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Thursday, October 13, 1977, began as just another routine trip for the crew of Lufthansa Flight 181, as the Boeing 737 departed the island of Palma de Mallorca bound for Frankfurt Germany. Onboard, 86 passengers and five crew members went about their business, while the coast of mainland Europe slipped away below them. Little did they know that it would take an ordeal to eventually reach their destination. Some 30 minutes into the flight, two men and two women rose from their seats brandishing pistols and hand grenades, while shouting commands to the passengers. They called themselves “Commando Martyr Halima” – in honour of fellow militant Brigitte Kuhlmann, who had been killed in Operation Entebbe the previous year. The leader of the hijacker group was Palestinian terrorist Zohair Youssif Akache (23, male), who adopted the alias “Captain Martyr Mahmud”. The other three were Suhaila Sayeh (24, female), a Palestinian, and two Lebanese people, Wabil Harb (23, male) and Hind Alameh (22, female). The Los Angeles Times, on Friday October 14, 1977, reported that they were wearing Che Guevera T-shirts

Ernesto “Che” Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution.

Ernesto Guevara was born to Ernesto Guevara Lynch and Celia de la Serna y Llosa, on 14 June 1928, in Rosario, Argentina. He was the eldest of five children in an upper-class Argentine family of pre-independence Spanish and Irish ancestry. Two of Guevara’s notable 18th century ancestors included Luis María Peralta, prominent Spanish landowner in colonial California and Patrick Lynch, an emigrant from Ireland and significant landowner in the Rio de la Plata Governorate.

From the beginning, Ernesto was raised as a Marxist revolutionary. His father was a staunch supporter of the Republicans/Communists from the 1936 Spanish Civil War, and often hosted many veterans from this conflict in the Guevara home. His parents’ home library contained more than 3,000 left leaning books, including the writings of Karl Marx (the author of the Communist Manifesto) and Vladimir Lenin (the father of Russian revolution of 1917) which he enthusiastically read.

He enjoyed the lavish lifestyle that came with his family’s high middle-class status. Ernesto was active in sports like swimming, football, golf, rugby, and shooting, while also becoming an “untiring” cyclist. In 1948, Ernesto entered the University of Buenos Aires to study medicine. Two years into his studies he took a 4,500-kilometer (2,800 mi) solo trip through the rural provinces of northern Argentina on a bicycle on which he had installed a small engine. This was followed by a nine-month, 8,000-kilometer (5,000 mi) continental motorcycle trek through part of South America. In 1952 he took a year off from his studies to spend a few weeks volunteering at the San Pablo leper colony in Peru, and the rest of the time journeying through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Miami, Florida, before returning home to Buenos Aires. At the end of the trip, he came to view Latin America not as a collection of separate nations, but as a single entity requiring a continent-wide liberation strategy, envisioning himself as its leader. On 7 July 1953, Guevara set out again, this time to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador Guatemala.

Guevara arrived in Guatemala where President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, through land expropriation and redistribution, was attempting to end the latifundia (a large estate / ranch) system. Pleased with the road the nation was heading down, Guevara decided to settle down in Guatemala to “perfect himself and accomplish whatever may be necessary in order to become a true revolutionary.”

In Guatemala City, he sought out Hilda Gadea Acosta, a politically well-connected member of the Marxist organization APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance). She introduced Guevara to a number of high-level officials in the Árbenz government. Then he established contact with a group of Cuban exiles linked to Fidel Castro and became part of Fidel Castro’s efforts to overthrow the Batista government in Cuba. He served as a military advisor to Castro and led guerrilla troops in battles against Batista forces.

When Castro took power in 1959, Guevara’s first assignment was to oversee executions at an infamous La Cabaña prison. As a “man of the people and for the people” he moved into the biggest, most luxurious mansion in Havana. Between 1959 and 1963, approximately 500 men were killed under his watch. He took a personal interest in the interrogation, torture, and execution of political prisoners. Ciro Roberto Bustos, Guevara’s fellow Communist revolutionary, described him as a ‘synthesis of pathological sadism and fundamentalist extremism.

Lacking any managerial training and skills, he was named head of Cuba’s central bank. Later, he became Minister of Industries, as such he called for the diversification of the Cuban economy, and elimination of any material incentives. By 1963 he had brought the economy to its lowest point since Castro came to power, at the same time Cuban dependence on the USSR for military equipment and economic aid was growing. The Soviet Union was intentionally overpaying for Cuban sugar, in 1969 Cuban sugar cost three times the price of any other.

In return Fidel Castro declared his readiness to support revolutionaries “in any corner of the world.” Guevara was the most visible advocate of this commitment. In 1965 he was deep in the African Congo leading a contingent of approximately 100 Afro-Cubans. His reputation outside of Cuba, among leftist intellectuals and the radical youth that called itself “the new left,” grew by leaps and bounds. At the order of Fidel Castro, on November 3,1966, after six months training in the mountains of Cuba, the legendary rebel Che Guevara entered Bolivia to ignite a continental revolution.

Guevara’s guerrilla force, numbering about 120 well equipped men, members of “National Liberation Army of Bolivia” entered Bolivia. However, Bolivia’s Communist Party reneged on the commitment to help him, and Fidel Castro cut off all supplies. Lacking outside support, Guevara was captured and executed on 9 October 1967.

In the 1930s, Joseph Stalin during the “Great Purge” eliminated high officers of the Red Army as well as almost all the activists of the Leninist party. From June 30 to July 2, 1934. Chancellor Adolf Hitler ordered a series of political extrajudicial executions called the “Night of the Long Knives.” In 1967 Fidel Castro got rid of Che Guevara. All of them to consolidate their power. Because the compassion for poor and needy is not a goal but a means to power, power at any costs. To manipulate poor ignorant young people to do things that they would never normally do, power hungry charlatans need legends like Che Guevara. The four young people who hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181 on October 13, 1977, are one of many victims of this propaganda.