During the 1950's, Ernesto Che Guevara, a medical student, and his friend Alberto Granado, a biochemist student, took a motorcycle trip through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Columbia and Venezuela. Ernesto's adventures throughout South America led to his observations of different socio-economic classes throughout different South American countries revealing misery, oppression, and injustice affecting the lower class people; caused by the upper class. Ernesto's profession as a doctor also led him to observe the lack of resources in the South American continent due to imperialist countries taking everything. These two experiences led to Ernesto's formation as a revolutionary later on his life as his political and anti-imperialist analysis shows throughout his journal the Motorcycle Diaries.
Away from Argentina, Ernesto's home country where he lived in upper middle-class luxury; in Chile Ernesto begins to realize the problems that affect the lower class. In Chile, when Ernesto is asked to visits a poor women with asthma and a heart condition, he is horrified by the lack of medical resources provided for the poor, leading him to blame Chilean government as he says in his diary:
How long this present order, based on an absurd idea of a caste, will last is not within my means to answer, but it's time that those who govern spent less time publicizing their own virtues and more money, much more money, funding socially useful works(68-69).
Ernesto at Grafton Cheese Company
Map of the first voyage of Ernesto Guevara and Alb...
English: Ernesto Guevara (right) with Alberto Gran...Here Ernesto says that the government needs to step up and start thinking about the people instead of themselves; providing more money to help the poor people who need medical attention. For the first time in the novel Ernesto realizes that even though the government can give more money to the poor, the government is not making an effort to do so because they are busy. The incidence with the old women...