James Miranda

The hit squad that invades Tony Montana’s mansion at the end of Scarface was inspired by a real Bolivian paramilitary group known as Los Novios de la Muerte — “The Fiancés of Death.” The unit was made up of European neo-fascists, former SS/Gestapo figures, international mercenaries and Bolivian military personnel. The group operated under the financial backing of Roberto Suárez Gómez, the Bolivian cocaine kingpin Alejandro Sosa was based on. Suárez built a vast trafficking empire called La Corporación, which supplied coca paste to the Medellín Cartel. Los Novios de la Muerte was organized with the help of Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” who had fled Europe and was living in Bolivia under the name Klaus Altmann. It was commanded on the ground by West German neo-fascist and former Spanish Foreign Legionnaire Joachim Fiebelkorn. The unit protected Suárez’s cocaine infrastructure, targeted rival traffickers and carried out political violence on behalf of Bolivia’s military-narco alliance. In Scarface, writer Oliver Stone effectively compresses all of this into the simplified figure of Sosa: a powerful Bolivian drug lord whose interests are protected by his own private army.