In writing about Pedro Valdivia, the conquistador of Chile, Guevara reflected: “He belonged to that special class of men the species produces every so often, in whom a craving for limitless power is so extreme that any suffering to achieve it seems natural.” He might have been describing himself. At every stage of his adult life, his megalomania manifested itself in the predatory urge to take over other people's lives and property, and to abolish their free will.

He ordered his men to rob banks, a decision that he justified in a letter to Enrique Oltuski, a subordinate, in November of 1958: “The struggling masses agree to robbing banks because none of them has a penny in them.” This idea of revolution as a license to re-allocate property as he saw fit led the Marxist Puritan to take over the mansion of an emigrant after the triumph of the revolution. The urge to dispossess others of their property and to claim ownership of others' territory was central to Guevara's politics of raw power. [4]

[4] Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The killing machine, The New Republic, 11/7/2005