Colin Harding
Richard Gott, who died on 2 November 2025, aged 87, was an influential pioneer of British press coverage of Latin America at a time when there was little public interest in that vast and fascinating region.
Latin America would have a profound impact on all aspects of Richard Gott’s life. He first made his mark in 1967, when he found himself called upon to identify the corpse of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara after the latter’s execution by Bolivian government forces acting in collaboration with the CIA. When Che’s body was brought to Vallegrande, a remote market town in the Bolivian lowlands, strapped to the runner of a military helicopter, Gott was in the area as the Guardian correspondent covering Che’s ill-fated attempt to stir the local peasantry to insurrection. Having previously interviewed Che for a newspaper article, he was the only person on hand qualified to judge whether the cadaver was indeed that of the famed Argentine revolutionary.
Gott had first travelled to Latin America in 1966, when he was invited by Claudio Véliz, a Chilean historian and social scientist whom he had met at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, to help him to set up the Instituto de Estudios Internacionales at the University of Chile in Santiago – an initiative partly funded by the British Council. His qualifications for such a task included his time as a leader writer on European affairs at the Guardian.
Gott was an accomplished historian as well as a journalist. He had a degree in History from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in 1963 he had co-authored, with Churchill’s future biographer Martin Gilbert, The Appeasers, a well-received book on Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler and thereby avoid going to war with Germany. In his later years he was an associate fellow of London University’s Institute for the Study of the Americas.
While in Chile Gott’s imagination was fired by the guerrilla wars that were sweeping across Latin America, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, of which Che Guevara had been a leading light. In 1970 he wrote a book on the subject, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America, after which his publisher, Penguin, commissioned him to edit a series on the region, the Pelican Latin American Library. The most influential (at the time) of these now largely forgotten volumes was probably André Gunder Frank’s Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, on which I remember organising a seminar at Cambridge’s Centre of Latin American Studies in 1972. The series was eventually abandoned by Penguin after complaints of left-wing bias.
I first met Richard Gott in 1974, when he was back in England and dividing his time between the Guardian and Latin American Newsletters, a small specialist publishing company based in poky offices in New Bridge Street, London. He was not everybody’s idea of a left-wing firebrand: his patrician manner, cultivated speech and air of self-confidence with which he expounded his sometimes outlandish ideas spoke of his public-school (Winchester) and Oxbridge education. But he had an engaging personality, and was able to get on even with people who disagreed profoundly with his world view. He knew everyone: on one occasion I returned to the Newsletters’ offices after lunch to find him chatting with Gabriel García Márquez like two old friends. He finally left the Newsletters in 1978 to take up a post as Features Editor of the Guardian.
Gott’s radical opinions were sincerely held throughout his life, but he sometimes gave the impression that he regarded political ideas as amusing intellectual exercises rather than matters of life and death – what his friend John Gittings described as a “sometimes disconcerting eclecticism of attitude and belief”. At one point Gott suggested that the bloodthirsty Khmer Rouge tyrant Pol Pot had been carrying out an ‘interesting social experiment’ by trying to wipe out Cambodia’s entire intelligentsia, and raised the possibility that Western critics might have misjudged the man.
He further demonstrated his sometimes contrarian outlook when he initially defended the 1976 military coup in Argentina that overthrew the chaotic civilian government of María Estela (Isabelita) Martínez de Perón. He quickly changed his mind when General Jorge Videla and his fellow commanders began kidnapping and murdering anybody suspected of left-wing opinions.
In 1994 Richard Gott was denounced in the Spectator magazine for accepting hospitality and payments from the KGB, who had allegedly tried to turn him, not entirely successfully, into an ‘agent of influence’. He accepted that he had been guilty of “culpable stupidity”, but explained his actions by saying he thought the whole thing was just “an enjoyable joke” and MI6 knew all about it. Even the Daily Telegraph conceded that his Marxism was “freewheeling and anarchic”, rather than following any line laid down by Moscow. This episode inevitably put an end to his career at the Guardian, but he was far from finished.
In later life Gott was the author of several more books on Latin America, notably a new history of Cuba (2005), offering a left-wing perspective to counter the conservative views of the author of the standard English-language work on the subject, Hugh Thomas. But perhaps his most appealing book was the earlier Land Without Evil (1993), a part-history, part-travelogue on what he called the South American watershed (between the River Plate and Amazon basins), the vast, wild area between Bolivia, Paraguay and southern Brazil where the Jesuits had their missions until their expulsion in 1767.
Land Without Evil set out Gott’s evolving views on what he saw as the original sin that afflicted Latin America: the destruction of indigenous societies and cultures by Spanish and Portuguese colonialists from their first arrival in the early sixteenth century. The Jesuits had attempted to protect the Guaraní people, as depicted idealistically in the 1986 movie The Mission, starring Jeremy Irons, but were ultimately defeated by the ruthless Spanish state.
Gott also wrote two laudatory books on Hugo Chávez, the army officer who was elected President of Venezuela in 1999 and dominated the country’s public life until his death in 2013. Chávez embodied Gott’s enduring hope that a providential saviour, often a military man, would liberate Latin American countries from the grip of imperialism – as he had briefly believed the Argentine military might do in 1976.
His negative opinion of Western imperialism was further elaborated in his 2012 history of the British Empire, which enraged more orthodox historians with its view that the empire had no redeeming features and brought nothing but suffering to the subject peoples.
Gott’s personal life was also shaped by his passionate involvement with Latin America. He adopted two children with his first wife, the economist Ann Zammit: Inti from Bolivia and Araucana from Chile. At the time he was preparing his book on the guerrilla wars he remarked that Ann would have preferred him to join the struggle rather than just write about it.
Bulletin of Advanced Spanish 