Nixon was very impressed with Médici. He privately told Secretary of State William Rogers that he wished Médici were “running the whole continent.” Then, before the general left the United States, Nixon made a toast at a farewell banquet. He proclaimed: “Where Brazil goes, Latin America will follow.”32
The same year, back in the United States, former Ambassador Howard P. Jones published his memoir on Indonesia, The Possible Dream, reflecting on the failures of US policy in Asia. It didn’t make much of a splash. At the same time, the world was living through another anticommunist massacre. The Communist Party of Sudan, the largest of the remaining Bandung-era communist parties (in the 1960s, it was in third place, behind the parties in Indonesia and Iraq, both of which had since been annihilated), attempted a coup against a new regime that was trying to destroy it. When the coup failed, the Gaafar Nimeiry government liquidated the opposition: the order was to “destroy anyone who claims there is a Sudanese Communist Party.” This didn’t make much of a splash in the West, either.33
Operation Jakarta
As the Brazilian government collaborated with right-wing forces in Chile, the word “Jakarta” was put to new use. In both countries, the capital of Indonesia now had the same meaning.
Operação Jacarta, or “The Jakarta Operation,” was the name of a secret part of an extermination plan, according to the documentation compiled by Brazil’s Truth Commission. Testimony gathered after the fall of the dictatorship indicates Operação Jacarta may have been part of Operação Radar, which was aimed at destroying the structure of the Brazilian Communist Party. The goal of Operação Jacarta was the physical elimination of communists. It called for mass murder, just as in Indonesia. Before the Jakarta Operation, the dictatorship had aimed its violence at open rebellions. Operação Jacarta was a hidden plan to expand state terror to Communist Party members operating openly with civil society groups or in the media.34
The Brazilian public would not hear the words Operação Jacarta until three years later. But in Chile, the word “Jakarta” made a very public arrival.
Around Santiago, especially in the eastern part of the city—up in the hills, where the well-to-do people lived—someone began to plaster a message on the walls. It took a few forms.
“Yakarta viene.”
“Jakarta se acerca.”
That is: “Jakarta is Coming.”
Or sometimes, simply, “Jakarta.”
The events in Indonesia had been a part of right-wing discourse for years. Most significantly, Juraj Domic Kuscenic, a Croatian anticommunist who wrote in right-wing outlets like El Mercurio and had maintained close contact with Pátria y Libertad since 1970, had made frequent references to it since the 1960s.35
The first record of “Jakarta” appearing as a threat was in a January 1972 edition of El Rebelde, the official MIR newspaper. The cover asked, “What is Djakarta?” and on the inside showed a photo of the word slapped onto a wall. In a small article, “La Via Indonesia de Los Fascistas Chilenos,” the paper attempted to explain what the message meant. The Indonesian Communist Party had played an active role in an “independent, progressive” state, and then—overnight—all that was left of its members was a “sea of blood.”36 At this point, not all of the left knew the Indonesian story, and the idea of a wave of violence here seemed far-fetched.
The second article on Jakarta came out in February 1972 in Ramona, a Communist Party youth magazine. It claimed that the right wing had adopted something called “Plan Djakarta,” and said it had gotten the plan from David Rockefeller or Agustín Edwards (the owner of El Mercurio). “The Chilean extreme right wants to repeat that massacre,” the article explained. “What does that mean concretely? The terrorists have a plan which consists of killing the entire Central Committee of the Communist Party, the top of the Socialist Party, the national directors of CUT, the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Chile union organization, leaders of social movements, and all prominent figures on the Left.” The article was published on February 22, signed by Carlos Berger, the Communist Party member who had argued with Carmen Hertz about left-wing tactics and the meaning of the Indonesian massacre when she was back at the University of Chile.37 Carlos and Carmen Hertz were now married.
