Brendan Cole
- Klaus Barbie was responsible for 14,000 deaths in World War Two
- He was recruited by CIA to fight communism and boasted that he helped hunt down revolutionary Che Guevara
- Sadistic Nazi went from sending families to death camps in the war to playing a pivotal role in £60billion-a-year cocaine trade
- Was finally jailed for crimes against humanity in 1987
During the Second World War, he was notorious as the Butcher of Lyon, but unlike his Nazi partners in crime, Klaus Barbie never faced instant arrest and justice when the fighting ended.
Despite sending whole families to death camps, the US recruited him as a CIA spy and smuggled him into Bolivia where he helped spearhead a brutal narco-state.
Barbie’s initial escape from justice as a mistake that contributed to a cocaine trade which was as vicious as it was lucrative and justice was not served until many years later.
The Daily Mirror’s Warren Manger interviewed the American journalist Peter McFarren who co-wrote a biography of the Nazi called The Devil’s Agent.
‘Barbie may not have been physically involved in shipping kilos of drugs, but he played a decisive role in the growth of the cocaine trade in Bolivia, Peru and Columbia,’ Mr McFarren said.
‘He was the liaison between these kings of cocaine and the government, military and mercenaries.’
Barbie was appointed leader of Hitler’s secret police in 1942 aged 29 when he was charged with hunting down members of the French Resistance.
During the war, he earned his Butcher nickname by torturing people with sexual abuse, electrocution and breaking bones.
When it emerged Barbie might face prosecution for his horrific war crimes, including responsibility for the deaths of 14,000 people, the CIA enlisted the help of the Vatican to change his name to Klaus Altmann, and he fled to Bolivia in 1951.
He became a colonel in the Bolivian army where he enlisted the help of terrorists called Fiancés of Death. He also advised the Bolivian military on interrogation and torture techniques.
He then teamed up with some of the region’s most feared drug lords, including Pablo Escobar whom he most likely supplied with weapons, although Barbie’s closest ally was Bolivian warlord Roberto Suarez Gomez, whom he met regularly in the early 1980s.
Barbie was paranoid there would be a Communist revolution in Bolivia from where he would be deported to France to stand trial for war crimes. Suarez Gomez wanted the freedom to expand his cocaine empire without fear of prosecution.
So they arranged a military coup to install General Luis Garcia Meza Tejada as commander of the army, then as president in 1980, all funded by cocaine cash.
Mr McFarren says: ‘Overthrowing a democratic government with money from the drug trade was unheard of. It set a dangerous precedent of how democracy could be interrupted by the dollars and terrorism of cocaine trafficking bandits.
‘In Colombia and Peru there were individual government officials and military police who were part of the cocaine trade. But I can’t think of another regime that was completely in the pocket of the trade, and Barbie played a key part in that.’
Barbie was able to live well in Bolivia and even became a public figure.
‘He wasn’t seen as a horrible Nazi murderer. He became a grandfatherly figure. I saw him on the streets with his wife, hanging out in the local café,’ Mr McFarren says.
After the collapse of the military dictatorship, Barbie was extradited to France in 1983 to stand trial. By then 70, he remained unrepentant for his many crimes, declaring: ‘When I stand before the throne of God I shall be judged innocent.’
Tried on 41 counts of crimes against humanity, he was found guilty and jailed for life in July 1987. He died four years later of leukaemia and cancer of the spine.
‘Most Nazis who escaped prosecution disappeared, often to South America, but they stayed off the radar.
‘But Barbie became a public figure. That makes him unique. And, despite that, he was able to live with impunity in Bolivia for more than 30 years. In that respect, America has a lot to answer for.’
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