Later, he reflected on this more deeply. He thought back on his own life, to his time in Kansas in the late 1950s and early ’60s. He thought of those Indonesian military men coming over to eat Indonesian food at his home and then going out on the town. It was then that those men were being trained, by the United States, in the ways of violent, fanatical anticommunism. It was those men who returned to Jakarta, after nights of strip clubs and heavy drinking with Benny, to help carry out the world’s most notorious right-wing extermination program. That’s where it all started.
Back in Kansas, he thought. That’s why the name of the city I grew up in, where I studied, where I learned about socialism and marched against colonialism and racism, has become a synonym for mass murder.
10
Back Up North
New Theaters
In 1975, the Cold War underwent some geographic shifts. Washington abandoned some of the regions where it had made constant war on communism, while the anticommunist regimes it had helped create continued to scorch the earth all around them.
The United States left South Vietnam. In the Western world, this meant that Saigon “fell.” From the perspective of Hanoi, the Vietnamese had only achieved what they should have gotten, through the referendum that Washington had helped cancel, back in 1956. Three million had died, the entire nation was militarized, and huge swathes of the country’s lush jungles were rendered poisonous for generations because of US chemical warfare. After the fall of Saigon, there was no communist-led mass murder of civilians in Vietnam.
The massacres came in Cambodia. In 1970, the United States had orchestrated a coup to oust Prince Sihanouk, and installed Lon Nol, a general who was supposed to be Cambodia’s Suharto. His forces trained in Bandung, not far from the site of Sukarno’s 1955 Afro-Asian Conference.1 During Lon Nol’s rule the United States continued to bomb the country indiscriminately, killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly peasants, in a futile attempt to stop Vietnamese communists from moving through the countryside. The United States dropped three times the tonnage on Cambodia that fell on Japan during World War II, atom bombs included. For the people who survived, the effect of the B-52s on those nearby was reminiscent of the sulfatos in Guatemala: “The terror was complete. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out,” one Vietnamese official remembered later.2
The disregard for life was staggering, and well understood in Southeast Asia. Traumatized refugees flooded Cambodia’s cities. After the US-backed coup that deposed him, the ousted prince, Sihanouk, published a book of memoirs titled My War with the CIA. “We refused to become US puppets, or join in the anti-communist crusade,” he wrote. “That was our crime.”3 He threw his support behind the small, shadowy, and strange group of Marxists he had repressed while in power. The Khmer Rouge, as he called them in the old colonial language, were the only ones fighting against Lon Nol and the US Army, which was wiping out entire swathes of the population. In 1975, the “Red Khmer” took Phnom Penh back from Lon Nol, without Vietnamese assistance. They closed the borders and set up one of the most horrifying regimes of the twentieth century. It would be years before anyone, even their supposed allies in Hanoi, knew what they were doing.
In 1975, Magdalena and Sakono were still in prison. They were still surviving on starvation rations, and forced to endure backbreaking work in Indonesia’s system of concentration camps. For ten years, it had been drilled into them that they were evil, outcast, unwanted. Entirely cut off from family. The tiny bit of rice that prisoners received might have sand or glass in it; they would plant or forage for vegetables to supplement their diets. When working the fields, prisoners were often forbidden from using sickles—because it was one half of the now-banned communist logo.4
On Bali, one group of prisoners would carefully collect and utilize their own feces to fertilize tiny bits of soil and grow vegetables. They would pass the time by singing songs, either those from the days of Sukarno or based on their own experiences. The refrain to one of them, sung in Spanish, came from the title of Fidel Castro’s 1953 speech—“La historia me absolverá”—history will absolve me.5
It was also in 1975 that the withdrawal of another colonial power sent ripples throughout the Third World. The dictatorship in Portugal, which had ruled since 1933, had fallen apart. The United States developed a “contingency plan” to invade parts of Portuguese territory if a government it considered communist took over.6 Lucky for the Portuguese, Washington allowed the elected left-wing (not communist) government to exist. The new Portuguese administration decided on a rapid withdrawal from what was left of its empire.
