Bunke, Tamara (Guerrillas)

(1937-1967)

Revolutionary who died fighting in Bolivia. Tamara Bunke was born on November 19, 1937, in Buenos Aires (Argentina) to German parents who had emigrated from Nazi Germany. In 1952, her parents returned to the Communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany), where Bunke joined the Communist youth movement. From that point, it is difficult to establish the political and personal development of young Tamara, because her life was later widely used for Communist propaganda purposes and was posthumously streamlined to fit the image of a Communist heroine. The official history asserts that Tamara met the revolutionary Che Guevara when he visited East Berlin, and the Spanish-speaking Bunke served as a translator during his talks with representatives of the East German Communist government. She decided to join Che Guevara in his revolutionary activities, but it is unclear whether she also became his mistress. After training in Cuba, she went to Bolivia, and following clandestine activities, she joined an armed partisan group. Cuban and Eastern bloc media began to celebrate Bunke as "Tania la guerrillera" by the mid-1960s. She was depicted as a young European Communist joining the people of the Third World in their struggle for liberation from capitalism and imperialism. On August 31, 1967, Tamara Bunke was killed either in combat with Bolivian government troops or after being captured. She was celebrated as the female Che Guevara. Her grave has not yet been found. Up to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989-1990, more than 200 schools, factories, and other facilities had been named after Bunke. The Bunke cult did not reach the level of Che Guevara’s; nevertheless, the story of a young woman engaging in and perishing in revolutionary combat inspired many young people not only in former Eastern bloc countries with their all-dominant state propaganda, but also in the West. Recent research on the life and death of Tamara Bunke has been overshadowed by court injunctions.

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