The Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie, was deeply involved in the establishment of one of the most important drug cartels in South America, according to a report Friday by German News Weekly Der Spiegel.
Nicknamed the “Boucher de Lyon” for his prisoner torture in wartime, the former Gestapo chief of the occupied French city fled to South America after the end of the Second World War.
Barbie was finally decree After being found by the most famous Nazi hunting couple in France, Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate, The BBC reported. He was extradited from Bolivia in France in 1983 and condemned to life imprisonment in 1987 for crimes against humanity.
Barbie died in prison in 1991.
According to Der Spiegel, Barbie – living under the aka Klaus Altmann – has become a security advisor to the drug baron Roberto Suarez after the two men met in the 1970s.
Suarez’s son Gary told the magazine that Barbie was “an important person for my father”.
“He knew something about security, military strategy and secret service work,” he said.
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Barbie was also active in the Bolivian security services advisor, helping to set up a death team for the dictator Luis Garcia Meza.
Gary Suarez told Der Spiegel that “Barbie had been deeply involved in military regimes dating back to decades”.
“Speate of death”
Barbie had helped “organize the militias that overthrow the government” as the violent coup d’etat of 1980 approached the Garcia Meza power.
Among them was a group of neonazi mercenaries called “husband of death” who had a swollen cross headquarters called Bavaria club in the city of Santa Cruz.
After the coup, they were deployed to help both crush the political opposition and the Rivals of Suarez in the production of cocaine.
A CIA sending Since May 1974 seen by Der Spiegel reveals that agency officers already suspected Barbie involvement in drug trade, said the magazine.
The son -in -law of Roberto Suarez, Gerardo Caballero, told Der Spiegel that “Barbie has helped us a lot, in particular by working with Pablo Escobar” Colombian drug seed.
Barbie was recruited as an anti-communist agent by American Secret Services after the war, and the United States later apologized to France for helping Barbie escape justice.
Der Spiegel previously reported that Barbie was also active as a secret agent for West German information in Bolivia.
The magazine said that he had been recruited at the end of 1965 in the Bolivian capital La Paz and that he had received the code name “Adler” (“Eagle”).
Jacques Vergés, a French lawyer who represented Barbie, was requested by “60 minutes” In 2004, how he could represent one of the most vile world war criminals in the world.
“You must have hated what he represented,” asked Morley Safer, correspondent Morley Safer.
“I am unable to hate,” replied Vergés.
“Even the worst monster that you are unable to hate?” Asked safer.
“No. I am curious to understand,” replied Vergés. “I condemn, but I don’t hate.”