Suharto looked east, and he pulled out his old bag of tricks. Among Portugal’s newly freed colonies was the small nation of East Timor, which shared an island with Indonesian territory. When East Timor gained its independence, Suharto claimed he was threatened by communism on his borders.
Calling this a wild exaggeration would be generous. Neither China, the Soviet Union, nor Vietnam was backing the tiny country. The party that oversaw the Timorese declaration of independence, FRETILIN, did have a left wing, and some of its members used Marxist language, which was hardly surprising for a Portuguese-speaking national liberation movement at the time. But this was enough for Washington, which was convinced that East Timor could become a “Cuba in Asia”—even though Nixon had already re-established relations with the Communist Party in Beijing. He gave Suharto a “big wink,” and the Indonesian generals quickly drew up Operasi Seroja—Operation Lotus.7
Indonesia invaded in December 1975. The people of East Timor did not want the Indonesian military there. FRETILIN radicalized, and launched a “people’s war” against the invaders. To put down the freedom fighters, the Indonesian Armed Forces killed up to three hundred thousand people.8 From 1975 to 1979, while both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter sat in the White House, Washington’s closest ally in Southeast Asia annihilated up to a third of the population of East Timor, a higher percentage than those who died under Pol Pot in Cambodia.
In former Portuguese colonies in Africa, a different type of bloodshed emerged. In both Mozambique and Angola, full-on Cold War conflicts broke out, with the participation of the world’s greater and lesser powers on both sides. Still under Brezhnev, the Soviet Union had begun to intervene more forcefully in the Third World, believing temporarily, and incorrectly, that the United States would grant the Soviets freedom to intervene, just as they had allowed Washington to meddle with Chile in 1973.9 The United States did not—Washington-backed proxies in both countries, who fought alongside Zaire (as Mobutu’s Congo was called at the time), apartheid South Africa, and Rhodesia, all joined together against Moscow’s favored movements. Cuba sent twenty-five thousand troops to Angola to assist Moscow’s ally. A small number of American and British volunteers, often single, unemployed men responding to magazine classified ads, enlisted to join white supremacist forces in Rhodesia and South Africa.10
Back in formerly Portuguese South America, there was an internal split within Brazil’s dictatorship. Médici was no longer in power, and the new top general, Ernesto Geisel, favored a relaxation of counterinsurgency measures and a so-called abertura, or slow “opening,” of Brazilian society. The problem was that torture and murder—as they often do—had created powerful elements within the state whose privileges derived from the existence of endless war. They opposed the abertura, and favored expanding the violence to include unsuspecting, law-abiding members of the Communist Party.
It is believed that Brazil’s own “Operação Jacarta,” or Jakarta Operation, was a plan that aimed to intensify, rather than moderate, repression, and therefore derail abertura. It is also believed that a beloved journalist named Vladimir Herzog was one of its few victims. Herzog was a popular middle-class newsman who operated very openly. Though no big fan of the USSR (he had been inspired by Alexander Dubcˇek’s “socialism with a human face” in Czechoslovakia), he joined the Brazilian Communist Party in the ear
ly 1970s. The PCB was pursuing a moderate path, building a united “democratic front,” and was one of the most organized groups opposing the dictatorship, along with parts of the Catholic church. In October 1975, Herzog became editor in chief of the public station TV Cultura. A right-wing journalist called the station “TV Viet-Cultura” because of his communist “infiltration.”11
On October 25, 1975, Herzog was called for questioning by the Brazilian Army; he went into the military offices voluntarily; he did not come out. No one bought the official version of the story, that he had killed himself—a grisly photo of his body, slung too close to the ground for hanging to be effective, made the dictatorship’s claims even more patently offensive—and his death galvanized the nation into protest.
Influential members of the Catholic church hierarchy took up the cause of Herzog’s death, and trained increasingly harsh critiques on the military regime.12 Instead of escalating Brazil’s internal war, the “Jakarta Operation” had backfired, and forced the military to back off. Despite the wishes of some hard-line elements, Geisel’s abertura continued.
