The Americans had their eyes on a specific Brazilian replacement. Gordon continued:
The most significant development is the crystallizing of a military resistance group under the leadership of Gen. Humberto Castello [sic] Branco, Army Chief of Staff. Castelo Branco is a highly competent, discreet, honest, and deeply respected officer.… Castelo Branco’s preference would be to act only in case of obvious unconstitutional provocation, e.g., a Goulartist move to close Congress or to intervene in one of the opposition states (Guanabara or Sao Paulo being the most likely ones). He recognizes, however (as do I) that Goulart may avoid such obvious provocation, while continuing to move toward an irreversible fait accompli by means of manipulated strikes, financial undermining of the states, and an executive plebiscite—including voting by illiterates…63
Earlier in his life, Castelo Branco had trained at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. There, he had met Vernon Walters, the military attaché Kennedy sent to Brazil. After they studied together in Kansas, Castelo Branco and Walters were roommates, living together in a small hotel in Italy.64
Given the circumstances that led to his inauguration, Jango had almost no support in Congress, and had few allies in Brazil’s media, much of which was owned by a few powerful landowning families. In order to demonstrate public support for his reforms, he organized a series of street rallies. On March 13, 1964, Jango gathered with other left-leaning leaders to speak to nearly two hundred thousand people in front of Central do Brasil, the iconic train station in downtown Rio. A tense Jango took the stage, called again for land reform, and attacked right-wing false democrats for being “anti-people, anti-union, and anti-reform.” He said, “Meeting with the people on the streets is not a threat to democracy. A threat to democracy is when you pounce on the people, exploiting their Christian beliefs; and the mystifications of an anticommunist industry—they are a threat to democracy.” Cameras caught some attendees carrying signs with slogans like “Down with the Latifundistas,” a photo of Fidel, and “Legalize the Communist Party”—more fuel for the right-wing conspiracists.65
The conservatives responded with their own rally. On March 19, just a few miles from the Tan family’s new home in São Paulo, the “Marcha da Família com Deus pela Liberdade,” or “March of the Family with God and for Liberty,” brought almost five hundred thousand people to the streets. Most of them were from well-off, conservative families—though some forced their maids to come—and the presence of respectable women and children emboldened the scheming military officers. Ing Giok Tan and her family, living just miles away, were wary of these kinds of things, and stayed away. The US government did not. It supplied material and moral support to the march, which was already well grounded in homegrown Brazilian elite attitudes.66
Jango’s final and fatal error, as far as the military was concerned, came just after that. A group of two thousand marines in Rio, supporters of the reformas da base, staged a little rebellion against their superiors, demanding better working conditions and a relaxation of their disciplinary code. The rebels showed the pro-mutiny, anti-imperial Soviet classic film The Battleship Potemkin, which did little to calm nerves back at military high command.67 Jango’s initial response—neither to support the uprising nor back an immediate crackdown—served as ultimate proof to the military that the president would support an uprising of low-level soldiers and subvert the military hierarchy. To make matters worse, he gave a talk to military police at the Brazil Automobile Club the next day. He didn’t say anything radical, but by then it was considered a direct affront that he would even speak directly to sergeants and low-level officials.
The coup against Jango began on March 31, 1964, and many of the plotters were motivated by the belief that communists had built some kind of revolutionary plan around Goulart. This was entirely false, but it was also entirely consistent with the fanatical anticommunism of the time, all the way back to the McCarthy hearings and the mythology surrounding the Intentona. Wherever there were communists, no matter how limited in number, and no matter what their stated declarations, they must have a secret, nefarious plot.
Within the mythology of Brazil’s own anticommunism, this likely meant the communists had something deeply perverse planned. Many in the elite believed that communists practiced violence that they carried out with “Satanic pleasure,” that it was their deep desire to murder the faithful en masse and deliver them to “Red Hell.”68
Although the military high command and Washington had been plotting a coup for weeks, it started prematurely. A single outraged general, Olímpio Mourão Filho, the same man who had created the fake Jewish-communist conspiracy known as the Cohen Plan back in 1937, led a march of poorly equipped soldiers on Rio, where Jango was in residence. Goulart flew to Brasília, but when it became clear to him that the military high command was dead-set on removing him, he fled to Uruguay. Tanks rolled up and parked outside Congress. Invoking an “Institutional Act” with no legal basis, the military junta declared that the left-wing members of the Congresso Nacional had lost all their legal rights.69
As the coup began, the US State Department began an operation it dubbed Brother Sam, and made tankers, ammunition, and aircraft carriers available to the conspirators.70 None of these were needed. The Brazilian Congress declared the presidency “vacant,” in clear violation of the constitution. Then, after that first Institutional Act removed about forty of their left-wing colleagues from office, 361 of Brazil’s remaining lawmakers voted to install General Castelo Branco as president. Almost all of Brazil’s media supported the coup.71 US assistance began to pour back in.72
With Jango gone, the military delivered a very different kind of speech at the 1964 memorial of the 1935 Intentona. General Pery Constant Beviláqua declared, “The fatherland is here! There it is in this beautiful flag! As we contemplate it, we feel your presence, you heroes of November 1935!”73
Ambassador Lincoln Gordon called the 1964 coup “the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century.”74
As Brazilian historian Marco Napolitano puts it, “Just as in a Hollywood film, there was a happy ending (for the plotters, that is). The communist bad guys and their sympathizers were deposed. The good guys were in power. And best of all: this was achieved without the United States needing to appear as a visible agent of the conspiracy.”75
This was huge, and novel. In Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958) and Cuba (1961), anyone who was paying attention knew that Washington had been behind the regime change operations. These very obvious signs of US intervention had not only tainted Washington’s image worldwide—they had undermined the efficacy of the states they installed when they were victorious. Guatemala’s government fell apart quickly after the CIA-backed coup, as did the Shah’s government in Iran, eventually.
