Tamara Bunke

Cuba

After the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro dispatched emissaries to other socialist countries to garner international support. In 1960, Che Guevara was sent to Leipzig, East Germany as part of a Cuban trade delegation, and Bunke was assigned as his interpreter. She also served as an interpreter for the ballerina Alicia Alonso of the Cuban National Ballet. In 1961, she received an invitation from Alonso to travel to Cuba.

According to Bunke, she "became directly involved in revolutionary activities" and "grassroots organizations" shortly after arriving in Cuba. She worked as a German translator with the Cuban Ministry of Education, volunteered to teach in the countryside, and participated in the Cuban literacy campaign. She built homes and schools with Guevara. She helped plan the International Student Union conference in Havana and joined several organizations, including the Cuban Institute for Friendship Among People (ICAP), the Asociación de Jóvenes Rebeldes (later known as the Union of Young Communists), and the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC). Through her involvement in the FMC, she became close with Vilma Espín, a Cuban revolutionary and politician. Bunke also joined the People's Defense Militia and met other Latin American revolutionaries, including Nicaraguan revolutionary Carlos Fonseca, founder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. She expressed solidarity with the Nicaraguan struggle and shared her desire to join the insurgency in Nicaragua. In addition to her political and volunteer work, Bunke pursued a journalism degree at the University of Havana and performed Latin American folk music on the piano, guitar, and accordion for audiences in Havana.

Based on Bunke's personal and political background, Guevara recommended her as a fit for a deep undercover role in an unidentified country. Ultimately, Guevara's goal was to spark revolutionary uprisings throughout Latin America. Bunke was one of three candidates evaluated for the role, and she was eventually chosen by the Cuban revolutionary Ulises Estrada, whose real name was Dámaso José Lescaille Tabares. Decades later, Estrada would go on to write a biography about Bunke's life, using first-hand knowledge, documents from Cuban security services, autobiographical notes from Bunke, and letters from her mother, Nadia.

Training

Bunke chose "Tania" as her nom de guerre in honor of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a Soviet partisan who used the same alias. In his biography of Bunke, Estrada wrote that he and another "compañero"—or comrade, in Cuban Spanish—helped her develop cover stories, allowing her to walk away from her current volunteer work and enter the world of an undercover agent. Between 1963 and 1964, Estrada helped train Bunke in Havana, showing her techniques she would need in the field, including how to covertly follow and surveil a target, conduct countersurveillance, and use dead drops. She also received technical training in encrypting and transmitting secret messages and practical military training in weaponry and explosives. During this period, Bunke and Estrada developed a romantic relationship.

On April 9, 1964, Bunke used the cover identity Haydée Bidel Gonzalés to travel to Prague in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, where she received instruction from Czechoslovak State Security (StB) on a farm outside of the city. When she completed this phase of her training, she pretended to be an Argentine woman named Marta Iriarte persona and traveled through Western Europe to gather information and build another fake identity, Vittoria Pancini. Her Pancini identity was an Italian–German cover that she ultimately used to return to Latin America. She later met with Guevara, Estrada, and several other Cuban guerrillas, who revealed that the operation she was preparing for would take place in Bolivia.

Bolivian insurgency

In October 1964, Bunke adopted the fake identity Laura Gutiérrez Bauer and arrived in Bolivia as an undercover agent in Guevara's final revolutionary campaign. Her mission was to infiltrate Bolivia's political and military elite to gather intelligence on the country's power structures. Posing as a right-wing Argentine folklore expert, Bunke quickly gained access to high society in La Paz. She befriended high-ranking officials, including General Alfredo Ovando, head of the Bolivian army, and ultimately won the admiration of President René Barrientos, even accompanying him on a holiday to Peru.

To solidify her cover, Bunke pursued her interest in Bolivian folk music, joining the country's Department of Folklore in the Ministry of Education and building one of the most comprehensive collections of Bolivian music. She also married a young Bolivian man in a marriage of convenience, securing citizenship and blending further into Bolivian society. Through her connections, Bunke gathered valuable intelligence on the Bolivian military and reported back to Guevara and the Cuban Intelligence Directorate.

In late 1966, Bunke's role shifted from intelligence gathering to preparing for the arrival of Guevara's guerrilla forces in Bolivia. According to the testimony of a guerrilla codenamed "Pombo" (whose real name was Harry Villegas), Bunke welcomed new guerrillas and transported them to a ranch in Ñancahuazú, because there was a shortage of "trustworthy compañeros" in La Paz. Later, the activist Loyola Guzmán said that Bunke had taken on this role in order to help the urban network in La Paz, which was overwhelmed by the tasks Guevara had assigned them. Pombo stated that Guevara was surprised to see Bunke at the camp when he returned in March 1967. According to Pombo, Guevara did not want her involved in direct guerrilla actions, and he criticized her for not continuing her espionage work. Soon after his arrival, Guevara made arrangements for Bunke and several others—the journalists Ciro Bustos and Régis Debray, who Bunke had personally escorted to the Ñancahuazú camp—to leave the camp, because there were reports that the Bolivian army was aware of the guerrillas' presence.

