"We’ll be like Che" Foquismo and sacrificial ethics within the Latin American revolutionary activism

Abstract

The article focuses on the double dimension–political and moral–that the Guevarist legacy assumed within the Latin American left in the 60s and 70s. First, it identifies those postulates emanating from Guevarist rhetoric that offered both a language and a political sense to the revolutionary left, thus promoting armed action. What fundamentally stands out, among those postulates, is the inclusion of the revolutionary process in a war on a continental and global scale, as well as the foquist assertion that the armed action from the revolutionaries creates the subjective conditions for the revolution. Secondly, the article approaches a central figure of the revolutionary imaginary erected as a model of conduct: the new man. By addressing this dual legacy, the aim is to illuminate the particular forms in which the thought and action of Guevara shaped a political subjectivity and sacrificial ethics for thousands of Latin American revolutionaries.