This achievement in Brazil in 1964 was not only possible because of the new tactics JFK put in place to build alliances with the military. The United States also got lucky. And importantly, Brazil had its own, very deep anticommunist tradition, built on five centuries of fear of the black, the poor, and the violent and marginalized, and with its own, incredibly effective, myths and annual rituals.
Despite his support among the population, the legally elected Jango did not mount a counteroffensive. He likely believed that this, like other coups in Brazilian history, would be a minor reset to the system, and that he would be able to regroup and run in the next election. He was wrong. Brazil would not hold another democratic election for twenty-five years. Washington’s commitment to military-led modernization remained strong during the Johnson administration, and Brazil was now one of the most important US allies in the Cold War. Indeed, Latin America’s largest country would soon play a crucial role in flipping other countries into the Western camp.
6
The September 30th Movement
THE COUP IN LATIN AMERICA reverberated around the globe, and made its way to Indonesia. The mainstream press in Indonesia covered it; so did the communist
People’s Daily. A new English-language publication run out of Jakarta called the Afro-Asian Journalist said the Brazilian “military junta” helped to carry out a “US imperialist plot.”1 That article may have been translated by Francisca, who worked there now.
In the early 1960s, Francisca became more involved in politics than ever before. It wasn’t just her—the country had moved to the left, and society in general was infused with revolutionary energy, after the bombings carried out by the US and as the campaign for West New Guinea heated up. But it was Francisca’s exceptional language skills that brought her right into the center of world history.
After a decade working in the library, and with her children now in school, she began giving private English lessons to embassy staff from all around the world. She started off with the wife of the Hungarian chancellor; she ended up teaching Russian embassy staff too, and then an official from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (usually called “North Vietnam” at the time in the West). She would give classes at the embassies or at the lavish residences of the ambassadors themselves, around central Jakarta and the upscale Senopati neighborhood, and more often than not she would get to chatting about international politics as they practiced. When Castro’s government sent its first-ever ambassador to Indonesia, Benigno Arbesú Cadelo, he got lessons from Francisca too.
As a matter of course, all Francisca’s new clients were from socialist countries. This was the social circle that she and her husband ran in. By this point, Zain was a relatively influential figure on the left.2
Sukarno, for his part, went to Havana to visit Fidel and Che. He selected a trusted friend from the days of the revolution, A. M. Hanafi, to serve as ambassador, and Indonesia and Cuba began working on a “tricontinental” conference, which would expand the 1955 “Afro-Asian” conference to include Latin America. The entire Third World united.
Sukarno was again talking about the unity of Marxism, Islam, and nationalism, and repackaged it into one of his trademark acronyms—NASAKOM, for Nasionalisme, Agama (Religion), and Komunisme. He talked of forming a NASAKOM cabinet, but the right wing of Indonesian politics blocked the Communists.3 General Nasution, head of the Armed Forces and point man for Washington, told Ambassador Howard Jones in 1960 that the military would never allow the PKI to participate at the executive level of government.4
In reality the three political forces in the country were not nationalism, religion, and communism but rather the PKI, Sukarno, and the military. The president would use his personal influence to play rivals against each other, and maintain a delicate balance. Unlike in Brazil, fanatical anticommunism did not have widespread support in Indonesian society. Despite what military leaders said to Americans in private, they were not opposed to the left in general, and they often echoed Sukarno’s revolutionary language in their literature and public statements. The entire country was essentially anti-imperialist, by definition.
In early 1963, the countries brought together by the Bandung Conference founded the Afro-Asian Journalist Association at a Jakarta conference. Francisca was asked to serve as an official interpreter at the meeting, and she stayed on as they founded the Afro-Asian Journalist, published by the Lumumba Foundation (named after murdered Congolese leader) in Jakarta. They kept her busy translating pieces from multiple languages and a wide range of countries. The Afro-Asian Journalist published what has been called “socialist cosmopolitan journalism,” and viewed world struggles as one interconnected fight. The magazine was much more eclectic and liberal than many of the world’s actually existing socialist publications; the editors valued cultural pluralism and artistic innovation, publishing anti-imperialist cartoons and features from a wide range of global contributors.5
This was an exciting job for Francisca—not only because she got to travel the world, meeting revolutionary leaders across Africa and Asia. It looked like the dreams she had nurtured since she was a little girl were on the way to being realized. At the end of 1963, Jakarta served as host for the GANEFO, or the “Games of the New Emerging Forces” (characteristically, Sukarno gave them an acronym). This was an Olympic Games for the Third World, and its slogan was “Onward! No Retreat!” The games originally came about because of a fight that broke out when Indonesia excluded the Republic of China (Taiwan) and Israel from the 1962 Asian Games. The Western-led International Olympic Committee suspended Indonesia from its games in retribution, so he turned around to put on an anti-imperialist games, which the IOC didn’t like one bit. But that’s not what Francisca remembered about the “Games of the New Emerging Forces.” She was struck, for life, by seeing an event organized entirely by people from the Third World, and by the athletic and cultural performances put on that week in Jakarta.
