At least, that’s what he told Nury and the family when he arrived back in Havana. Not long after, his job disappeared, because the embassy in Havana disappeared. He and his whole family lost their Indonesian passports.
Fidel, of course, understood. He and Che had built their entire revolution on the premise that Washington could strike to destroy Third World governments at any time, and he had survived countless attempts on his own life. He was hardly surprised that the ambassador and his family were stranded in Havana by the forces of imperialism. Even though Hanafi had lost his job and diplomatic protection, Fidel stepped in, gave them a nice house in the exclusive neighborhood of Cubanacán, and found Hanafi a job giving lectures on Asian history and the Indonesian revolution.
The Tricontinental Conference, officially called the Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, did take place in Havana in January 1966, without the participation of the country that spearheaded the Third World movement. In attendance, however, was Salvador Allende, the Chilean socialist and supporter of the Third World movement, who had been the presidential runner-up to Frei in the 1964 election.55
Nury lost contact with her family and all her friends back in Jakarta; she and her father were considered communists now, and it was dangerous for anyone from their old life to speak with them. She settled into a life in Havana.
Taiwan
The Republic of China, the state set up by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in Taiwan, still insisted on its claim to mainland China and had long been home to active anticommunist crusaders. The small dictatorship run from Taipei paid close attention to the massacre in Indonesia, sponsoring attacks on the Chinese embassy in Jakarta as a way to weaken both Sukarno and Mao’s regime in Beijing.56
In 1966, Taiwan and South Korea—still run by Park Chung Hee, the dictator installed with the help of Marshall Green before Green took over for Howard Jones as US ambassador in Indonesia—came together to found the World Anti-Communist League (WACL).57 Congressman Walter Judd and US religious figures flew out to attend the first meeting.58 The new global organization, built on a structure provided by the existing Asian People’s Anticommunist League, brought together moderate conservatives as well as far-right radical groups that had carried out atrocities for Hitler in World War II in countries like Romania and Croatia.59 It would go on to hold yearly conferences around the world, allowing its members to exchange support, intelligence, and tips for the rest of the Cold War, and was now—alongside the Brazil-founded Tradition, Family, and Property organization—one of two such anticommunist organizations with global reach.
The WACL also began to recruit students for the Political Warfare Cadres Academy, in the Beitou district in Taipei. Like military academies set up by the United States, the Beitou school began to train soldiers for the global anticommunist struggle.
Hawaii
In 1965, just after he retired from the State Department and left Indonesia, former Ambassador Howard Jones took over as chancellor at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. He kept in contact with the embassy and watched as the situation deteriorated rapidly, but had no more control over events.
There at the East-West Center in Honolulu, a young Indonesian employee of the Armed Forces named Lolo Soetoro met and fell in love with an American anthropologist. He wasn’t a soldier, but he worked for the military’s topographical service, and had won a grant to study geography in Hawaii. He was a short, handsome man, from a big Javanese family that had felt the violence of colonialism. In Indonesia’s revolutionary war, the Dutch killed his father and brother, then burned their house down.
In March 1965, Lolo married Ann Dunham, and became the stepfather to her son from a previous marriage with a Kenyan economics student. But then in 1966, as Suharto solidified his control over the country, Lolo was abruptly summoned back home, just like so many other Indonesians around the world. He obeyed, and over the next few months, Ann and her five-year-old son made preparations to go live with him as well.
Barack Obama’s memories of life as a young boy in Jakarta from 1967 to 1971, published in his book Dreams from My Father, provide a vivid picture of life in the capital as Suharto’s government, and the US State Department, attempted to move on from the violence they had just finished inflicting on the country.
The rule was silence. At first, neither young Barry, as he was then known, nor Ann knew why Lolo had come back, or the nature of his work. Barack Obama remembers that soon after they arrived, they were driving, and his mother used the word “Sukarno” in a sentence.
“Who’s Sukarno?” Barry yelled from the backseat.
Lolo ignored the question.
He was working in West Papua, surveying the area that Sukarno had won from the Dutch with Kennedy’s help just a few years before. Lolo would go on trips, Obama remembers, and come back with wild animals for his adventurous young stepson to admire.
But Ann and Barry both noticed that Lolo had changed since Hawaii: “It was as if he had pulled into some dark hidden place, out of reach, taking with him the brightest part of himself. On some nights, she would hear him up after everyone else had gone to bed, wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets.”
To busy herself, and fight the loneliness, Ann got a job at the embassy Howard Jones had left two years earlier. It was there she realized how ugly, and racist, the old white men working for her government could be. They’d insult the locals, until they realized she was married to one, and try to walk their comments back. She realized that some of these men, the occasional supposed “economist or journalist,” would mysteriously disappear for months at a time, and it was never clear what these secretive men were really doing.
It was also there that she found out, very slowly, what had happened just before they arrived. “Over lunch or casual conversation, they would share with her things she couldn’t learn in the published news reports,” Obama wrote.
Innuendo, half-whispered asides; that’s how she found out that we had arrived in [Jakarta] less than a year after one of the more brutal and swift campaigns of suppression in modern times. The idea frightened her, the notion that history could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the streets; the way people could continue about their business beneath giant posters of the new president as if nothing had happened…
The more she found out, the more she asked Lolo, and the more frustrated she became as he refused to answer. Finally, one of his cousins explained the situation, and told her to try to be understanding.
“You shouldn’t be too hard on Lolo,” the cousin said. “Such times are best forgotten.”
They grew further apart as he took a new job, working for Unocal, the US energy company. She didn’t want to go to his company dinner parties, where Texas oilmen bragged about bribing officials and their wives complained about the quality of the Indonesian help. It became clear to her, and to him, that they were American, and privileged in a way Lolo was not, and that as a result he was bound to a life that maybe they did not want. Ann could speak out, knowing she would never lose her American citizenship or the comforts back home. But Lolo was constantly forced into painful moral dilemmas; people in his world were forced either to stay silent and try to get ahead in life, or to speak up and face the risk of poverty, starvation, even death. She couldn’t stay there anymore.
Once, before they returned to Hawaii, Barry had the idea of asking Lolo if he had ever seen a man killed:
He glanced down, surprised by the question.
“Have you,” I asked again.
“Yes,” he said.
“Was it bloody?”
“Yes.”
I thought for a moment. “Why was the man killed? The one you saw?”
“Because he was weak.”
“That’s all?”
Lolo shrugged and rolled his pant leg back down. “That’s usually enough.
Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man’s land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her.” He paused to take another sip of water, then asked, “Which would you rather be?”60
9
Jakarta Is Coming
Paradigm Shift
The governments established in Brazil in 1964 and in Indonesia in 1965 were not Washington’s perfectly obedient servants. They remained nationalist, in a way, and pushed back, at times, against the United States. Nor were they “neoliberal” in the sense that word is used today. The state remained significantly involved in the economy and attempted to guide national “development.” They were simply capitalist—well, a certain type of capitalist—authoritarian regimes, well integrated into the expanding Western system.
But they sure had a lot in common, and these two anticommunist dictatorships were the best allies that Washington’s foreign interventions had ever created. Things worked out so well that the US government and its allies began to use them as a model. Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, began working with the gringos to fight communism and create copycat regimes in its neighborhood. Indonesia, the largest country in Southeast Asia, would use anticommunism as an excuse to expand its influence eastward with Washington’s approval, and the leader of Southeast Asia’s second-largest country soon used a script similar to Suharto’s in order to consolidate his own right-wing dictatorship.
Both military dictatorships, Brazilian and Indonesian, would quibble with Washington over this or that economic issue or foreign policy decision, but the big questions were settled. They were in the Western camp, and fiercely opposed to communist expansion. They were porous to international investment, and happy to export raw materials to rich countries under the existing terms governing the international economy. They certainly were not trying to rewrite the rules of the global economy, or use the power of a unified Third World to shift influence back to the majority of the world’s peoples, to those who had been structurally disadvantaged by centuries of colonialism. They took advice from Western advisers and US-trained economists. In Indonesia, this was the “Berkeley Mafia,” a set of economists trained at the University of California who worked with Suharto.1 In Brazil, the coup was aided by the conspiring and propagandizing of the US-funded Instituto de Pesquisas e Estudos Sociais (Research and Social Studies Institute), which remained active under the dictatorship until 1972.
Both regimes were strongly influenced by Modernization Theory. And both countries began to experience economic growth. That was almost entirely sucked up by a small elite, but the GDP growth counted to foreign investors, and they could be sold as success stories. And in both cases, the countries had stable governments made up of local rulers who could trace their legitimacy to some Brazilian or Indonesian past, rather than appearing to their populations and the world as the obvious imposition of Washington.
In the long term, this was all much better than what had been created in Guatemala or Iran in the 1950s. Guatemala had plunged into a brutal civil war. Iran’s government alienated its neighbors and much of the population, and this would explode very dramatically in Washington’s face in the next decade.
Both Indonesia and Brazil were anticommunist dictatorships, and this doesn’t only have consequences on the international stage. Internally, when anticommunism is the ruling ideology, almost the national religion, any legitimate complaint from below can easily be dismissed as communist. Anything that would be an obvious inconvenience to the small clique of rich families that run the country can be easily categorized as dangerous revolution, and cast aside. This includes any whiff of socialism or social democracy, any land reform, and any regulation that would reduce monopoly power and allow for more efficient development and market competition. It includes unions and any normal demands for workers’ rights.
