Tạm biệt em, tình yêu duy nhất của anh, Đừng run sợ trước bầy sói đói mồi Cũng như giữa những thảo nguyên cô quạnh; Anh luôn mang em theo trong tim m… - Ernesto Che Guevara

Valdivia's actions symbolize man's indefatigable thirst to take control of a place where he can exercise total authority. That phrase, attributed to Caesar, proclaiming he would rather be first-in-command in some humble Alpine village than second-in-command in Rome, is repeated less pompously, but no less effectively, in the epic campaign that is the conquest of Chile. If, in the moment the conquistador was facing death at the hands of tht invincible Araucanian Caupolican, he had not been overwhelmed with fury, like a hunted animal, I do not doubt that judging his life, Valdivia would have felt death was fully justified. 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, and he had become the omnipotent ruler of a warrior nation.

Dejeme decirie,
a risego de parecer ridiculo,
que el revolucionario verdadero
esta guiado por grandes sentimientos de amor.

Let me say,
at the risk of seeming ridiculous,
that the true revolutionary
is guided by great feelings of love.

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall].