Surazo

On May 12, 1973, Monika Ertl is shot dead by security forces in the street in La Paz during a firefight. At the time of her death, she was in her mid-thirties and a member of the Bolivian guerrillas ELN. Her father, Hans Ertl, learns of his daughter's death on his cattle farm La Dolorida in the Bolivian rainforest. The cameraman of Leni Riefenstahl and Rommel's preferred front photographer had emigrated there in the 1950s. In his environment: right-wing nationalist dictators and SS-Obersturmführer, German missionaries and Jewish emigrants, indigenous people and apparent magicians who manage to remain invisible in full view. Following in their footsteps, this research traces the lines of transatlantic extensions of Nazi careers, traces the involvement of the next generation in the international networks of the Sixty-Eighters, and branches out to the Tyrolean Alps and Linz. Surazo, the name of the cold tropical wind, should be the title of Hans Ertl's last film; Surazo, instead, is a deep drilling that tells, as if in passing, of historiography in an entangled world; Surazo, that is the search for answers to questions that we still have to ask ourselves.