page_title: Tamara Bunke
section_title: Bolivian insurgency (1964–67)
hierarchical_section_title: Tamara Bunke / Bolivian insurgency (1964–67)
caption_attribution_description: English: Tamara Bunke aka "Tania" in her various disguises that she employed while working clandestinely for the Cuban government.
context_page_description: Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, better known as Tania or Tania the Guerrilla, was an Argentine-born East German communist revolutionary and spy who played a prominent role in the Cuban government after the Cuban Revolution and in various Latin American revolutionary movements. She fought alongside Marxist guerrillas under Che Guevara during the Bolivian Insurgency where she was killed in an ambush by CIA-assisted Bolivian Army Rangers.
context_section_description: In October 1964, Bunke traveled to Bolivia under the name Laura Gutiérrez Bauer, as a secret agent for Guevara's last campaign. Her first mission was to gather intelligence on Bolivia's political elite and the strength of its armed forces. Posing as a right-wing folklore expert of Argentine background, she quickly found herself infiltrating high society and rubbing shoulders with the glitterati of Bolivia's academic and official circles. Showing how high she was able to rise in La Paz society, she won the adoration of Bolivian President René Barrientos, and even went on holiday with him to Peru. In order to maintain her cover, she also busied herself part-time with her explorations of folk music (producing one of the most valuable collections of Bolivian music in the process) and entered into a marriage of convenience with a young Bolivian to gain citizenship.
  Tactically, she was initially invaluable to Guevara's guerrillas because she used radio equipment hidden in a compartment behind the wall in her apartment to not only send coded messages to Fidel Castro in Havana; but to Guevara's guerrillas in the field by posing as a radiohost giving encoded relationship advice to fictitious lovelorn couples. This radio program was called "Advice to Women".
  In late 1966 however, the unreliability of many of her comrades in the urban network set up to support Che's guerrillas forced Bunke to travel to their rural camp at Ñancahuazú on a number of occasions. On one of these trips, a captured Bolivian communist gave away a safe house where Tania's jeep was parked in which she had left her address book. As a result, her cover was blown, and she now had no other choice than to join Guevara's armed guerrilla campaign. In this capacity she was in charge of rationing food and monitoring radio broadcasts. There continues to also be the allegation from fellow surviving guerrilla Benigno, that Bunke and Guevara had at some point become lovers in Bolivia; with Benigno remarking decades later in 2008 that "You could tell by the way they spoke so quietly and looked at each other when they were together near the end".
  Without Bunke as the guerrilla's contact to the outside world, the guerrillas then found themselves isolated. Bunke also soon found herself battling a high fever, a leg injury, and the painful effects of the Chigoe flea parasite. Consequently, Guevara decided to try to send a group of 16 other ailing combatants, including Bunke, out of the mountains.
caption: During her years working for the Cuban government (1961–1967), Bunke utilized various disguises. These included a Czech woman Marta Iriarte, Haydée González, and Vittoria Pancini, an Italian citizen travelling in Europe.[1]
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