Klaus Barbie, the notorious Nazi war criminal known as the "Butcher of Lyon," managed to escape justice for decades, living under a false identity in Bolivia until his arrest in 1983. He was convicted of crimes against humanity in France in 1987 and died of cancer in prison in 1991. Now, newly uncovered details shed light on Barbie’s postwar life — one in which he played a central role in turning Bolivia into a cocaine superpower while serving as a trusted advisor to drug lords and dictators.
After the war, Barbie worked for Western intelligence services and adopted the alias Klaus Altmann in South America. In Bolivia, he became the chief security adviser to Roberto Suárez, one of the world’s most powerful drug traffickers. “He was important to my father,” said Suárez’s son, Gary Suárez, 62, in an interview with Der Spiegel. “He had extensive knowledge of security, military strategy and intelligence work. He never spoke about his past — and no one cared, because he was helping turn Bolivia into a cocaine empire.”
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Klaus Barbie was the notorious Nazi war criminal known as the "Butcher of Lyon,"
(Photo: Witschel )
Barbie’s success with Suárez brought him new clients, including dictator Luis García Meza, who seized power in 1980 with the backing of cocaine barons. Barbie, hailed as the ideological architect of Bolivia’s “Cocaine Coup,” was awarded the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Bolivian army and granted immunity for his actions. According to Der Spiegel, he helped Meza set up death squads and served as Bolivia’s de facto intelligence chief.
Barbie even operated his own private execution unit composed of Italian and Argentine mercenaries, headquartered in a Santa Cruz building designed in the shape of a swastika and adorned with Nazi flags.
New revelations stem from recently declassified CIA cables from 1974, which show that agency operatives suspected Barbie of involvement in the drug trade — including possible links to Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. The CIA believed Barbie played a key role in the rise of both Suárez and Escobar’s Medellín Cartel.
One chilling revelation involves Suárez’s wife, who reportedly had Jewish roots. Her aunt had lived with her family in Lyon and was abducted by Barbie’s Gestapo in 1944.
Despite being one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, Barbie was reportedly recruited by the CIA. His role in aiding drug cartels was allegedly part of a broader U.S. effort to prevent leftist regimes from taking power in Bolivia — as had happened in Cuba — by bolstering military dictatorships. This cooperation is believed to have allowed Barbie to evade extradition to France for years. When he was finally captured, the U.S. formally apologized to France for helping him flee.
As head of the Gestapo in Lyon during World War II, Barbie was responsible for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz. He also oversaw the torture and execution of countless members of the French Resistance, gaining a reputation for sadism that stood out even among his fellow Nazis. “I came to kill,” he reportedly declared upon arriving in Lyon in 1942.
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Barbie carried that same brutality into his new role in Bolivia, where he worked with U.S. intelligence as a counterintelligence operative. Exploiting his Nazi-honed skills and fanatical hatred of communism, he was involved in the torture and killing of thousands of political dissidents in Bolivia and neighboring Peru.
Once a symbol of Nazi terror, Klaus Barbie reemerged as a hidden architect of a bloody, drug-fueled dictatorship in South America — a chilling testament to how impunity and geopolitical interests allowed one of history’s most notorious war criminals to reinvent himself in plain sight.