Richard Gott

On the way into Guatemala City from the airport on my first visit years ago, I was informed by the taxi-driver – who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that another imperial satrap had received his just deserts. The taxi-driver, however, thought it was bad news. There was an evening curfew and a 24-hour block on all journalistic reports leaving the country; it was not easy to discover quite what had taken place or to telex the story to the outside world.

Although I had lived for some of the previous decade in Santiago, I was not in Chile on 11 September 1973, the day 25 years ago when the government of Salvador Allende was overthrown. I was sitting in the Guardian’s old building in the Grays Inn Road when the news came in over the wires, but could not immediately fly to Chile, having a longstanding engagement to drive my family from Sussex to Yorkshire to establish them in a new home. The foreign editor threatened to send the Washington correspondent instead, so I promised I’d be on the first plane into Santiago. The Chilean military had closed the country to the outside world, and I knew that it would be some days before it opened up. They did not want too many foreign witnesses.

I met Che Guevara in November 1963 at a reception in the gardens of the Soviet Embassy in Havana, one of those diplomatic occasions held every year to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution. He strode in after midnight, accompanied by a coterie of friends, bodyguards and hangers-on, wearing his trademark black beret, his shirt open to the waist. He was unbelievably beautiful. People stopped whatever they were doing and stared at the Revolution made flesh. ‘He had an incalculable enchantment that came completely naturally,’ Julia Costenla, an Argentine journalist told Jon Lee Anderson when he was researching his biography of Guevara. ‘If he entered a room, everything began revolving around him.’