In Buenos Aires

A diary, a map, a bicycle.

I realised with some enjoyment that my table was a summary of the upcoming project I've been meaning to write about for a while. A road map of Argentina and Chile, a copy of Che Guevara's 1952 The Motorcycle Diaries, and a multitool for the bicycle just out of frame. I leave it to you to guess what's coming up.

Less visible is a booklet from an art exhibition at the Embassy of Palestine in Buenos Aires, which is on top of a leaflet from the house of El Dios, Diego Maradona, whose working definition for foreign policy is still today not a bad starting point in how to read the world: “I hate everything that comes from the United States. I hate it with all of my strength.” Maradona had Guevara's portrait tattooed on his upper arm, when he had it done he said he felt it was time the two greatest Argentines were united in the same body.

There is much to say and naturally a book to be written, out next year. I will not be exhaustive in my outline here but shall write from the road and keep you abreast of my journey in the wheeltracks of Guevara and his friend and companion, Alberto Granado. Much has changed since 1952, ranging from a successful revolution in Cuba to a successful and vicious US coup in Chile against the democratic government of Salvador Allende, which fell on September 11 1973 and spelled a pivotal decline in Latin American democracy, just as the US coup against Mossadegh in Iran ruptured in 1953 the democracy of the region my work and writing is better-known for. But imperialism is connected and to be successful against it, so must be resistance. Colombian paramilitaries trained with the Israelis in their brutal 1980s occupation of Lebanon and the lessons — crucial if flawed among them the suppression of resistance by use of atrocities against civilians —were imported back to Latin America. As I write, Guevara's hometown of Rosario sees a brief stint of martial law to combat drug trafficking, with the CIA invited by a newly elected far-right Argentine president, Javier Milei, to keep order; an ominous sign that history warns Latin Americans to be vigilant against. As if to confirm the concerns, Milei has also lifted protections against foreigners buying Argentine land, and US ranchers will be pleased at the prospects of this unfettered access to one of the world's most profitable regions for the rearing of cattle.

Future history, however, is not yet written. Nor is it impervious to being changed by those who pass only the simple test of believing it is within their grasp to do so. In Brazil the reelected socialist Lula da Silva has railed on behalf of the world's global majority against the current genocide carried out by the Israelis in Palestine. At home in Brazil, the rate of Amazon deforestation has slowed markedly since his return, which has also meant a return for the culture of protecting indigenous rights in the Amazon. Across the Andes in Chile, a young and progressive President, Gabriel Boric, is outlining the nationalisation of the lithium reserves so essential to the green industry and batteries that underpin global focus on decarbonisation. The hope and intention is that 21st century Chile will not be plundered for its lithium as it was its copper in previous centuries, including at mines that Guevara's route encountered, and which remain among the world's largest.

Collectively, these ideas are now in Latin America being summarised by the term “Pink Tide"; not the full red of communism, but a mixed, socialist economy where capitalism and resources are put to work for people and not vice versa. Whatever the election of Milei by Argentines desperate for any change at all, a central tenet of what I mean to do in this ride is to meet people and have conversations that allow me to separate hope from reality in whether a change really is coming from and in Latin America. Aside from the fact that it will deviate and return to Guevara's, my route is undefined, but will cover most of 10,000 miles of roads, landscapes and people that — as always and everywhere else — I am hoping the bicycle will assist me in understanding a little better.

None of this is for me separable from the fact that the US-backed Israelis are currently carrying out a genocide in Palestine, a place where I have obviously cycled previously, and where I have friends and colleagues still at threat from the the disgusting and depraved Israeli violence. I had desperately hoped for a ceasefire by now and before setting out, but alas Israeli bloodlust is greater than even I had reckoned for. Their concern for both Palestinian life and the wellbeing of Israeli hostages in Gaza has also proven more insincere.

The psychological impact of these events, particularly in Gaza, will no doubt form a greater philosophical anchor in my writing than otherwise would have been so. I was reading The Motorcycle Diaries in Beirut as the Israeli onslaught was in its first month, and the sense of a world order, and certainly western legitimacy, was already collapsing.

Back then, formative to this project, I was struck by these words of Guevara's—of a system crumbling— taken from a speech he made to doctors in Havana that is featured in the appendix of my copy of the book. In these sentiments are, in my view, the twin nature of the extreme situation at hand today: not only the collapsing of an old and corrupted system, but also the faith and duty that we can and must build a new one, not least of all because such such a thing will look after us all better anyway.

I leave this first update here, return to my map and soon the packing of my panniers. I close also with a photo from Kaş on the beautiful south coast of Türkiye, taken last year with a friend who'd accidentally bought cigars rather than tobacco, but we felt we needed to make use of them all the same. It was perhaps an unwitting training for this project, one that has always been in the back of my mind but was yet to cohere. I am obviously at sub-Guevara levels of both cigar etiquette and in terms of not having a successful revolution to my name, but I have added a negroni to his formula, even if there is probably an inverse correlation between negronis and the number of successful revolutions one is able to put their name to.

With thanks as always for the support, and curious to find out what the coming months and kilometres will bring, I'm glad to have you along for the ride.