In February, the soldiers came again. Josefa’s other brother was working in the field, and they lobbed a grenade at him, and killed him. They took more people away that day, and this time they burned down the empty houses as they left.
Antonio Caba Caba, a young boy, realized something was wrong that day when he came back from working in the fields. As he approached his home, he saw his mother standing in the doorway, wearing the long red skirt worn by Mayan women in the region, staring blankly into the distance. What’s wrong, he asked her. She told him about the fires. The soldiers had burned an old woman alive in her home as they left.55
Some people began to discuss running—but there was nowhere to go except into the mountains, where they’d soon run out of food. This was the worst violence their community had ever experienced; they came to the conclusion that finally, it must be over.
They were wrong.
On March 23, the soldiers came back at five in the morning and woke up every single person in Ilom. They were wearing black paint again.
“Come on, there is a town meeting, you are going,” they told Antonio, and Josefa, and everyone else. They walked the villagers to the tiny town square. They sent the men into the little church behind the plaza and the women into the tiny courthouse next door.
Antonio heard one of them fidgeting on the radio, talking to a superior.
“We’re gonna kill the guerrillas,” he said.
One by one, then two by two, they brought men out of the church, stood them in front of the schoolhouse, and shot them. Everyone could see each murder. That was clearly the point. After about a hundred were dead, they stopped.
“We’re only killing the ones that look guilty. The ones that look afraid,” one of the soldiers said.
Other villages weren’t so lucky.56 In many parts of this region, the military simply killed every man, woman, and child. The government had decided that the Ixil were intrinsically communist, or at least very likely to become communist. In Indonesia, it may not have been the case that the mass murder was genocide. It was simply anticommunist mass murder. In Guatemala it was anticommunist genocide.
On March 23, 1982, General Efraín Ríos Montt took power in Guatemala in a military coup. He was an Evangelical Christian—which made him a special favorite of Ronald Reagan—and continued the genocide in a slightly different fashion. Some indigenous people from ethnically suspect communities were herded into state-built aldeas modelos, “model villages” built to help indigenous people start new lives in suitably noncommunist fashion, which often amounted to little more than deadly concentration camps. For many others, the massacres simply continued apace. As was the case in Indonesia, and Brazil and Argentina, Montt’s religious zeal gave the anticommunist violence a theological justification. “They are communists and therefore atheists and therefore they are demons and therefore you can kill them” is how one civil war victim, now the head of one of Guatemala’s most prominent research organizations, summarizes the logic.57 The vast majority of the murdered were practitioners of traditional Mayan religions.
The remaining residents of Ilom were forced into slavery, but this time, they had to work for the military. Antonio was forced to join a militia and grew up “fighting” the guerrillas for the rest of the 1980s. They rebelled quietly, by intentionally missing when shooting at the “enemy.” Josefa quickly married—if she had not, she would have been forced to “marry” one of the soldiers watching over the aldea modelo, forced into sexual slavery like so many of her friends. Their village was liquidated and burned to the ground.
This was all part of Ríos Montt’s new strategy for fighting communism. “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea,” he said. “If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.”58
From 1978 to 1983, the Guatemalan military killed more than two hundred thousand people.59 Around a third of these were taken away and “disappeared,” largely in urban areas. Most of the rest were indigenous Mayans massacred in the open air of the fields and mountains where their families had lived for generations. The Salvadoran civil war took seventy-five thousand lives; again, the majority were innocent people killed by the government. Argentina killed twenty thousand to thirty thousand civilians, and other Operation Condor nations killed tens of thousands more. Anticommunist extermination had spread all across Latin America, always with the assistance of the United States. Taken together, the death toll approaches the estimated size of the 1965–66 massacres in Indonesia.
Even the anticommunists’ great enemy, the supposed reason for all this terror, did not deploy this kind of violence. Using numbers compiled by the US-funded Freedom House organization, historian John Coatsworth concluded that from 1960 to 1990, the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America “vastly exceeded” the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period of time.60
The Fall
The violence in Central America raged on until the fall of the Berlin wall, and then kept going. From 1989 to 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart spectacularly, along with all the states that Moscow directly established in the wake of World War II. The Second World was no more, and its residents experienced this as the literal collapse of their governments. For the rest of the planet, most of which had somehow been affected by the Cold War, some things changed, and some things did not.
In the First World, North Americans and Western Europeans watched triumphantly. Leaders in the West felt vindicated by very persuasive evidence that Soviet Communism was not a sustainable system.
In parts of the Third World, most specifically the regions where the Cold War was still being fought, there was some relief.
Benny was able, finally, to triumph at the UN. He had been lobbying for years to get the US to stop recognizing the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia’s official government, and trying to tell the world about the horrors inflicted by Pol Pot. Benny was influential in getting enough countries on board to end the diplomatic impasse caused by Washington’s stubborn opposition to Hanoi. In 1992, he moved to Siam Reap, the most chaotic part of the country, to try to help put together a new UN-coordinated coalition government.61
In El Salvador, a truce was finally allowed. In 1992, the FMLN rebels simply became a legal party. Historians suspect that probably could have happened long before, if fanatical anticommunism had not led Washington to block any possibility of negotiations.
