was just too much for me to resist. I initially moved to Paraguay for a year and ended up investigating for eight full years. I am now the author of Opération Condor, un homme face à la terreur en Amérique latine (understand Condor Operation, a man facing terror in Latin America), published in France by editor Saint-Simon in October of 2020. This book brought me to travel all over the World to meet and interview hundreds of people, including Pope Francis when Martín Almada discussed the opening of the Vatican’s archive about the Condor Operation with him. Maurice Lemoine, editor-in-chief of the most respected French political News Paper, “Le Monde Diplomatique”, wrote an article about my work and later wrote to me personally saying he considers me the intellectual heir of investigators John Dinges, Marie-Monique Robin and Pierre Abramovici: the greatest specialists of the Condor Operative worldwide. Swiss sociologist and human rights council to the United Nations Jean Ziegler, who had his world turned upside down by only one meeting with Che five decades ago, also called me to say I’d written a historic document. Sometimes… you just have to jump, don’t you?!
What about my uncle the Che, say you?
At this stage of the story, his name is Oscar Ferreira and he still is a humble sunglasses salesman.
But we’ll get there!
* French writer, journalist, screenwriter and playwright, author of the non-fiction novel Opération Condor, Un homme face à la terreur en Amérique latine, Saint Simon, 2020, 378p. ISBN 978-2-37435-025-7
Cover illustration: Roberto Goiriz