“For the first time in my life, I became aware that I didn’t actually come from an uncultured or backwards people, and the other peoples of Africa and Asia weren’t backwards either. I had always been told, and even thought, that we were very stupid Indonesians who didn’t know what we were doing, trying to build a country without any education or resources,” she said. She was now almost forty years old. “We played our own sports, put on our own dances. This was really an awakening for us. It felt like this was what the West had been trying so hard to keep down, for centuries, and it was finally revealed.”
Even her husband’s Communist Party felt more independent than ever before. In the 1960s, the PKI had increasingly moved closer to China’s side in the Sino-Soviet split, partly because Beijing was more supportive of Indonesia in its territorial conflicts. But technically the PKI was still ideologically committed to the Soviet Union’s anti-Stalinist line. These were the years in which Mao was sidelined as a result of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958. Suspicious that the Soviets were trying to hold him back, he ignored their agricultural advice and launched a wildly utopian farming program. Millions died in the resulting famine, and the other leaders of the Chinese Communist Party put the blame, rightfully, on Chairman Mao. He was forced to resign from party and national leadership, and starting in 1960 watched as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping took control of the economy, reintroduced small-scale capitalism, and temporarily reduced Mao to an ideological figurehead.6
More importantly, the PKI didn’t think it had to take orders from anybody.7 It was now the third-largest communist party in the world, the largest outside China and the Soviet Union, and its strategy of nonviolent, direct engagement with the masses had led to impressive results. The PKI now had three million card-carrying members. The organizations affiliated with the party—including SOBSI (the Central All-Indonesian Workers Association), LEKRA (the People’s Cultural Institution), BTI (Front of Indonesia), Pemuda Rakyat (People’s Youth), and Gerwani (Women’s Movement)—had at least twenty million members. This added up to nearly a quarter of Indonesia’s population of one hundred million, including children, and nearly a third of the country’s adult registered voters were PKI affiliates.8 They operated openly, in every corner of the country. But at the national level, they relied almost entirely on Sukarno for their influence over policy. They had no other choice. As a means of achieving power, they had neither arms nor the ballot box; they had been peaceful since the expulsion of the Dutch, and deprived of elections by Guided Democracy (and the US-backed Army, which had been so alarmed that the communists kept winning).9
On the other side of the political divide, the military was allied with Muslim groups, and increasingly relied on the enthusiastic support of the United States. The Indonesian military had already radically increased its influence during the CIA’s attempt to break up the country in 1958, and Kennedy and Johnson’s “civic action program,” or CAP, had delivered them the resources and training to emerge as a political and economic force to be reckoned with. The political lines were clear to anyone paying attention—communists and Sukarno on one side; Army and the West on the other.
And Sukarno no longer felt any shyness about taking on the West. His revolution had bested the CIA in 1958; he had gotten
Kennedy and the Netherlands to back down on West New Guinea. With interventions in Brazil and escalating interventions in Vietnam apparently confirming his view of Washington as an imperialist aggressor, he felt he was on the right side of history. So he overestimated his strength, and took on the United Kingdom while problems grew at home.
Konfrontasi
Malaya, a colonial possession covering the Malaysian peninsula from the Thai border down to the tip of Singapore, was one of Britain’s last and most important territories in Asia. When London finally decolonized the region and began to create the new country of Malaysia, Sukarno became adamantly opposed to the form it took. He believed that the English were employing imperial trickery to weaken revolutionary forces in Asia. He was mostly right. And Howard Jones knew it.10
The British did not want to create a country that was majority Chinese, since too much of Malaya’s population, especially in Singapore, sympathized with communism for their liking. As a solution to this “problem,” London added its possessions on the top half of the huge island of Borneo into what would become Malaysia, and excluded the island of Singapore. This move would combine the entirely distinct peoples of Sarawak, Borneo, and Sabah into the new Malaysia, which would dilute the proportion of ethnic Chinese to levels the British considered acceptable. The southern half of Borneo was part of Indonesia—so Indonesians would share a long border with British colonial territories shoehorned into Malaysia just to dilute the power of leftists. One very rough way to understand this is to imagine that, after revolution swept through the United States, King George III made Protestants in Northern Ireland citizens of Canada, allowing him to make sure loyalists to the crown would win elections in perpetuity north of the US border. This intentional dividing and mismatching of different peoples was employed by the British very famously in Africa and the Middle East, with consequences to this day. President Sukarno also distrusted Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister, because that small city-state had cooperated with the CIA in the 1958 attacks on Indonesia.
The Jakarta Method Page 14