In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas easily won the 1984 election. Washington told the right-wing opposition not to participate, since the Reagan administration did not want the vote to appear legitimate.62 The Contras never stopped their terrorism. It was clear to everyone, as the country went to the polls again in 1990, that the violence would not stop until the leftists lost power. The Nicaraguan people voted them out, and they left peacefully.
In Afghanistan, where Soviet troops had been trying to prop up a communist ally for nine years, Moscow’s forces retreated, the CIA-backed Islamist fundamentalists set up a fanatical theocracy, and the West stopped paying attention.
In Chile, Pinochet had been removed from power by national plebiscite in 1988, but he remained Army commander in chief until 1998, when he became a senator for life.
For the two biggest anticommunist governments ever set up in the former Third World, the end of the Cold War had an indirect effect. Both Indonesia and Brazil transitioned from authoritarian rule to multiparty democracy. They did so at different times—Brazil started the process well before the fall of the Berlin wall, and Suharto left power almost a decade after it fell. Crucially, however, they both did it the same way. In Brazil and Indonesia, the transition from military dictatorship was carried out in a controlled manner. Negotiated transfers of power both maintained the fundamental social structure the dictatorships were set up to protect and provided impunity for the rulers, who remained wealthy and influential. The elites who felt threatened by social movements in the 1950s and ’60s remained in charge, and the countries were well integrated into the
global capitalist system. This was now the case in almost every country in Latin America, and the vast majority of Southeast Asia. In different ways and to varying degrees, fanatical anticommunism remained a powerful force in both countries and in the surrounding regions. It took different forms, both overt and latent, but it was there, always threatening to reanimate. It certainly did not leave the earth when the putative Soviet threat disappeared.
Nor did Washington change its stance toward Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead of moderating pressure on Havana or trying a different tactic, Washington tightened the screws, passing the Helms-Burton Act in 1992 and penalizing all companies doing business with Cuba. But Cuba remained resilient. Castro buckled down, and the island made it through a so-called “Special Period,” marked by deprivation worse than it had seen since the 1950s, by reintroducing capitalism and relying on tourism.
It’s hard to explain US behavior toward Cuba as a response to the fear of Soviet Communism, or as a defense of freedom. From 1960 to the present, Cuba was very far from the most repressive political system, or the worst violator of human rights, in the hemisphere.
Perhaps Castro had committed the unforgivable sin of very publicly surviving repeated coup and assassination attempts in a way that embarrassed Washington. Or perhaps the real threat Washington perceived was the possibility of a rival model outside the global American-led system, the same thing that we now know bothered US officials about Guatemala in 1954, Bandung in 1955, and Chile in 1973.
There’s another thing the US certainly didn’t change. Immediately after the end of the Cold War, US officials, especially President George H. W. Bush, had talked about a “Peace Dividend.” The idea was that, with Soviet Communism gone, Washington would cut back on military spending and violent foreign engagements. The exact opposite happened. There was a small decrease in spending in the ’90s, and then the Pentagon budget exploded again after the turn of the century. Barack Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, yet when he finished his term in 2016, the United States was actively bombing at least seven countries.63
The past two decades have led the best historians to take a wider view of US behavior. Before and after the Cold War, the United States was always an expansionist and aggressive power.
“In an historical sense—and especially as seen from the South—the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means,” writes Odd Arne Westad. “The new and rampant interventionism we have seen after the Islamist attacks on America in September 2001 is not an aberration but a continuation—in a slightly more extreme form—of US policy during the Cold War.”64
In Africa, the civil wars ended in different ways, but crony capitalism and resource extraction became the rule almost everywhere.65 In Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism was not as clean a process as the West often believed.
Nury, the daughter of Sukarno’s ambassador to Cuba, had moved to Bulgaria with her Bulgarian husband after she left Fidel’s care in Havana. In 1990, Bulgaria held an election. Despite Washington’s generous support for the opposition, the Bulgarian Socialist Party—the new name for the Communists—won. But US and European officials made it clear they were unwilling to deal with the Socialists, and after a period of strife and protest, the Socialists handed power to a coalition government. Over the next few years, living standards dropped precipitously. Nury and her husband, who had been used to high employment and decent public services at least, if not democratic freedoms, watched in horror as the economy shrank for nine years in a row and inflation spiraled out of control.66
“When I finally got to go back to Indonesia, it was shocking to hear what people think communism is,” Nury said. “I lived through it, and they are just wrong. And living in Bulgaria under communism was a hell of a lot better than living in Suharto’s Indonesia.”
In Guatemala, the civil war ended in 1996. The surviving people of Ilom were finally able to return home and reconstruct their tiny village. The only way to get there now, if you don’t have a car, is to climb windy, dangerous roads on a crowded, recycled school bus from the United States. The journey takes two to three days from Guatemala City, about eighty miles away.
The Mayans still wear the red skirts that Antonio’s mother was wearing the day she realized her neighbor had been burned alive. Villagers still farm corn, wake up early, and take horses through the trees to work the fields, and come home at sunset to sit and tell stories in Ixil and laugh.
