Celia Guevara de la Serna never asked for the spotlight. Born in 1929 in Argentina, one year after her brother Ernesto, later known to the world as Che, she grew up in a highly political environment. But while history turned her brother into an icon, Celia carved out a different path for herself.
Her political awakening was personal. In 1962, her mother was arrested without charges, punished simply for being Che Guevara’s mother. More than a decade later, in 1975, it was her younger brother Juan Martín who disappeared into the machinery of repression during the military crackdown. Celia visited him constantly in prison, carrying food, clothes, and medicine as his health collapsed. Every trip meant new threats — anonymous phone calls, paramilitary warnings, intimidation from guards. She went anyway.
The breaking point came in 1976: while she was abroad visiting her father, her home was ransacked, with everything destroyed. She left the country shortly thereafter.
Exile pushed her first to Cuba, then to Spain. From 1980 to 1983, she studied at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies (IUED) in Geneva, where she earned the Certificate in Development Studies on August 26, 1981.
Armed with this expertise, she returned to academic life with conviction. As an architect and senior researcher at the Mario J. Buschiazzo Institute of the University of Buenos Aires, she specialized in urban development in emerging countries — a field she helped shape. Her work on the Northern Corridor of Greater Buenos Aires became a reference point, and colleagues described her as brilliant, grounded, and fiercely principled.
Even as she built her academic career, she never stopped fighting for those who had no voice: the prisoners, the disappeared, the families demanding answers.
Celia Guevara passed away in Buenos Aires in 2023, at 93. The tributes that followed from academics, activists, and institutions across Latin America remembered her as a woman who lived by her convictions with quiet force.
She leaves behind a legacy of daily courage and of a life anchored in dignity and justice.
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