Inspired by Che Guevara, Jean Ziegler has spent the past 60 years exposing how Switzerland enabled global wrongdoing. His enemies accuse him of treasonIn early 1964, Jean Ziegler, a young Swiss politician, received a phone call from a man claiming to represent Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary and minister of industry. Che would be in Geneva in March for a UN conference on trade policy, and some comrades had suggested Jean might be his chauffeur during his stay. Was Ziegler available for the gig?Today, in his tenth decade of life, Ziegler is Switzerland’s most notorious public intellectual. That’s because, over the course of writing about 30 books, serving for close to three decades in the Swiss parliament, and relentlessly crusading for leftwing causes in his free time, Ziegler has made a career of unsparing criticism of his home country and its outsize influence on the rest of the world. In the 1960s, though, he was just another eager young leftist, waiting for his ch...
Jean Ziegler, a Swiss politician and journalist, exposed Switzerland's role as a global hub for offshore wealth and corporate secrecy. In the 1960s, he supported revolutionary causes, including Che Guevara, and later criticized Swiss banks for facilitating tax evasion and money laundering. Ziegler documented how Switzerland became a haven for the wealthy, enabling corruption and human rights abuses. His work, including the book *The High Stakes of the Game*, highlighted Switzerland's paradoxical identity as a neutral nation deeply entangled in global financial power. Ziegler passed away in 2020.
