Nbadan
12-23-2007, 09:11 PM
Oh what a tangled web we weave...
http://www2.uol.com.br/historiaviva/reportagens/img/klausbarbie.jpg
He broke my teeth, he pulled my hair back.
He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until the lips split from the pressure."
Barbie 'boasted of hunting down Che'
The CIA made use of a Nazi war criminal's anti-guerrilla skills
David Smith
Sunday December 23, 2007
The Observer
Oscar-winning British director Kevin Macdonald has raised the intriguing possibility that Che Guevara's capture by the CIA in the forests of Bolivia 40 years ago was orchestrated by Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal called the 'Butcher of Lyon'. Guevara was the Marxist guerrilla who helped Fidel Castro seize power in Cuba. Barbie was the Gestapo chief in Lyon whose crimes included the murder of 44 Jewish children, taken from an orphanage and sent to Auschwitz. Improbably, the men's paths crossed in Bolivia. My Enemy's Enemy, a documentary directed by Macdonald, whose previous films include Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland, examines how Barbie's record was disregarded when he was recruited by US intelligence after the Second World War as a useful tool against communism. He evaded French justice by fleeing to Bolivia where, living under the alias Klaus Altmann, he was welcomed by fascist sympathisers. Meanwhile, in 1966 a disguised Guevara arrived in Bolivia to organise the overthrow of its military dictatorship.
The Americans had been hunting Guevara and, according to the film, turned to Barbie for his first-hand knowledge of counter-guerrilla warfare: he had attempted to crush the French Resistance and was responsible for the death of its celebrated leader, Jean Moulin. Alvaro de Castro, a longtime confidant of Barbie interviewed for the film, says: 'He met Major Shelton, the commander of the unit from the US. Altmann no doubt gave him advice on how to fight this guerrilla war. He used the expertise gained doing this kind of work in World War Two. They made the most of the fact that he had this experience.'
(snip)
Kai Hermann, a journalist, tells the film-makers: 'He always boasted - though I cannot prove it - that it was he who devised the strategy for murdering Che Guevara.'
The evidence appears inconclusive, but Macdonald, who won an Academy Award for One Day in September, about the killing of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian group Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics, told The Observer: 'The Che claim came from several sources. I think it makes total sense when you understand what Barbie was doing and who he was working for in the Bolivian military, and how they admired him as a Nazi officer and what he had done in the war. Jean Moulin was an infamous episode, and he would trade on it and use that as part of his calling card.'
Observer (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2231851,00.html)
Che Guevara
Though communism may have lost its fire, he remains the potent symbol of rebellion and the alluring zeal of revolution
By ARIEL DORFMAN
Monday, June 14, 1999
By the time Ernesto Guevara, known to us as Che, was murdered in the jungles of Bolivia in October 1967, he was already a legend to my generation, not only in Latin America but also around the world.
Like so many epics, the story of the obscure Argentine doctor who abandoned his profession and his native land to pursue the emancipation of the poor of the earth began with a voyage. In 1956, along with Fidel Castro and a handful of others, he had crossed the Caribbean in the rickety yacht Granma on the mad mission of invading Cuba and overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Landing in a hostile swamp, losing most of their contingent, the survivors fought their way to the Sierra Maestra. A bit over two years later, after a guerrilla campaign in which Guevara displayed such outrageous bravery and skill that he was named comandante, the insurgents entered Havana and launched what was to become the first and only victorious socialist revolution in the Americas. The images were thereafter invariably gigantic. Che the titan standing up to the Yanquis, the world's dominant power. Che the moral guru proclaiming that a New Man, no ego and all ferocious love for the other, had to be forcibly created out of the ruins of the old one. Che the romantic mysteriously leaving the revolution to continue, sick though he might be with asthma, the struggle against oppression and tyranny.
His execution in Vallegrande at the age of 39 only enhanced Guevara's mythical stature. That Christ-like figure laid out on a bed of death with his uncanny eyes almost about to open; those fearless last words ("Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man") that somebody invented or reported; the anonymous burial and the hacked-off hands, as if his killers feared him more after he was dead than when he had been alive: all of it is scalded into the mind and memory of those defiant times. He would resurrect, young people shouted in the late '60s; I can remember fervently proclaiming it in the streets of Santiago, Chile, while similar vows exploded across Latin America. !No lo vamos a olvidar! We won't let him be forgotten.
