Che Guevara by Jon Lee Anderson Read Free Book Online Page A

and dispatches arrived in the mail, Carmen read them aloud to the gathered clan, bringing the raw impact of the war home in a way no newspaper article could do.
    In the early 1930s, there had been little in Argentina’s domestic politics to engage the liberal Guevaras. Argentina had been ruled by a succession of conservative military regimes in coalitions with factions of the traditional “liberal” party, the Unión Cívica Radical, which had splintered and foundered in ineffectual opposition since President Hipólito Yrigoyen’s overthrow in 1930. The war for the Spanish Republic, a dramatic stand against the growing threat of international Fascism, was something one could become passionate about.
    Ernesto Guevara Lynch helped found Alta Gracia’s own little Comité de Ayuda a la Republica, part of a national solidarity network withRepublican Spain, and he befriended the exiled Spanish newcomers. He particularly admired General Jurado, who had defeated Franco’s troops and their Italian Fascist allies in the battle for Guadalajara, and who now had to support himself by selling life insurance policies. General Jurado dined with the Guevaras and held them in thrall with war stories. Young Ernesto followed the war by marking the Republican and Fascist armies’ positions on a map with little flags. According to family lore, he named the family’s pet dog, a schnauzer-pinscher, Negrina—because she was black and in honor of the republic’s prime minister, Juan Negrín.
    When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939 and World War II began, the inhabitants of Alta Gracia began choosing sides. Ernesto Guevara Lynch threw his energies into Acción Argentina, a pro-Allies solidarity group. He rented a little office from the Lozada family that was built into the exterior stone wall of the Jesuit mission overlooking Tajamar Lake. He traveled around the province, speaking at public meetings and following up tips about “Nazi infiltration.” He and his colleagues feared an eventual Nazi invasion of Argentina and monitored suspicious activities in Córdoba’s sizable German community. Now eleven, Ernesto joined the youth wing of Acción Argentina. His father recalled that “all the free time he had outside his playtime and studies, he spent collaborating with us.”
    In Córdoba, one of the chief targets of concern was the German settlement in the Calamuchita valley, near Alta Gracia. In late 1939, after inflicting damage on British warships in the Atlantic, the crippled German battleship
Admiral Graf Spee
was chased into the Río de la Plata, where its captain scuttled it in the waters off Montevideo. The ship’s officers and crew were interned in Córdoba. Ernesto Guevara Lynch recalled that the internees were observed conducting military training exercises with dummy wooden rifles and that trucks loaded with arms from Bolivia were discovered headed for the valley. A German-owned hotel in another town was suspected of providing cover for a Nazi spy ring and of housing a radio transmitter that communicated directly to Berlin.
    Alarmed at what they believed to be evidence of a flourishing Nazi underground network in Córdoba, Ernesto Guevara Lynch and his colleagues sent a detailed report to the headquarters of Acción Argentina in Buenos Aires, expecting prompt action to be taken by the pro-Allied administration of President Roberto Ortiz. But Ortiz was in ill health and was effectively replaced in his duties by his vice president, Ramón Castillo, who was strongly pro-Axis. Thus, according to Guevara Lynch, no substantive measures were taken against the Nazi network.
    Argentina’s ambiguous position throughout the war—it remained officially neutral until the eve of Germany’s defeat in 1945—owed as muchto its economic concerns as to the considerable pro-Axis sentiments within its political and military establishment. Traditionally dependent on Europe as an export market for its beef, grain, and other agricultural