Wall painting was a popular political device in Santiago in the early 1970s. On the left, volunteer collectives painted murals with elaborate images created by young artists inspired both by famous international muralists, such as Diego Rivera in Mexico, and by Chile’s indigenous Mapuche culture. On the right, money pouring in from Washington or supplied by local elites was used to contract professional painters, who were both more efficient and less talented, because they were used to plastering simple advertising messages. Patricio “Pato” Madera, a founding member of the left-wing Ramona Parra Brigade of muralists, recognized the “Jakarta” graffiti as the handiwork of the same class of hired hands who had been painting right-wing slogans in recurring terror campaigns since 1964. But this was an escalation. It was a mass death threat.38
In addition to painting walls, they also sent out postcards. They arrived at the homes of officials in the left-wing government and Communist Party members.
Sometime in 1972, Carmen Hertz and her husband got one. The paper was thin and flimsy. On top, it said “Jakarta is Coming.” On the bottom was the geometric spider, the Pátria y Libertad logo.
The terror campaign worked. Carmen and Carlos lived a life of twenty-four-hour anxiety. They were on permanent “maximum alert.” All around them were sabotage, threats, and aggression. Only in her twenties, Carmen had been hired to work as a lawyer in the Allende government’s land reform program, and had seen just how violent the opposition could be. In addition to party activities and journalism, Carlos helped with public relations at the Finance Ministry. They both suspected that Washington was intentionally wrecking the economy. And mindful of domestic threats, the two of them often slept at work. They would only stay at home now and then, and never for too many days in a row. In the streets, they’d often exchange words with members of Tradición, Família y Propriedad (TFP), the Chilean chapter of the anticommunist group founded in 1960 in Brazil. In Santiago, TFP youth would wear medieval-style tunics, and were often protesting in the streets, ready to yell at Carmen. But when she got the postcard—“Yakarta se acerca”—she felt even more in imminent danger.
After she read it, Carmen heard a loud pounding on her door. And then shouting: “Comunista!” She yelled back. She took her newborn baby, Germán, in her arms, grabbed a pistol hidden in the house, and ran to the street, pointing it back and forth wildly. She shot it into the sky. She only realized later, as her heart stopped pounding so loudly, that she was still holding on to Germán as she fired. She couldn’t sleep at home that night, so she tried to flag down a bus to get to Carlos’s childhood home. None came, so she walked down the chilly streets of Santiago, with the baby gripped tightly against her body.
The rifts in Chilean society split Carmen’s own family down the middle. She knew that her mother, whom she loved, may have been more sympathetic to those right-wingers than she was to her own daughter. It was always patient Carlos who tried to mend their relationship, who always insisted on visiting Germán’s grandmother, and tried to laugh and calm them down as they inevitably fought.39
But Carmen and Carlos thought history was on their side. They were at battle, yes—but they were playing by the rules, they had the people behind them, and so they thought they would win. They also believed the country was suffering from foreign sabotage, and on this count they were certainly right. The CIA, working with its far-right partners, was trying to ruin the economy, and doing its best to make it look like it was Allende’s fault.
The most obvious problem for Allende’s government was probably a nationwide strike in October 1972. Truckers—who were indirectly receiving funding from Washington—brought transportation to a halt, meaning regular people were left without basic supplies. Once the strike started, the CIA did its best to ke
ep it going.40
It was not just economic sabotage, however. “Track two never really ended,” said one CIA officer, meaning that since 1970, the Agency had never stopped looking for ways to organize a coup. The officer’s notes from the time record Kissinger asking, “Since Allende is holding himself out as a moderate, why not support extremists?”41
The thing about destabilizing a country is you don’t need surgical precision. A pretty big hammer works. Soon Chile was in chaos, and as a result Allende was forced to skip his much-anticipated trip to the Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Algeria.42
But there were still two major problems. First, Allende would be in power for at least another three years, and the left still had plenty of support among the public. Still, the same circumstance had not stopped the coup in Brazil. The second problem, the real obstacle, was that Carlos Prats, the man who took over as head of the Armed Forces after René Schneider, was also a constitucionalista. He saw that there was an economic crisis, and that conservatives were clamoring for a military coup. But he was loyal to the Schneider Doctrine, and to democracy, so he refused to step outside of his legal role. Allende remained in power.
