Che Guevara was executed in a Bolivian schoolhouse
On this day · 9 October 1967
A day after his capture, the revolutionary was shot on army orders — and almost instantly became a global icon.
On October 9, 1967, the captured revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara was executed in the village schoolhouse at La Higuera, Bolivia. Taken alive the previous day, he had been held overnight while Bolivian commanders, wary of a trial that might rally his sympathizers, decided his fate.
The order came down by radio: kill him, and make it look as if he had died in battle. A sergeant, Mario Terán, carried it out, shooting the 39-year-old Guevara around 1:15 p.m. His body was flown to nearby Vallegrande and displayed to the press.
The army staged the death as a battlefield killing — a fiction the displayed body quickly undercut.
Far from erasing him, the execution turned Guevara into an enduring symbol of revolution. The stark photograph of his corpse, and Alberto Korda’s earlier portrait, would soon make his face one of the most reproduced images on Earth.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
