Chasing the footsteps of Che Guevara in Bolivia: A journey through history and myth.

I traveled to Bolivia to satisfy a curiosity that had haunted me since childhood: the true story behind the death of Che Guevara, once the “comandante” of Fidel Castro’s so-called Rebel Army in late-1950s Cuba. The tales of the “Che,” with which my generation was raised on the island, were nothing short of glamorous—epic, heroic to the extreme. Guevara was portrayed almost as a member of every Cuban household, spoken of with admiration, even affection.

A worker walks with her slasher tool  past the Che Guevara monument in La Higuera, Bolivia, 2013.

That was the official story, hammered into us by the government, and since I had no other version, I believed it. But after moving to the United States, I began to hear something entirely different about this so-called “hero of adventure.” The storytellers were no longer the polished announcers with solemn voices on state television. No—these were real people, flesh and blood, looking me straight in the eye. As they spoke, their breathing quickened, their hands trembled, their voices broke when recounting the “atrocities”—at the very least—that they attributed to him.

The name “Guerrillero Heroico” was nowhere to be heard. Instead, the word that echoed was “assassin.” These Cubans in exile carried a vision completely at odds with the myth I had been raised on. And faced with them, I found myself believing more in the weight of several personal testimonies whispered to me face-to-face than in the distant voice of a television presenter beamed onto a screen.

Miguel, a resident of La Higuera, shows a revolver and several bullet casings that he claims to have found near the site where Che was captured back in 1967. La Higuera, Bolivia, 2013.

“Here, nobody wanted to know anything about Che,” says Miguel, who was just a young boy at the time of the guerrilla’s capture. The problems the Cuban Revolution claimed to have solved were not the same as those faced in Bolivia, and Guevara’s campaign was doomed to fail. On October 8, 1967, a Bolivian army patrol under General Gary Prado captured the revolutionary. Shortly after, he was executed in a small schoolhouse in the village of La Higuera, in Bolivia’s Vallegrande province.

Susana Osinaga, the Bolivian nurse who tended to Ernesto Che Guevara after his death, holds up a photograph taken only minutes before she washed his body. On October 9, 1967—the very day of his execution in the nearby village of La Higuera—Osinaga was summoned by the military to the hospital in Vallegrande, where she was ordered to clean and prepare the corpse for its public display. Her hands, which once carried out that grim duty, later became part of the legend that surrounded Guevara’s final hours. Susana lived the rest of her life in Vallegrande, where she died in 2018 at the age of 86. This photo was made in Vallegrande, Bolivia in 2013.

After listening to Susana’s story, I went to visit the now-famous laundry room. It was over this concrete washbasin that Guevara’s body was laid out for the world to see. More than fifty years later, it still stands there, its surface covered with countless inscriptions left by those who continue to embrace the communist version of history—those who still call Che Guevara a hero. Vallegrande, Bolivia, 2013.

In 2013, I set out to retrace the last steps of Che Guevara in Bolivia, a journey that took me to the remote village of La Higuera—where the guerrilla fighter was captured and executed—and then to Vallegrande, the town where his lifeless body was carried, displayed, and eventually buried. As I photographed these places, I also recorded video, fragments of a story etched into landscapes and walls that still echo with history.

For this project, I left behind the digital world and relied entirely on my beloved Canon EOS 1N, with my inseparable 28mm lens. Each frame was captured on Ilford HP5 film, grainy and timeless, as if the medium itself was conspiring to remind me that I was not just documenting a place, but walking through the ghost of a story larger than life.

I was completely immersed in my own hunt for images, my eye pressed to the viewfinder, the outside world dissolving into light and shadow. So focused was I on what unfolded through the lens that I didn’t realize another story was happening just a few steps away. My friend and colleague, Sven Creutzmann, who had joined me on this expedition, quietly raised his own camera—not toward the mountains, the village, or the echoes of history we had come to chase, but toward me. In that instant, he caught the hunter while hunting.

When I finally saw the photograph later, I couldn’t stop laughing. There I was, crouched and serious, looking as if I was about to uncover a great secret—while in truth I had just become Sven’s unsuspecting prey. In La Higuera, it turned out, the one chasing ghosts ended up being the one caught on film.