At the end of 1972, the world gained another anticommunist dictatorship. Since 1970, students had been protesting the government of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, both for his blatant corruption and his government’s collaboration with the US war in Vietnam. The Philippines was the site of Washington’s largest experiment with direct colonial rule, and its independence had been carefully managed to keep Manila in the Western camp, ever since the CIA had defeated the left-nationalist Huks using terror and psychological warfare in 1954. US bases in the Philippines were used in 1958 when the CIA attempted to break up Indonesia. The right-wing Marcos, re-elected under slightly suspicious circumstances in 1968, and his wife, Imelda, were close friends of California Governor Ronald Reagan, who attended the gala opening of Imelda’s lavish, multimillion-dollar Cultural Center.43
Some of the anti-Marcos students were followers of Communist José Maria “Joma” Sison, a Maoist literature professor inspired by Lumumba, Castro, and Western New Left intellectuals. Sison studied in Indonesia before the fall of Sukarno and came to the conclusion in 1965–66, just like Pol Pot, that the unarmed PKI had left itself too vulnerable. In 1968, he founded the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), which relied on guerrilla groups in the countryside rather than the open, mass party tactics the PKI employed. (Sison told me that what he saw in Indonesia in 1965 convinced him the CPP had to be armed and clandestine, and the party is active to this day.)44
But many of those anti-Marcos protesters were simply supporters of the centrist Liberal Party. Marcos himself was behind others. “Disorders must now be induced into a crisis so that stricter measures can be taken,” he wrote. “A little more destruction and vandalism, and I can do anything.”45
Marcos and his defense secretary, Juan Ponce Enrile, repeatedly warned of a communist threat. Then, on September 22, 1972, Enrile faked an attempt on his own life. He took a different car as gunmen lit up the car he was supposed to be in. He and Marcos, who helped plan the ruse, said God had saved him. Of course, they blamed the communists. They also claimed, on the same day, that all of this left them no choice but to declare martial law. Military units fanned out to arrest opposition leaders, the first of whom was the Liberal Party Senator Benigno Aquino Jr. Suharto already had an anticommunist ally in Marcos, but now he—and Washington—had a friendly authoritarian regime in Southeast Asia’s second most-populous country. Marcos, with active US support, created his own version of crony capitalism with record-setting levels of corruption. He went on to kill thousands of people, often dumping their bodies in public in order to terrorize his enemies.46
Marineros Constitucionalistas
As 1973 started, Pedro Blaset was twenty-three, a working-class sailor in Chile’s traditionally more upper-class, conservative Navy. He was lucky enough to hop on a cruiser trip to Switzerland for six months, and had missed much of the radicalization back home. In Europe, he and his shipmates were shocked at how liberally navies were organized in contrast to the strict, Prussian traditions in Chile. When he first entered the service, he was beaten, as a form of hazing. And when he and some friends celebrated Allende’s victory in 1970, they were reprimanded. The deeply conservative naval officers, usually privately educated and self-consciously aristocratic, had not even liked the CIA-backed Eduardo Frei government much. As Blaset understood it, their main problem was that his modest reforms brought some members of the middle class into their elite schools, and their children were forced to study with their inferiors.
But when Pedro got back to Santiago in February 1973, things were different. The Navy was likely the most anticommunist branch of the military, and his colleagues weren’t hiding their feelings. The high officers talked about their collaborations with the Brazilian embassy. They spoke about passing weapons to Pátria y Libertad. They savagely criticized Army leader Prats for his constitutionalist stance, especially after the left did well in the March elections. They began to talk, quite openly, about something called “El Plan Yakarta.”