No one seriously pretended Brazil or Indonesia was a democracy. But this is not how capitalism is supposed to work, either—this arrangement may be just as far from the system that economics textbooks describe as Soviet society was from the sketches of socialism provided by Karl Marx. In capitalism, feudal lords are not supposed to be running much of the country as their own personal fiefdoms. Market inefficiencies—like massive corruption—are supposed to disappear as the result of competition. There is supposed to be a give-and-take between the various elements in the economy. There is supposed to be space for new and innovative firms to emerge, challenge entrenched interests, and diversify national production. But in the system set up in Brazil and Indonesia, the logic of survival required people to attach themselves to a corrupt, rapacious, and wasteful apparatus at the top of society or risk falling down into the abyss themselves, and become a poorly paid worker in the extraction machine.
Young Barack Obama had seen what this dynamic did to his stepfather. “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford,” Lolo told Barack’s mother. Lolo did understand. “She didn’t know what it is like to lose everything, to wake up and feel her belly eating itself… without absolute concentration, one could easily slip, tumble backward.”2
There’s a term that broadly describes this kind of economic arrangement. The people of Indonesia and Brazil lived under “crony capitalism.”
This was a very different reality from that of Washington’s European, capitalist allies. Francisca and her family arrived in Holland in 1968, and saw immediately how different Western Europe’s dynamic, successful societies were from the Suharto regime.
The Communist Party had won a few seats in the most recent Dutch election, and participated in Parliament. In France and Italy, the communist parties aligned with Moscow were still major players. The PCF—Parti Communiste Français—got more than 20 percent of the vote in 1967 and formed parliamentary opposition with the Socialists and Radicals.3 The Italian Communists had gotten second place in the previous election, and held solid chunks of the country as their loyal base. In West Germany, there was no influential communist party. But the main center-left party, the second-place Social Democrats, was founded as a Marxist party while Marx was still alive, and its leaders had chosen a more moderate path than the Leninists because of their success working within capitalist democracy.
The last time Francisca had seen Western Europe, just after the war, it was very different. Back in the 1940s, access to meat and butter was strictly limited, and everyone was scrambling to rebuild their lives. In the 1960s it was just, rich and relaxed. The region’s economies had been rebuilt along more American lines thanks to the Marshall Plan. But these were not fanatically anticommunist nations when it came to their own affairs. Certainly not as much as the US, and nowhere near as much as Indonesia or Brazil. Even though the supposed Red Menace was just a few miles to the east, ready to swallow them up, Western Europeans were far less afraid of it than the United States, sitting half a world away.
It was very clear to Francisca why Europeans were allowed to experiment with social democracy and even communist politics, while her country had been taken away from her forever.
“Racism, very simply. White Europeans are offered tolerance and sympathetic treatment, while we are not.”
When Frank Wisner and Howard Jones were working to re-engineer West Germany’s financial system after World War II, the US government wiped out all public and private debt as they created the new deutsche mark. One shudders to think how a major Third World leader perceived as anti-American or “communist” would have been treated if his country tried the same thing after a war of independence.
In Western Europe’s capitalist democracies, moderate and radical left-wing parties alike served as constant critics of the economic order from within the system without ever taking it over entirely. Of course, the CIA was still active in Europe, scheming in ways we still don’t really understand. The Operation Gladio “stay-behind” networks that grew out of Wisner’s early days continued into the 1980s. But when Eur
opean governments shifted too far right for citizens, voters shifted to the parties on the left, and vice versa, and that was allowed.
Why did Cold War Washington let Western Europe “get away” with all this light socialism when similar policy orientations led to violent intervention in the Third World? Was it only that, as Francisca said, Americans simply trusted their European cousins—who were white, and therefore responsible—to handle the task of managing democracy? A complementary explanation might be that these countries, some still overseeing remnants of colonial empire, were incredibly rich and powerful. They were much harder to push around, even if Washington had wanted to, and—perhaps more importantly—they sat at the top of the world economy. They were being fully integrated into the US-led system, and so there was much less of a risk they would try to radically reshape the global order, because it had served them quite well.
There was no opposition allowed in Brazil or Indonesia, however, which meant that elites could get away with everything. Venality and violence ruled the day in Jakarta and Brasília. With a population too terrified to speak up, corruption exploded. In the early days of the Suharto regime, US oil executives bragged that they were taking advantage of exactly those dynamics as they dined in front of Barack Obama’s mother. His government, along with the US-backed Mobutu regime in the Congo, would go on to set world-historical records for corruption.4 Of course, the regime that Suharto set up was founded on mass violence. And by the late 1960s, Indonesia was operating a system of US-supported concentration camps comparable to the worst years of the Soviet Union.5
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