The route of Che Guevara in Bolivia covers many places, but all or virtually all trips pass through Vallegrande and the small community known as La Higuera, a quiet place with few inhabitants. On these tours, you will visit the place where El Che was taken prisoner, where he was killed and shown to the journalists, and finally where a few years ago his remains were unearthed. Many people believe that the victory or the goal Che Guevara had in mind in Bolivia was finally achieved when Evo Morales was inaugurated as the President.

The sites where Ernesto Che Guevara traveled stealth and gun in hand together with his guerrilleros 37 years ago in Bolivia, have now become places that would love to be filled with tourists who merely take pictures. The local people from this deserted region where a guerrilla was set up in 1967 are now working as guides for visitors to the first camp of Che Guevara, where his failed armed insurrection started, up to the schoolroom in the remote rural school were he was killed.

The tour starts on a recently asphalted road, though very soon an arrow on a meagerly painted sign stuck on a tree trunk points to the vegetation. In the middle, a “Ruta del Che” sign has been recently posted along a narrow dirt road. Someone has tried to erase part of the R to turn it into a P. That is the starting point in which the impoverished local people have put their illusions, hoping that enough people will be interested in following the 300-Km long route of Che Guevara and his guerrilla through the steep canyons of the hot Bolivian southeast.

In the town of Camiri, the cells of the 4th Army Division where French intellectual Regis Debray and Argentine painter Ciro Bustos, who used his art to provide the military with drawings to identify Che and his guerrilleros, were held, have been opened to the public. Debray got married in the casino of the military barracks for which he was given two hours. The casino is now used to display the pictures of the guerrilleros drawn by Bustos.

Far from there, in the village of Vallegrande, the mass grave where Che and six of his comrades were secretly buried was discovered 30 years after their death. This is one of the principal attractions of the Che Guevara Route. The small village called La Higuera, where Che was executed in the local school, is just as poor today as it was 37 years ago when the guerrilleros passed through. La Higuera is a village with around 30 houses where you are reminded of Che Guevara everywhere. For years, one of the locals has been collecting the strangest objects such as the chair on which Che sat for the last time, plates from which he ate and cups from which he drank, and the radio receiver he used to listen to the news. In the entire region, the myth surrounding Che Guevara is of such magnitude that the local population even prays to the guerrillero’s soul in the hope that he will perform some sort of miracle.

The children in La Higuera can attend school only up to the ninth grade. Ana María Ramírez, who is 15 and who has not been to school for one year now stands under the big bust of Che Guevara on the central square where she prays for “a miracle so I can go to school in the city" (Luis Crespo, Bolivia).