What if Che Guevara’s trip across South America in ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ happened today?

Seventy four years later the environment is entirely different, thanks to climate change

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From the 2004 Walter Salles’ film, “The Motorcycle Diaries.” (Focus Features.)

(Michael Molinski is a senior economist at Trendline Economics. He’s worked for Fidelity, Charles Schwab and Wells Fargo, and previously as a foreign correspondent and editor for Bloomberg News and MarketWatch.)

ATACAMA DESERT, Chile (Callaway Climate Insights) — It’s been 74 years since Che Guevara and his buddy Alberto Granado embarked on their trip across South America, which Guevara later turned into a memoir called “The Motorcycle Diaries,” That, in turn, became a 2004 feature film by the same name.

But if they were to make the same trip today, they would likely encounter a completely different South America: industrialized and modern, yet changed environmentally, politically and culturally.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary who played a prominent role in the Cuban Revolution. He was executed in 1967 by the Bolivian army on orders by the CIA. Long before that, though, he was a young medical student whose journey in The Motorcycle Diaries started in Buenos Aires, when Juan Perón was president.

In many ways, that trip formulated the anti-capitalist sentiment that Guevara saw when he witnessed the poverty, hunger and disease throughout South America, especially when it came to the indigenous people.

These days, South American politics seem to be shifting toward the right.