Brazil started to slide, little by little, away from its more hard-line anticommunist neighbors. Meanwhile, Chile’s Operation Condor continued to expand its activities all around South America, until the continent was a veritable anticommunist killing zone. Thereafter, any real threat to US-aligned authoritarian capitalist development existed mostly in the paranoid minds of the Condor alliance dictators and their US allies. The fanatical anticommunists won the continent.
In 1976, a coup in Argentina brought to power the bloodiest of these regimes. Under General Jorge Rafael Videla, the dictatorship kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared tens of thousands of people. Videla’s regime cast a much wider net than Pinochet’s men did. This period is often called, somewhat incorrectly, the “Dirty War”—but there was no war. It was a top-down anticommunist extermination campaign with ideological roots in Argentina’s homegrown fascist movement.13 “Subversives” were tortured and killed for their real or perceived communism; for their real or perceived atheism; for their real or perceived Jewishness; or just for union activities. Ford Motor Company and Citibank collaborated with the disappearance of union workers.14 Even beards were suspect—that’s why a Brazilian piano player named Tenorinho was brought in, thrown on a parrilla, or grill, for torture in Buenos Aires, and then drowned.15
Representatives from Argentina’s military had already been at the meeting that launched Operation Condor in 1975, and the murderous “Triple A” alliance—the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina—had begun unleashing terror under Isabel Martínez de Perón, who served as president from 1974 to 1976. But the true believers were now in power.
Admiral Emilio Massera declared Argentina was fighting a “Third World War” between “dialectic materialism and idealistic humanism.” This meant removing the influence of Marx, as well as Freud and Albert Einstein.16 General Antonio Domingo explained how this worked: “First we will kill all subversives, then we will kill all of their collaborators, then those who sympathize with subversives, then we will kill those that remain indifferent, and finally we kill the timid.”17
But the Condor alliance didn’t limit their activities to their own continent. They built upon the “stay-behind” armies Frank Wisner had helped to build in Europe to pursue their enemies in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Ireland.18 The men behind Operation Condor often considered the nonviolent democracy and human rights activists operating abroad to be even more dangerous than armed guerrillas at home.19 Most infamously, this logic led US citizen, known CIA contact, and Condor operative Michael Townley to murder former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in the heart of Washington, DC. A car bomb placed on Embassy Row blew Letelier’s legs off, killing him instantly; his twenty-five-year-old American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, staggered from the car and slowly drowned in her own blood.20 Townley is now in FBI witness protection.
In 1978, Ing Giok Tan was admitted to the University of São Paulo (USP). This was a huge accomplishment for an immigrant from a poor Asian country—she would be studying, free, at the best college in Brazil, only fifteen years after she and her family shoved off from Jakarta on that rusty old hospital ship. But for her hardworking family, this seemed natural. She worked like hell at her good—almost entirely white—high school, and her parents put their heads down too, avoiding political conflict like the plague that it had been for their whole lives.
It also felt natural as she drifted toward the left-leaning counterculture at USP. Brazilian universities at the time, especially the elite institutions, were hotbeds of student activism. This wasn’t the staid, ultra-disciplined Communist organization of the 1950s and ’60s; this was a much more eclectic group of kids. This was the era of Tropicália: global rock ’n’ roll devoured and reconstituted as a mix of Brazilian high-art concept and savage indigenous pride; cultural liberation; and, more than anything else, opposition to the censorship imposed by the dictatorship. Ing Giok also realized—very quickly—that there were no black students in her class at USP, either.
It was in this milieu that Ing, as everyone called her now, met her Uruguayan friend Hernán Pietro Schmitt, or “Tupa,” as they called him. He was always terrified of the police, for reasons she didn’t quite understand. He wasn’t even a particularly active or left-wing student. But when he told her, it all made sense—as did his nickname. His father had been a Tupamaro, a member of the Uruguayan left-wing group that had prompted Brazil to threaten invading the neighboring country in 1971. Under the dictatorship that consolidated power in Uruguay starting in 1973, the new anticommunist regime sent men into Hernán’s home and took his father away.