NY Times (http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/guevara01.html)
http://www2.uol.com.br/historiaviva/reportagens/img/klausbarbie.jpg
He broke my teeth, he pulled my hair back.
He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until the lips split from the pressure."
Barbie 'boasted of hunting down Che'
The CIA made use of a Nazi war criminal's anti-guerrilla skills
David Smith
Sunday December 23, 2007
The Observer
Oscar-winning British director Kevin Macdonald has raised the intriguing possibility that Che Guevara's capture by the CIA in the forests of Bolivia 40 years ago was orchestrated by Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal called the 'Butcher of Lyon'. Guevara was the Marxist guerrilla who helped Fidel Castro seize power in Cuba. Barbie was the Gestapo chief in Lyon whose crimes included the murder of 44 Jewish children, taken from an orphanage and sent to Auschwitz. Improbably, the men's paths crossed in Bolivia. My Enemy's Enemy, a documentary directed by Macdonald, whose previous films include Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland, examines how Barbie's record was disregarded when he was recruited by US intelligence after the Second World War as a useful tool against communism. He evaded French justice by fleeing to Bolivia where, living under the alias Klaus Altmann, he was welcomed by fascist sympathisers. Meanwhile, in 1966 a disguised Guevara arrived in Bolivia to organise the overthrow of its military dictatorship.
The Americans had been hunting Guevara and, according to the film, turned to Barbie for his first-hand knowledge of counter-guerrilla warfare: he had attempted to crush the French Resistance and was responsible for the death of its celebrated leader, Jean Moulin. Alvaro de Castro, a longtime confidant of Barbie interviewed for the film, says: 'He met Major Shelton, the commander of the unit from the US. Altmann no doubt gave him advice on how to fight this guerrilla war. He used the expertise gained doing this kind of work in World War Two. They made the most of the fact that he had this experience.'
(snip)
Kai Hermann, a journalist, tells the film-makers: 'He always boasted - though I cannot prove it - that it was he who devised the strategy for murdering Che Guevara.'
The evidence appears inconclusive, but Macdonald, who won an Academy Award for One Day in September, about the killing of Israeli athletes by the Palestinian group Black September at the 1972 Munich Olympics, told The Observer: 'The Che claim came from several sources. I think it makes total sense when you understand what Barbie was doing and who he was working for in the Bolivian military, and how they admired him as a Nazi officer and what he had done in the war. Jean Moulin was an infamous episode, and he would trade on it and use that as part of his calling card.'
Observer (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2231851,00.html)
Che Guevara
Though communism may have lost its fire, he remains the potent symbol of rebellion and the alluring zeal of revolution
By ARIEL DORFMAN
Monday, June 14, 1999
By the time Ernesto Guevara, known to us as Che, was murdered in the jungles of Bolivia in October 1967, he was already a legend to my generation, not only in Latin America but also around the world.
Like so many epics, the story of the obscure Argentine doctor who abandoned his profession and his native land to pursue the emancipation of the poor of the earth began with a voyage. In 1956, along with Fidel Castro and a handful of others, he had crossed the Caribbean in the rickety yacht Granma on the mad mission of invading Cuba and overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Landing in a hostile swamp, losing most of their contingent, the survivors fought their way to the Sierra Maestra. A bit over two years later, after a guerrilla campaign in which Guevara displayed such outrageous bravery and skill that he was named comandante, the insurgents entered Havana and launched what was to become the first and only victorious socialist revolution in the Americas. The images were thereafter invariably gigantic. Che the titan standing up to the Yanquis, the world's dominant power. Che the moral guru proclaiming that a New Man, no ego and all ferocious love for the other, had to be forcibly created out of the ruins of the old one. Che the romantic mysteriously leaving the revolution to continue, sick though he might be with asthma, the struggle against oppression and tyranny.
His execution in Vallegrande at the age of 39 only enhanced Guevara's mythical stature. That Christ-like figure laid out on a bed of death with his uncanny eyes almost about to open; those fearless last words ("Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man") that somebody invented or reported; the anonymous burial and the hacked-off hands, as if his killers feared him more after he was dead than when he had been alive: all of it is scalded into the mind and memory of those defiant times. He would resurrect, young people shouted in the late '60s; I can remember fervently proclaiming it in the streets of Santiago, Chile, while similar vows exploded across Latin America. !No lo vamos a olvidar! We won't let him be forgotten.
NY Times (http://www.time.com/time/time100/heroes/profile/guevara01.html)