Who was Che Guevara’s avenger Monika Ertl? – Friday

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The title Surazo: Monika and Hans Ertl, a German story in Bolivia is, to put it mildly, quite an understatement, because in addition to the close father and daughter community and their later drifting apart, the author tells us about many other things being thrown together, which at times assume unbearable proportions.

Surazo, that’s what the cold tropical wind is called. Where is it blowing from? The author Karin Harrasser, born in 1974, is a historian from Austria, in parts the writing looks like a diary. But her more personal concerns go beyond engaging portrayals of childhood experiences in the Alps and episodes of the historian traveling in the Bolivian and Chilean Andes: “It’s about better understanding the contribution of women to the uprising around 1968, and also to shed light on what you can take with you from the past for today. That’s why I didn’t stick to the asceticism demanded by biographical theory, but tried to follow all possible traces, including the faint and the improbable.” We need to bring a certain amount of patience with us to read it, but it’s worth it.

Monika Ertl was shot dead on May 12, 1973 in La Paz in the course of a firefight on the open street. She is in her thirties and is fighting to revive the Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN, which has been drastically weakened since Che Guevara’s assassination. Behind these two executions is a man named Altmann, whom Monika affectionately called “Uncle Klaus” when he was a child and who was convicted on July 4, 1987 by a jury in France as the “Butcher of Lyon”. Barbie was a Gestapo from 1942 to 1944 -Boss of Lyon. He managed to escape to Bolivia via the “rat line”, where he later, “in his second career” with his Gestapo know-how and as an employee of the US secret service CIC and the federal intelligence service BND, comprehensively surrounded the Bolivian security apparatus under the dictator Banzer “Development aid” in torture and enforced disappearances, in raising money through the cocaine trade and arms trafficking, i.e. in the “fight against communism”.

However, a colonel in the Bolivian secret service, Roberto Quintanilla, gave the immediate order for Che’s assassination. Later, as Consul General in Hamburg, he thought he was out of the line of fire, where the ELN tracked him down. It is believed that it was Monika Ertl who shot him in the consulate in 1971. The philosopher Regis Debray wrote a romantically exaggerated novel in 1979, A life for a lifeto pay tribute to Monika and this revolutionary episode.

Expedition to Inca Ruins

The author is on the hunt. I was impressed by her sincerity and incorruptibility, which is hard to find on this subject in Germany: “It was only with Monika Ertl that I was able to catch a glimpse of the reality of revolutionary events. Nevertheless, I can only imagine to a limited extent what it was like to live in a time when one could have the impression that the revolution was really just around the corner, and in different places at the same time.” At times the author admits her perplexity how to deal with these often shocking finds.

“Right or wrong. It’s my country” – so Hans Ertl, Monika’s father, once asked about his Nazi past. He was Leni Riefenstahl’s cameraman and Erich Rommel’s personal photographer during his North Africa campaign. Ertl was a gifted mountaineer, expedition leader, embedded in the Nazi cultural chic. When he was denied the federal film prize because of his Nazi past, he began to have doubts about democracy and emigrated to Bolivia in 1960. The bloody dictatorship there appeals to him more. There he undertakes expeditions to Inca areas and shoots adventure films, mostly accompanied by his daughter Monika. As all the material for his next film entitled Surazo gets lost, he retires to a remote area to set up cattle breeding there, “La Dolorita – in German: Freistaat Bayern”. His neighbor was Hugo Banzer, the bloody Bolivian dictator, like Pinochet and many others graduate of the US Counterinsurgency Academy for Coups and Torture in Panama, the Escuela de las Americas. Here it was taught not only to slaughter guerrillas, but also intellectuals, publicists, leftists. Banzer and Ertl shared an authoritarian male friendship. Unwavering loyalty, it never occurred to Ertl to ask Banzer about the grave of his beloved daughter Monika.

When daughter and father drift apart, it doesn’t seem to be the classic conflict between the young ’68ers and the generation of fathers who were guilty of fascism. The author deals with this question cautiously and prudently. How could it be that a young woman who follows her Nazi father on his expeditions to Inca ruins and film projects in the Bolivian jungle, who moves as a tennis and golf-playing engineer’s wife in the elite of Bolivia, who despises and exploits the indigenous people, quickly transformed into the revolutionary guerrilla Imilla, who wants to get the ELN going again after the execution of Che and his successor Inti Peredo?

Her experiences in northern Chile, where her husband worked in the copper mines, seem to have been a decisive factor in Monika’s radicalization. There she witnessed not only the incredible misery of the miners and their families, but also the rise of the powerful copper miners’ union. It was the time and place of Salvador Allende’s rise to power, who, after his election in 1970, once again pushed ahead with the nationalization of the copper industry as an important signal.

Another sharp contrast results from the immigration policies of the Bolivian governments. Bolivia needed workers to settle vast tracts of wasteland. The indigenous population was out of the question because they were “inferior”. Therefore, the “lesser evil” was taken, Jews who wanted to emigrate from Nazi Germany. It is said to have been an estimated 7,000 to 8,000, later fleeing Nazi war criminals were welcomed. In La Paz and other cities, the Jews must have repeatedly encountered their tormentors and torturers on the streets and in shops.

Disturbing discoveries

Even in the idyllic Kufstein, familiar place of happy childhood days, she encounters disturbing things. A central figure in the networks of the old and new Nazis, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the Wehrmacht’s most decorated dive fighter, lived and operated five hundred meters from her house. He supplied arms to the Paraguayan dictator Stroessner; he is said to have helped set up Pinochet’s notorious secret service DINA and was in contact with the German sect Colonia Dignidad, which he probably used as a transhipment point for arms deliveries and where Pinochet operated a torture facility. The author writes: “How could I approach the brutal work that the former SS men and Gestapo henchmen did in the machine rooms and torture chambers of the right-wing dictators? What does it mean for contemporary historiography that the long-term consequences of Nazi knowledge and Nazi techniques shaped an entire continent for half a century? That the Gestapo’s knowledge of torture, pampered in the anti-communist struggle in the USA, was further perfected in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay up to the 1980s?” What impressed me when reading the book is an author who tells this powerful and violent story tells – and a lot about himself, starting with the missionary activities of the Jesuits in the 17th century and ending for the time being with an Evo Morales, who flies to Germany in the presidential plane in 2009 to collect cult objects of the Incas, the Hans Ertl stolen, solemnly bringing them back to where they belong.

Lutz Taufer was involved in the RAF hostage-taking in Stockholm, was imprisoned for 20 years and then worked for the Weltfriedensdienst in Brazilian favelas for many years

Surazo: Monika and Hans Ertl: A German history in Bolivia Karin Harrasser Matthes & Seitz 2022, 270 S., 26 €

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