She didn’t know it, but this was the fourth time that Washington’s violent anticommunist campaign had affected her life personally. First, the US-backed military, the nascent “state within a state,” had ignited anti-Chinese riots in her part of Indonesia, forcing her family to flee the country. Second, her family lived through Brazil’s US-backed military coup in 1964. Third, the mass murder in Indonesia demolished life for the relatives who had stayed home. And now, one of her college buddies was the victim of an Operation Condor campaign.
That same year, 1978, alarm bells began to ring far north of São Paulo. A new wave of guerrilla movements seemed to threaten the fragile military oligarchies that had been established by Frank Wisner and the CIA back in the 1950s. So with the help of Washington, some of South America’s most messianic anticommunists turned their attention north. Essentially, Operation Condor was extended to Central America.21
Drain the Sea
The countries of Central America are far more united than the nations of South America. Its peoples know one another well, and they tend to experience the waves of history in a similar fashion. This is especially true of the four most-populous countries in the middle—Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras. (Belize, at the very top, was a British colony; and down at the bottom, Panama took a very different historical path after the US created the nation in order to build a canal.) And world history had crashed over their little subcontinent with punishing violence over the past few centuries. In the late 1970s and ’80s, this process rose to astonishing levels of brutality.
Before this new storm of blood and screams even started, brutal oppression was already the rule for the vast majority of the population. The region was ruled by dictators who rarely bothered to hide their cruelty. The practice of “forced labor”—that is, the enslavement of the indigenous peoples that had started centuries prior—was still widespread.22
In Guatemala, the terror that started in 1954, and accelerated in 1965 after the arrival of John Gordon Mein and John P. Longan, had never stopped. The year those two men arrived, 1965, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama came together to formalize military links and intelligence sharing within El Consejo de Defensa Centroamericana (CONDECA), a kind of proto-alliance to put down the guerrilla threat.23 That threat was real. M
ein himself was killed in 1968 by the FAR, the first rebel group formed in Guatemala in the wake of the 1960 clash over the CIA’s use of a Guatemalan base to train Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion.24
The violence unleashed by the Guatemalan dictatorship during the civil war that followed was indiscriminate. Right-wing terror groups like La Mano Blanca (“The White Hand”), the New Anticommunist Organization, and the Anticommunist Council of Guatemala started their own massacres, with the support of US Green Berets, and these death squads were eventually incorporated into the state.25
The disappearances that started in 1966 had expanded by the 1970s to transform Guatemala’s cities into hunting grounds for any kind of perceived leftist or subversive. The number of people desaparecido by the state rose into the tens of thousands. If you were a union member, a student activist, a left-leaning politician, a critical journalist, or even a homeless child, you knew that the regime might come for you. As tension periodically rose around you, friends disappeared forever; you escalated evasive tactics, then settled back into your “normal” life of low-level terror—if you survived this time. Life was a permanent cat-and-mouse game, and Guatemala City became a deadly, sprawling obstacle course, sometimes for the entire life span of its victims.
Miguel Ángel Albizures, the same little schoolboy who never forgot the trauma of the sulfatos bombs dropped near his school during the US-backed coup in 1954, grew into a union organizer. The unions were not uniformly left-wing. As a teen, not long after the overthrow of Árbenz, he joined the Catholic Christian Workers’ Movement, and by the 1970s he was a bit of a small-time leader. The union movement had moderate communists, and Christian Democrats, as well as some who supported the more radical guerrillas. The government did not care much for these distinctions. In 1977 they busted open the door of a union meeting Miguel was attending, firing their guns. Miguel fled onto to the roof, and jumped from building to building to escape. Another time they shot down several of his colleagues in front of the Coca-Cola factory. He knew he was lucky, in a way, because they apparently didn’t want to simply kill him. They easily could have done that in the street, with some men in a car with machine guns. They wanted to capture, torture, and disappear him, hopefully getting some information along the way and creating mystery around his death. Since that was a little harder to pull off, he kept bobbing and weaving until he found a way out of the country.26
The Jakarta Method Page 26