Guevara

Eliciting gasps of relief from Latino activists, a former police officer was sentenced to six months in jail yesterday for stealing money from a Spanish-speaking immigrant.Dorian J. Martin, who was found guilty of misdemeanor theft and misconduct in office last month, slumped as Circuit Judge Clifton J. Gordy rejected his plea for leniency and announced the sentence. A sheriff's officer immediately handcuffed Martin."All of Baltimore's citizens, visitors and guests should be free from criminal predators, and `predator' is the correct word here," Gordy said.

Che Part One and Che Part Two are being presented together these days as a four-and-a-quarter-hour presentation about the rise and fall of the godfather of exportable revolution in the mid-20th century. The title and length suggest a biographical epic, but it's neither biographical nor epic. It's as if the director, Steven Soderbergh, wanted to take tissue samples of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's political life. Part One focuses on the Argentinian doctor joining Fidel Castro's Cuban revolutionary brigade in 1955 and rising to become Castro's right-hand man. Part Two centers on 1967, when he waged a futile and fatal attempt to stage a Marxist rebellion in Bolivia that would fan outward to all of Latin America.

Oct. 9 1967 Latin American guerrilla leader Che Guevara was executed while trying to incite revolution in Bolivia.

PAUL L. MONTGOMERY, 72 Civil right-era reporter Paul L. Montgomery, a former reporter for The New York Times who covered riots in Harlem, the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965 and the search for Che Guevara in Bolivia, died of cancer Thursday in Lausanne, Switzerland. Mr. Montgomery, who lived in Lausanne, started at The Times as a copy boy in 1959 and went on to an array of reporting assignments, from religion news to the New York Nets in the late 1970s. From 1966 to 1969, he was The Times' bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The Maryland Court of Appeals overturned yesterday the conviction of a former Baltimore police officer accused of stealing $300 from an immigrant and ordered that the officer be granted a new trial. Saying that "credibility [of the chief witness] was a central issue in the case," the court ruled that a trial judge erred when he did not allow Dorian J. Martin's defense lawyer to question the immigrant about whether he was planning to sue the city. "Action taken in contemplation of a civil lawsuit against a criminal defendant by a prosecuting witness is relevant to the witness's credibility and may be evidence that a witness has an interest in the outcome of the trial," wrote Judge Irma S. Raker in a unanimous 7-0 decision.

In the first day of a much-anticipated trial, an attorney for the former Baltimore police officer charged with robbing a Latino immigrant accused the alleged victim yesterday of taunting the officer with cash and lying about being unable to speak English.He also said that his client, Dorian J. Martin, "was being held up as a sacrificial lamb to the Hispanic community in Baltimore.""The state will tell you that this man doesn't speak English, but that's not true," said attorney Warren A. Brown.

A bail bondswoman has accused the county State's Attorney's Office of withholding information that could have prevented an attempted murder suspect's flight to his native Ecuador.Facing a trial on charges of shooting a man at a party last February in Shady Side, Raul Eduardo Guevara apparently chose to flee the country. When Guevara was a no-show for his scheduled trial yesterday, Circuit Judge Bruce C. Williams ruled the Shady Side man had forfeited his $25,000 bond.In a motion for a hearing on the bond forfeiture filed yesterday, bail bondswoman Theresa Moyer of the Amwest Surety Insurance Co. said the state's attorney's office was told Aug. 7 Guevara was about to flee.

ON THE morning of his humiliation, ex-cop Dorian Martin drooped his head and avoided all eye contact. A Circuit Court jury had pronounced him guilty of theft and misconduct, and Judge Clifton J. Gordy, handing out a six-month prison sentence, was calling him a disgrace to the badge he had worn. Now, nearly two years later, Martin lifts his head to hear another opinion. It comes from the Maryland Court of Appeals, whose members, living in some rarefied world utterly unconnected to bullies on street corners, have tossed out Martin's conviction.

An Ecuadorean citizen who jumped bond after being charged in a shooting in Annapolis two years ago is back in the Anne Arundel County Detention Center after spending 16 months in a Spanish jail.vTCAnd this time, Circuit Court Judge Raymond G. Thieme Jr., isn't taking any chances. He ordered Raul Eduardo Guevara, 46, of the 1100 block Oak Ave. in Shadyside, held without bond to await his trial for assault with intent to murder.Mr. Guevara is accused of shooting Thomas Dyer Hibble on Feb. 3, 1990.

A 46-year-old Ecuadorean, who spent more than a year in a Spanish prison after he was charged in a Shady Side shooting and then jumped bail, was sentenced to six years in prison yesterday.Raul Eduardo Guevara, who lived in the 1100 block Oak Ave. in Shady Side, pleaded guilty to assault with intent to murder in the shooting of Thomas Dyer Hibble on Feb. 3, 1990.Mr. Hibble was among a number of people who crashed a party at a house in the 1100 block of Bay View Ave. in Shadyside, according to court testimony.

