Ejército de Liberación Nacional (Bolivia)
The ELN ( Ejército de Liberación Nacional ; German National Liberation Army) was the most important Bolivian guerrilla movement in the late 1960s and 1970s . It was Marxist oriented.
In Colombia there is a guerrilla group with the same name .
The Ñancahuazú guerrillas in Bolivia
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In 1966, the National Liberation Army of Bolivia received active support from Cuba . The Cuban engagement in South America probably goes back to the instigation of Che Guevara , who had previously (1965) tried in vain in the Congo to carry the Marxist revolution to Africa , and now, disappointed from Africa, turned back to Latin America. At first Peru was considered as the next deployment site, but in the end the Cuban comandantes Che Guevara and Juan Vitalio Acuña Núñez as well as other armed Cuban fighters went to Bolivia to build a guerrilla movement there together with the ELN.
The Cubans around Che Guevara tried to transfer the experience they had gained in their successful Cuban guerrilla fight (1957-1959) with the rebel army of the M-26-7 in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra to Bolivia. As a base camp, the Cubans bought a remote homestead on the Río Ñancahuazú in the Santa Cruz department in central Bolivia between the cities of Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Sucre on the eastern slopes of the Andes . On the night of November 7, 1966, the disguised group around Che Guevara arrived there via Cochabamba . The contact person was u. a. the East German Tamara Bunke , who initially provided logistical support for the guerrilla troops in La Paz and, after being exposed on March 21, 1967, fled to the fighting troops in the woods.
Before they had succeeded in building a powerful group, they were exposed and, from March 1967, embroiled in skirmishes with the Bolivian military , which was supported by the US intelligence service CIA in the hunt for the Marxist guerrillas . This circumstance forced the rebels to leave their base camp and retreat to the woods. But as early as April 1967 the troops were separated: Guevara led the main group that wandered the eastern slopes of the Andes in search of the separated rearguard and occasionally laid ambushes against the Bolivian army . The rearguard was led by Guevara's deputy Juan Vitalio Acuña Núñez. Contact between the two groups could not be established until the end.
Ultimately, the ELN did not succeed in this phase of the struggle to win the impoverished farmers in the Bolivian highlands for their cause. The predominantly indigenous rural population respected and supported the rebels, but otherwise kept their distance from the armed struggle. In the country, only two local farmers joined the troop. On the other hand, the attempt to bring the revolution to Bolivia failed, not least because of the lack of support from the Communist Party of Bolivia (PCB) under Mario Monje . Basically, Che Guevara had also misjudged the mentality in the Bolivian Andes, which was very different from that of Creole - Caribbean Cuba , especially that of the indigenous population who had lived in extreme feudal dependence for centuries .
In mid-1967 the armed fighters' retreat became increasingly narrow. The rearguard was wiped out as early as August 1967. On August 31, 1967, Juan Vitalio Acuña Núñez died together with Tamara Bunke in an enemy ambush on the Río Grande near Vado de Puerto Mauricio . Their bodies were found seven days later on the banks of the Río Grande. Che Guevara's group, which in the end only consisted of 14 people, was tracked down by government troops on October 8, 1967 in the Quebrada del Churo (also: Quebrada del Yuro ) gorge near the village of La Higuera . After heavy fighting, the wounded Guevara was captured along with Simeón Cuba Sarabia and taken to the school building in La Higuera. There he was interrogated by the CIA agent Félix Rodríguez, among others .
On October 9, 1967, Che Guevara was shot dead on the spot by Mario Terán , a sergeant in the Bolivian army, without a trial . Although he had volunteered for the execution , he was then frightened so that he was ready to shoot after several hours and under the influence of heavy alcohol. Then Guevara's body was to be disposed of without a trace. She was therefore secretly buried at the airfield in Vallegrande, about 30 kilometers away . It was not until 1997 that the missing bones were found and transferred to Cuba, where they were buried in a specially created mausoleum in Santa Clara . The funeral ceremony on July 12, 1997 was rather fleeting and familiar.
Che Guevara's personal experiences during the Bolivian period are documented in his later published Bolivian Diary .
The murder of Che Guevara had an aftermath:
- Police colonel Roberto Quintanilla from the Ministry of the Interior, who was responsible for chopping off Che Guevara's hands after his death, was killed on April 1, 1971 in Hamburg, where he was working as a consul, by a woman with several shots from a revolver. The perpetrator left a written message ("Victory or Death - ELN") and was identified as the Bolivian German Monika Ertl without any conclusive certainty .
- The commander of the 8th Division, Joaquin Zenteno, was also liquidated by a guerrilla squad in Paris in 1976.
- Honorato, the farmer who led the guerrillas into the ambush of Valdo del Yeso, was killed by the guerrillas just a year after Guevara's death.
The ELN from 1967
After Che Guevara's death, the ELN consisted of only six survivors: the Cubans Harry "Pombo" Villegas , Dariel "Benigno" Alarcón Ramírez , Leonardo "Urbano" Tamayo and the Bolivians Inti Peredo , David Adriazola "Dario" Veizaga and Julio Luis "Ñato “Méndez beads . "El Ñato" was killed on November 15th after being persecuted by the military. The Cubans managed to return to Cuba and the ELN was henceforth headed by Inti Peredo, who wanted to build up a new network of supporters, "go back to the mountains" and continue guerrilla activity. The ELN financed itself through bank robberies and also through ransom money obtained through kidnapping of business people. In the midst of this reorganization work, "Inti" was shot dead by the police on September 9, 1969 or, according to other sources, tortured after arrest and finally murdered - again with the participation of Colonel Roberto Quintanilla. Inti's successor was his younger brother Osvaldo "Chato" Peredo . In the period that followed, the ELN succeeded in recruiting new members , especially from the radicalizing student youth and the liberation-theologically oriented youth association of the Christian Democrats, and in July 1970 established a new guerrilla focus near Teoponte in the north of the department of La Paz ; a large part of the 70 guerrillas quickly enclosed by the military died there of starvation or snakebites and not from fighting. Through the intervention of the trade unions and the urban left, the eight survivors who surrendered (Chato Peredo among them) were given safe conduct to Chile. In 1971 the ELN took part in the resistance against the government of Hugo Banzer , who came to power through a military coup , and whose security apparatus was advised by the former Gestapo man Klaus Barbie, alias 'Klaus Altmann'. Monika Ertl of German descent was killed in 1973 while trying to kidnap him and rebuild the urban structure of the ELN . The structures of the ELN were for the most part shattered in the following years by state repression or disintegrated due to internal conflicts. Without having formally dissolved, ELN members and residual groups have been working in legal political parties and grassroots movements since 1978.
literature
- Ernesto Che Guevara: Bolivian Diary. Documents of a Revolution , Reinbek 1986, ISBN 3-499-18312-9
- Gaby Weber : The guerrillas take stock. Talks with guerrilla leaders in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Uruguay . Giessen 1989, pp. 263-322 ISBN 3-88349-375-9
Web links
- Original ELN communiques (Spanish)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gaby Weber: The guerrilla takes stock. Talks with guerrilla leaders in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Uruguay . Giessen 1989, pp. 264-268