The Nazi Fugitive Who Created The Modern Cocaine Cartel & Befriended Escobar

The Underworld Podcast

True Crime, Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 871 Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”, escaped Europe at the end of the war and fled to Latin America, he didn’t follow his fellow Nazis into hiding. In fact, Barbie remained on the books of western spy agencies, including the CIA, and reaped enormous wealth, power, and protection. Barbie then hooked up with the fascists and druglords of Bolivia, christened a death squad called the “Bridesgrooms of Death” — and took the country in a brutal coup backed so far to the hilt by marching powder, that Bolivians still call it the “Cocaine Coup”. But Barbie’s work wasn’t done there. As reporters and Nazi hunters uncovered his true identity, the fugitive mass-murderer connected Bolivian “King of Cocaine” Roberto Suarez Gomez with the cartels of Colombia, birthing the modern-day blow industry. And he would even become friends with nascent narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's July 17, 1980, in the Bolivian capital city of La Paz, and a brutal coup d'etat
0:08.5	tar has sputtered into life. Hooded paramilitaries dressed in civilian clothes are racing
0:15.1	through the streets in jeeps and ambulances, stopping to execute dissidents and seize state buildings.
0:22.8	The group raids warehouses and lutes stores in a frenzy.
0:27.0	Some of them have European accents and swastika armbands on their shirts.
0:32.0	The mutilated bodies of leftist politicians are burned and left to char in the city's streets.
0:37.0	The gang storms Lapaz's prison and turns its drug traffickers loose. leftist politicians are burned and left to char in the city streets.
0:37.7	The gang storms La Pazes prison and turns its drug traffickers loose.
0:42.2	Pandemonium. Citizens scatter.
0:45.1	Policemen and soldiers cower in their barracks.
0:48.1	Nothing can stop the gang now.
0:51.0	The city ransacked. The murderers make their way to the Bolivian Workers Centre,
0:55.5	headquarters of the nation's trade unions.
0:58.7	35 unionists and lawmakers are inside,
1:01.8	drawing up emergency plans against the same narco-fascists who are now bursting through the doors,
1:07.3	20 of them in total, with 30 more standing guard outside. The victims barely have time
1:14.5	to think. 18 of those inside the building escape, but the gang shoots some dead and kidnaps others,
1:21.1	dragging them back into their hijacked vehicles. They'll soon be introduced to a new life of
1:25.9	captivity, beatings and electro-shock torture,
1:29.3	all at the hands of a regime led by bitter and violent military despot, Luis Garcia-Mesa.
1:36.3	But Garcia Mesa is only the front man for this terrifying year zero.
1:40.3	Paying for it all is one of the world's biggest drug kingpins, a man they call
	...

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