Lost Pics of Che Guevara's Body Turn Up

8 B&W photos show the Cuban revolutionary's body shortly after 1967 execution
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 17, 2014 12:58 PM CST
Lost Pics of Che Guevara's Body Turn Up
In this Dec. 13, 1964, file photo, Cuba's Ernesto "Che" Guevara makes an appearance on "Face the Nation" at CBS-TV studios in New York.   (AP Photo, File)

Marc Hutten was the AFP photographer who took pictures of Ernesto "Che" Guevara shortly after he was executed by the Bolivian army on Oct. 9, 1967. The world has already seen Hutten's rare color photos of the Cuban revolutionary's body—and now we'll get to see even rarer black-and-white ones that were lost for nearly 50 years. Eight images have turned up in the Spanish town of Ricla: Imanol Arteaga says he found the photos after his uncle, Luis Cuartero, died in 2012, reports AFP. The photos show Che with an open-eyed stare, sprawled on a stretcher with his shirt exposing a dirt- and blood-speckled chest. Arteaga and his aunt found the photos when they were going through his uncle's things after he died; Cuartero had been a missionary in Bolivia in the '60s and reportedly smuggled the photos out at the request of a French journalist (so say Arteaga's mother and aunt).

At least one of the new photos appears to have been taken at a different time than the color ones that were splashed across the world after Guevara's death: This one shows Guevara with "matted hair and a jacket crudely buttoned around his chest," AFP notes. There's also said to be a picture in the new batch of the body of Tamara Bunke, a female guerrilla who fought alongside Guevara. Arteaga is quite sure it was photographer Hutten who passed on the photos to his uncle, as Cuartero "was the only European leaving Bolivia at that moment." Hutten also died in 2012, but Arteaga had the B&W photos analyzed by an expert, who determined they were printed on a paper not made for decades. "What matters to me is that these photos were my uncle's—they have sentimental value," Arteaga says. "But now I realize they have historical value, too." (Che's battle diaries came out a few years ago.)

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