Pedro had heard tales about Jakarta before. Not long after he entered the Navy in 1966, sailors began trading horror stories from a particularly strange trip through Southeast Asia. They said they’d witnessed the carnage caused by an “extermination” program in the Indonesian capital. Stories about loose heads on spikes terrified the young sailors, as they took in tales of fantastical violence from a distant land.47
But when his superiors started talking about El Plan Yakarta in 1973, they were being very specific, and very serious. The plan was to kill around ten thousand people, the left and its core supporters, as a way of ensuring a stable transition to a right-wing government. Pedro and his friend Guillermo Castillo heard this being discussed on more than one boat.
“If we just put the Jakarta plan into place, kill ten or twenty thousand, then that’s it,” one officer said. “Then that’s all the resistance and we win.” Perhaps their superiors figured their underlings were on board with this kind of strategy, or at least respected the internal Navy hierarchy enough to keep quiet.
But this wasn’t normal to low-ranking sailors. “Who are they talking about killing? Our families?” Pedro asked a few of his closest friends. “What happened to Chile while I was gone?”
They decided to meet up, form a small, clandestine constitucionalista group within the Navy, and talk about the situation. They figured their oath was to the country, not their immediate superiors, so they decided to pass a warning on to politicians.
They were discovered. Pedro and Guillermo were imprisoned by the Navy, and tortured repeatedly. They would not see the light of day until well after a Chilean version of Plan Yakarta was indeed put into effect.
Operação Jacarta. Yakarta Viene. Plan Yakarta. In both Spanish and Portuguese, in all three ways it was used, it’s clear what “Jakarta” meant, and it’s a far cry from what the word meant back in 1948, when the Truman administration was guided by the “Jakarta Axiom.” Back then, “Jakarta” stood for independent Third World development that Washington need not view as a threat. Now “Jakarta” meant something very different. It meant anticommunist mass murder. It meant the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States. It meant forced disappearances and unrepentant state terror. And it would be employed far and wide in Latin America over the next two decades.
Operation Condor
In 1973, Allende fell. He died, and so did the Chilean dream of democratic socialism. In its place emerged a violent anticommunist regime that worked with Brazil and the United States to form an international extermination network. Their murderous terror was not only reserved for the left. They also unleashed it on former allies who got in the way.
In the months before September 11, 1973, Chile had a good deal in common with Brazil in 19
64. Private-sector groups were funding opposition groups, pro-“tradition” and “family” groups were organizing protests, and the right-wing media was spreading fears of a putative left-wing plot. The CIA reported at the end of 1972 that Chilean opposition groups were receiving “economic assistance and weapons such as machine guns and hand-grenades” from Brazil’s dictatorship.48
But the days after September 11, 1973, looked more like Indonesia in 1965, though on a smaller scale—at first. While Brazil’s military government moved only slowly toward terror, General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship began with an explosion of violence.
The first coup attempt came in June. The “Tanquetazo,” as it was called, failed largely because Carlos Prats, leader of the Armed Forces, put down the military rebels allied with Pátria y Libertad. Prats was not going to oversee the Chilean Army while it betrayed its historic mission.
In the weeks that followed, left-wing publications began to report that Pátria y Libertad and other right-wing forces behind the coup had planned to activate Plan Yakarta if they had succeeded. It seems they had reason to be worried. One politician, Domingo Godoy Matte, from the right-wing National Party, actually stood up in Congress and declared that they—the Nationalists—“estarán aquí hasta que se produzca el Yakarta” (“will be here until Jakarta is produced”).49 This inspired a wave of shocked condemnations on the center and left, furious accusations across a range of publications that the right was openly planning “mass murder.” The Socialist Party paper displayed a postcard that had been sent to its editorial director with the words “Jakarta is coming.” The paper blamed the United States.50
Strangely, right-wing media began to run an inverted version of the “Jakarta” terror meme. El Mercurio, the CIA-funded paper, reproduced the story that communists had massacred generals in Indonesia, and could do so in Chile, too.51
The Jakarta Method Page 24