On March 23, 1967, before Bunke could be evacuated from the area, the guerrillas engaged in armed combat with the Bolivian army, killing 7 members of the army and capturing several others. The prisoners were released after being given an "explanation of the [guerrilla] movement's ideals". At this point, Guevara still considered Bunke to be a "visitor" at the camp. Unbeknownst to Guevara at the time, the Bolivian army had interrogated three Bolivian guerrilla deserters and found the location of the guerrilla movement's safe house in Camiri. Bunke had parked her jeep at that safe house before hiking on foot to the Ñancahuazú base, and, since then, she had been unable to return to her vehicle. Inside her jeep, the authorities had found documentation that blew her cover, including the location of her apartment in La Paz. Meanwhile, the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was monitoring the Bolivian army's counterguerrilla efforts and exploring ways to provide military aid.

Due to escalating tensions in the area, Guevara decided to abandon the camp and incorporate Bunke and the other visitors into the main guerrilla column, which he led directly. He held a meeting with all of the guerrillas, including Bunke, and officially named their movement the National Liberation Army of Bolivia (ELN). At this point, Guevara may have given Bunke an M1 rifle or a pistol. Between March 31 and mid April, Bunke injured her leg and began to suffer from a fever and a painful chigoe flea infestation. Seeing her deteriorating health, Guevara grouped her in the rearguard with Juan Vitalio Acuña Núñez (nom de guerre: Joaquín) and 15 other guerrillas, 4 of whom were also sick. The other visitors Bunke had originally brought to the camp (Bustos and Debray) left the guerrillas. Joaquín's column split off from Guevara's group and generally stayed in the area called Bella Vista in the Serranía de Incahuasi. Bunke remained with them from April 17 to August. According to Estrada, her duties in Joaquín's group included monitoring radio broadcasts and encrypting messages. She also sewed clothes and was put in charge of distributing food amongst the guerrillas.

Death and burial

After suffering a series of desertions, deaths, and attacks from the Bolivian army, Joaquín's guerrilla column made a dangerous trek to the Río Grande river in late August 1967 in order to ultimately reunite with Guevara's group. Two undercover military couriers spotted them and quickly informed their commanding officer, Captain Mario Vargas, who was stationed several hours away. The guerrillas stopped at the farm of a peasant named Honorato Rojas and asked him to guide them to a place where they could get water the next day. Rojas had helped the guerrillas in the past. However, since their last meeting, Rojas had been interrogated "under duress" by the army and had agreed "to collaborate with [them] should the guerrillas return". That night, Rojas tried to flee the area with his wife and children, but he was apprehended on the road by Vargas, who had hiked to the area overnight with three dozen soldiers. Vargas forced Rojas to help him ambush the guerrillas. Rojas led the soldiers to a strategic location and then, the next day, he guided Joaquín's group to a ford in the Río Grande called Puerto Mauricio where the soldiers were concealed.

At 5:20 pm on August 31, 1967, Joaquín's column was ambushed while crossing the Río Grande at Vado del Yeso. As Bunke and the others walked through the water, the soldiers opened fire. Accounts differ on what happened next; despite the difficulty maneuvering in the high water, Bunke may or may not have been able to turn and fire back before bullets pierced her arm and lung. She was killed and swept away by the river's current.

The Bolivian army recovered Bunke's body downstream on September 6 and transported her by helicopter to Vallegrande. Two days later, the Bolivian dictator Barrientos arrived in Vallegrande and, "in a storm of publicity", was photographed beside Bunke's body. The bodies of the other guerrillas who had been killed in the ambush were thrown into a nearby ravine without any religious rites. Seeing the way the army had treated the bodies of the other guerrillas, the local campesino women banded together and "forced [the army] to give Tania a Christian burial". She may have been buried in a marked grave, unlike her comrades, but even a peasant who witnessed her burial at the time was unable to describe the exact location of her grave later.

Guevara picked up news of her death in a radio transmission from his guerrilla camp in the Bolivian jungle, but he dismissed it as propaganda at first. For several weeks, Guevara and his group of guerrillas continued to evade the Bolivian army, and the CIA assisted in the army's manhunt. Then, in October, he was captured in an ambush and summarily executed by the army. Afterwards, Guevara's body disappeared. When his brother tried to retrieve his remains for burial, a general said that Guevara's body had been "cremated".

