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On this day in 1971, the brutal right-wing Bolivian colonel Roberto Quintanilla, the man responsible for ordering the execution of Che Guevara & allegedly cut off his hands, was killed by German socialist revolutionary & guerrilla fighter Monika Ertl, dubbed "the avenger of Che".
Ertl, the daughter of a Nazi propagandist who fled to Bolivia, in early life worked with her father and learned how to use a camera and weapons. The family's close friends were other Nazi fugitives such as Klaus Barbie, a Gestapo leader known as "the Butcher of Lyon".
She rejected her father's ideology and grew closer to the socialist cause, admiring the Cuban Revolution and especially the Argentinian doctor and commander Che Guevara.
After the US-backed Bolivian army killed Guevara in La Higuera, she joined the National Liberation Army of Bolivia (ELN).
In 1971, she returned to Hamburg, where Roberto Quintanilla was stationed as Bolivian consul due to fears that the ELN could target him for his involvement in the killing and desecration of Guevara.
There, allegedly, she personally shot Quintanilla 3 times and was able to flee, thus avenging Guevara.
Back in Bolivia in 1972, she allegedly was part of an operation to kidnap and bring Klaus Barbie to France to face justice. Allegedly, Barbie had changed his surname to Altmann and was part of the Bolivian interior ministry.
She was ambushed and killed on May 12, 1973 by the Bolivian security forces. She was tortured before being murdered and her body was never returned to her family.
Her body was most probably dumped in a clandestine mass grave that were common under the US-backed military dictatorships propped up across Latin America.
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