The woman who avenged Che Guevara

A five-minute film in Spanish, based on the life of Monika Ertl. She was the daughter of Nazi propagandist Hans Ertl, “Hitler’s photographer”, who fled to South America after World War II along with some other notorious Nazis who later figured in the local fascist circles — among them Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”, who taught the arts of Nazi torture to Barrientos’s thugs in Bolivia, and whom Monika grew up calling “Uncle”. Monika went the other way, politically speaking; she became a leftist guerrilla during the late 1960s. In 1971 she went back to her native Germany; she disguised herself as a journalist and shot the Bolivian consul in Hamburg. And why not? He was none other than Colonel Roberto Quintanilla, who ordered the final indignity to Che’s corpse when he had his men cut off the guerrilla comandante’s hands before burying the remains beneath the airstrip at Vallegrande.