But to participate in the modern economy that has grown up around them, they also need money. For that, they send their teenage sons and daughters to the United States. Josefa’s son went in 2016, when he was seventeen. Everyone knows that if you go before you turn eighteen, it’s easier to get in the country and stay there. He has a construction job in Florida, where he learned pretty good Spanish. Having paid back his coyote, the man who smuggled him across the border, he can send money home.
Ilom keeps sending more of its youth up north. This is not about love for the United States, or the American dream. They don’t want to go. They know who was responsible for the violence they’d suffered.
“A lot of us, just really a lot of us, have gone to the United States,” said Antonio Caba Caba as he was showing me around Ilom. We walked by the plaza where he watched almost every man he knew get murdered for being some kind of a suspected communist. He said, “I guess it’s funny—well, maybe ‘funny’ isn’t the word—but we know who is responsible for the violence that destroyed this place. We know it was the United States that was behind it. But we keep sending our kids there, because they have nowhere else to go.”
11
We Are the Champions
WHAT KIND OF WORLD DID we get after the Cold War? Who won this war? Who lost? And more specifically, how did the anticommunist crusade concretely affect life for billions of people today? These questions were in the back of my head as I traveled the world, reporting this book. I had been raised with a certain set of answers to the questions. To say that what I learned since I started working on this project shook my faith in those answers would be a severe understatement. But rather than just reformulate the answers myself, I wanted to hear from the people who had lived through this, and felt the conflict most intimately.
So I put the questions directly to the survivors I interviewed in Indonesia and around Latin America. For them, the answer was usually quite simple. I asked Winarso, who is the head of Sekretariat Bersama ’65, or the Unified 1965 Secretariat, a threadbare organization advocating for survivors of the violence in Indonesia.
“The United States won. Here in Indonesia, you got what you wanted, and around the world, you got what you wanted,” he said to me in 2018, sitting on the floor of his modest home in Solo, constantly shifting his weight, trying to avoid further inflaming a painful back injury. I had gotten to know him fairly well over years of interviews he helped organize. He continued, “The Cold War was a conflict between socialism and capitalism, and capitalism won. Moreover, we all got the US-centered capitalism that Washington wanted to spread. Just look around you,” he said, gesturing to his city, and the entire Indonesian archipelago around him.
How did we win, I asked.
Winarso stopped fidgeting. “You killed us.”
Answers like that were very common.
The people I met were not a random selection of the world’s population. These were mostly the victims of, and experts on, anticommunist mass murder programs in the twentieth century. There are important other viewpoints out there. But I’m convinced that the perspectives of people like Winarso, and the experiences of people like Francisca and Carmen and Ing Giok and Sakono, are crucial to understanding how our world turned out.
In 1955, Sukarno and much of the rest of the Third World came together with the intention of changing the relationship between the First and Third World. They believed that after centuries of racist colonialism, it was their time to take their place in world affairs as independent nations, to assert their power
and intelligence and potential, and to rise as equals.
Back then, they were obviously very far behind, and not just symbolically. A quick look at GDP per capita, the size of a country’s yearly economic output divided by the number of inhabitants, in the world’s most-populous countries (see Appendix One) confirms that. The numbers for the US, and the economies of the white, former colonial powers were far, far larger than those in the Third World.
Sukarno thought this would change. Richard Wright, the skeptical African American journalist who covered the 1955 Bandung Conference, thought the Third World movement would succeed, too.1 Colonialism was over. Naturally, these countries would catch up.
But when Winarso waved his hand around him, indicating the current state of the wider world, what was he pointing at? We kept talking about this. One thing is clear as day, even without looking at economic data or quality-of-life tables. The United States is still by far the most powerful nation on earth, and when Americans travel to Indonesia, or Mexico, or Africa, or Paraguay, they are richer than the locals. But citizens of the United States vastly underestimate the size of the gap between them and the rest of the world. The gap between the First World and Third World is enormous. The US economy is not just a little bigger than Indonesia’s. It is twenty times larger. Brazil’s GDP per capita number is less than one-sixth the US number. With very few exceptions, the countries that were at Bandung have remained in the same structural relationship to the former imperial powers. (See Appendix Two.)
The People’s Republic of China has become much more powerful; everyone in Southeast Asia can feel that now. The Chinese economy is now nearly as big as the US economy. But that’s because there are four times as many Chinese people as there are Americans. China has gone from being an incredibly poor country to an average country, with GDP per capita around Latin American levels, and the Chinese people remain, on average, incredibly poor by US standards. It is Chinese economic growth over the past few decades that has driven most of the reductions in global inequality that have taken place since 1980. There are heated debates as to whether China has grown because it embraced capitalism or because it had Communist reforms and still remains under the control of a technocratic single party. But what is clear is that China is absolutely not an anticommunist regime created by US intervention in the Cold War. One way of looking at it indicates that global inequality has gone down slightly since 1960, largely because of China (see Appendix Three). Another way of looking at it—that is, by grouping countries into regions—indicates that the Third World has been stuck where it was, while the First World has gotten even better off (see Appendix Four).
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