Like Guevara, Bunke's grave site was undiscovered for decades. Then, in November 1995, Mario Vargas confessed to Guevara's biographer, Jon Lee Anderson, that the Bolivian army had never cremated Guevara, as previously believed. This led to an extensive investigation to find where the army had secretly buried him. After the investigation began, Bunke's mother sent a letter to Fidel Castro in December 1995; in the letter, she anticipated that her daughter's remains would be found in Bolivia and requested that her daughter be buried in Cuba. Castro agreed to honor her request.

After the discovery of Guevara's remains in 1997, Bunke's remains were also tracked down on September 19, 1998. She was found in a grave next to a collection of trees on the periphery of the Vallegrande army base. Before her body was transferred, locals in Vallegrande performed a ceremony in her honor, carrying her ossuary to the grave site and singing a Quechuan song called "La Cacharpalla". Afterwards, Bunke's body was transported to Santa Clara, Cuba, where she and nine other guerrillas who were killed during the Bolivia campaign were honored in a military parade, followed by a memorial ceremony led by Raúl Castro, then Vice President of Cuba. They were all interred in the Che Guevara Mausoleum. Bunke was remembered as the sole female guerrilla in Guevara's campaign.

Legacy

Soon after Bunke's death, the United States' CIA invented "sexual scandals" to discredit her, pushing a narrative that she was Guevara's lover and diminishing her contributions to the Bolivian campaign. The CIA also invented a story that Bunke was a triple agent for the Soviet KGB, East German Stasi, and Cuban intelligence. In later interviews, former CIA agents admitted to providing a journalist named Daniel James with materials and background from Guevara's Bolivian Diaries in order to spread these fabrications. James published these claims in The Observer in 1969, and he also included them in a book about Guevara.

When José Friedl Zapata repeated these claims in his book Tania, the Woman Che Guevara Loved (1997), Bunke's mother, Nadia, sued Friedl Zapata's German publisher, arguing that the book was defamatory. Friedl Zapata's book repeated a debunked rumor from Günter Männel—a former Stasi intelligence officer who defected to West Germany in 1961 and later worked with the CIA—that Bunke had an affair with Guevara while training in Prague, though records show they were never there at the same time. Männel also claimed that Bunke was specifically recruited by the Stasi to spy on Guevara, but journalist Christine Toomey writes in The Sunday Times that this claim can be "dismissed", based on her investigative reporting. In an interview with Junge Welt in 1998, Nadia said that GDR security services did not have any documents belonging to her daughter. Nadia also personally traveled to Moscow and obtained a statement from the press office of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, affirming that her daughter never worked for the KGB. Ultimately, Nadia's lawsuit was successful, and the courts deemed Friedl Zapata's book defamatory and banned it from being sold in Germany.

Other claims circulated about Bunke that were later discredited: for example, in a biography about Guevara, Jorge Castañeda Gutman published a rumor that Bunke was pregnant when she died. However, this rumor was discredited in 2017 when a doctor named Moisés Abraham Baptista revealed that he had conducted an autopsy on Bunke after her body was retrieved by the Bolivian army. Abraham Baptista affirmed that Bunke was not pregnant. Historian Richard Gott writes that Bunke was also accused of betraying her comrades after her jeep was discovered by the Bolivian authorities in Camiri. However, Gott notes that three guerrilla deserters had already been apprehended beforehand and "the damage had been done ... long before the army found her jeep".

In popular culture

When Fidel Castro learned of Bunke's death, he praised her as a hero. Journalists John Crewdson and Joseph Treaster wrote in The Globe and Mail that she became "a hero of the revolutionary left around the world". Bunke inspired the Venezuelan singer and revolutionary activist Alí Primera, and he wrote a song in her honor called "Tania". In Cuba, her image was featured on stamps, and she is also the namesake of a maternity hospital in Santiago called Hospital Materno Norte Tamara Bunke. During the GDR's existence, over 200 youth organizations and nursery schools were named after her.

In 1974, Bunke became the namesake of 2283 Bunke, a minor planet discovered by Soviet-Ukrainian astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravleva, and Patty Hearst adopted the alias "Tania" during her involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). In 1991, the Swiss filmmaker Heidi Specogna wrote and directed a documentary about Bunke called Tania La Guerrillera. A new species of diving beetle in Bolivia, Desmopachria taniae, was named after Bunke in 1999.

Fictionalized portrayals of Bunke have appeared in thriller novels and film. Agamemnon Films planned a movie focused on her called "Tania", which was set to depict Bunke as a Stasi femme fatale, but her mother threatened legal action in 2002, arguing that the plot was false and defamatory. Bunke's family said they had documentation proving that she was not involved with the Stasi or the KGB and was also not Guevara's lover. Jagged Films and Wildwood Enterprises, Inc production companies have also explored portraying Bunke's life. Later, Franka Potente portrayed Bunke in the Steven Soderbergh film Che (2008), but it was a small role, which Christine Toomey in The Sunday Times speculated was due to legal concerns.