ABSTRACT
In June 1952, toward the end of his rambling journey through South America, Ernesto Che Guevara arrived at the leper colony in San Pablo, Peru. He and his traveling companion, Alberto Granado, were greeted warmly by the staff, who threw Guevara an alcohol-soaked party during his stay there. As he recounts in The Motorcycle Diaries , “the director of the colony toasted us and, inspired by the booze, I replied with a quintessentially Pan American speech, winning great applause from the notable, and notably drunk, audience” (Che Guevara 154). The idea of Pan Americanism has a long and complicated history, and, despite Guevara’s intoxicated irony, in 1952 the concept still had a good deal of currency in the Americas. This was the idea of a hemispheric community of nations whose geographic proximity and supposedly shared values provided the foundation for a narrative of mutually beneficial cooperation among all peoples of the Americas. However, what these shared values were was a matter of debate. U.S.–based institutions had, for decades, articulated one version of Pan-American values rooted in notions of economic development – values which the older Che Guevara would spend most of his life opposing.
