In the film Manhunt, which depicts the attempts to apprehend Klaus Barbie, the former head of the Security Service's Security Police in Lyon, there is an interesting transition between two scenes. The first shows Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, who were instrumental in capturing the so-called ‘Butcher of Lyon’, finding a document in an archive, a telegram from April 1944 in which the SS man informs his superiors that 41 children have been deported from a Jewish orphanage in Izieu in southern France. After a close-up of the document there's a cut, and two sleeping children can be seen. Suddenly, the door to their room is thrown open, and a police commando in La Paz, where Barbie fled to in 1951, rudely awakens them. They’re dragged into the living room with their family, where the leader of the commando aims his pistol at the children's chests.

The makers of the film, which was released in 2007, weren't the first ones to draw connections between the crimes committed in Europe by fugitive Nazis and oppression under South American dictatorships. As early as 1972, when Barbie's capture made headlines around the world, it was reported that he had been the instigator of the putsch that had brought German-Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer to power in Bolivia. The Bolivian government was also reputed to have used Barbie as an advisor on interrogation techniques. For Juan José Torres, the former Bolivian president who had fled Banzer's coup in 1971, it was obvious why Barbie was in the Andean mountain state. ‘It doesn't surprise me that the Bolivian government would harbour the torturer and war criminal Klaus Barbie’, Torres was quoted as saying: ‘This position reflects the logic of the system. The same fascism that yesterday wanted to subject the French people to slavery, today keeps down the Bolivian people. The circumstances may be different, but the methods are the same’.

In 1973, the Banzer putsch was followed by the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile and the establishment of a dictatorship in Uruguay. In 1976, after a three-year civilian intermezzo, a military junta once again seized power in Argentina. With Brazil and Paraguay having been ruled by the military for quite some time, almost all of South America was in the hands of right-wing dictators.