Oct. 9 1967 Latin American guerrilla leader Che Guevara was executed while trying to incite revolution in Bolivia.

MIAMI -- In some circles, Ernesto "Che" Guevara may live, but in Target stores, he's history. Images of the Communist revolutionary figure - his ears donning an iPod-esque set of earphones and splashed on the latest CD cases - have been pulled from the shelves. "The stores don't have pictures of Osama bin Laden or Adolf Hitler," said Miguel Saavedra, founder of the anti-Castro group Vigilia Mambisa. "It's disrespectful to the Cuban community." Miami's Cuban exile community collectively gasped at the use of Fidel Castro's one-time right-hand man to sell music accessories, with community leaders saying Guevara was one of history's brutal mass murderers.

HOLLYWOOD -- Having played characters such as the Sundance Kid and Bob Woodward, Robert Redford knows what it's like to evoke real life on film. But nothing quite prepared him for the stomach-churning experience of screening The Motorcycle Diaries, the new film based on Che Guevara's youthful road trip across South America, for Guevara's widow, Aleida March, her family and Albert Granado, now 82, who was Guevara's companion on most of the trek. When Redford acquired the rights to Guevara's book about his journey of discovery long after the Cuban revolutionary's death, he promised Guevara's widow a first look at the finished movie.

Lovely, heartfelt and unforced, Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries is a portrait of a revolutionary as young man. The revolutionary is Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and Salles' film, based on journals kept by the young Ernesto during an 8,000-mile trek in the 1950s through South America, as well as an account written later by his traveling companion, doesn't lionize its subject. Instead, it explores what might turn a 23-year-old medical student into a man determined to overthrow what he viewed as repressive regimes everywhere.

Published in 1993, a quarter-century after its author's death, Ernesto "Che" Guevara's The Motorcycle Diaries achieved instant cult status with nascent revolutionaries thanks to its fervent call for a new Pan-Americanism. It also became required reading in many Latin American schools and quickly was optioned for screen treatment. And why not? The memoir reads like an exhilarating coming-of-age adventure and spiritual odyssey, not some dry political manifesto. Eleven years later, The Motorcycle Diaries finally is reaching the screen as a $6 million road picture starring Mexico's Gael Garcia Bernal as the 23-year-old medical student Ernesto.

Is it real history or only a docudrama, make-believe, TV moment? That's the question I kept asking myself during Fidel, an ambitious and spirited Showtime miniseries on the life of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. As entertainment, politics, mythmaking and culture, I was fascinated by this four-hour film. As history, though, it often felt like Swiss cheese, right down to the producers' disclaimer that they made up dialogue and characters for "dramatic purposes." Take the morning-after scene in government headquarters on Jan. 8, 1959, the day after Castro and his triumphant revolutionaries marched into Havana and took control of the country.

MAYBE FELIX Guevara became a citizen this week. He sat there Tuesday morning in Baltimore Circuit Court, and maybe the distance widened between the Salvadoran system of justice, which Guevara remembers with a shudder, and American justice, which finally arrived in its lumbering way.The American system sends Dorian Martin off with handcuffs and words of contempt. A year ago, Martin stopped Guevara on Gough Street in Southeast Baltimore. Martin wore the uniform of a city police officer; Guevara was clothed in his vulnerability.

In a decision described as a blow to Baltimore's Latino community, a jury cleared a former police officer of felony robbery charges yesterday for taking money from an immigrant -- but convicted the officer on lesser charges of misdemeanor theft and misconduct in office."

ON THE morning of his humiliation, ex-cop Dorian Martin drooped his head and avoided all eye contact. A Circuit Court jury had pronounced him guilty of theft and misconduct, and Judge Clifton J. Gordy, handing out a six-month prison sentence, was calling him a disgrace to the badge he had worn. Now, nearly two years later, Martin lifts his head to hear another opinion. It comes from the Maryland Court of Appeals, whose members, living in some rarefied world utterly unconnected to bullies on street corners, have tossed out Martin's conviction.

The Maryland Court of Appeals overturned yesterday the conviction of a former Baltimore police officer accused of stealing $300 from an immigrant and ordered that the officer be granted a new trial. Saying that "credibility [of the chief witness] was a central issue in the case," the court ruled that a trial judge erred when he did not allow Dorian J. Martin's defense lawyer to question the immigrant about whether he was planning to sue the city. "Action taken in contemplation of a civil lawsuit against a criminal defendant by a prosecuting witness is relevant to the witness's credibility and may be evidence that a witness has an interest in the outcome of the trial," wrote Judge Irma S. Raker in a unanimous 7-0 decision.