Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  38 “Rockefeller Buys Into Russian Oil Business,” April 4, 2015. https://www.rt.com/business/oil-rockefeller-vtb-company-324/

  39 Wayne is president of the Jensin Group, one of the largest real estate private equity firms in Russia which manages over $500 million of retail, industrial, warehouse and suburban developments in Russia, including St. Petersburg’s “Super Siva” shopping center, the historic department store “Passage,” the “Jubilee” store, and a 92% stake in the Sestroetsk factory built at the site of Czar Peter’s arms factory. Jensen Group L.L.P, Form D Notice of Sale of Securities, US. Securities and Exchange Commission, received August 31, 2006. In this filing, the Jensen group revealed that the minimum acceptable investment by any individual was $5 million, with $150,589,000 already sold of a $230 million offering for partnership interests.

  40 “Stephen B. Heintz: A Conversation with the President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund,” Philanthropy News Digest, November 5, 2000.

  41 Brzezinski, using Islamic jihadists, was the architect of the first U.S. intervention in Afghanistan which led to the defeat of invading Soviet troops in Afghanistan and the implosion of the Soviet Union. This has been heralded as one of Brzezinski’s greatest achievements. But he failed to predict that the CIA’s Saudi ally in that Afghanistan war, Osama bin Laden, would become the spearhead of the most devastating backlash yet against the Rockefeller dream of corporate globalization.

  42 The Bush administration (2000–2008) became preoccupied with its wars in the oil-rich Middle East once dominated by Rockefeller oil companies. On March 22, 2005, in an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “The Return of Latin America’s Left,” Peruvian author Alcvaro Vargas Llosa made a frank assessment of the political climate in the region: “The left is in power in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. With this month’s inauguration of Tabaré Vazquez as present of Uruguay, this trend will likely continue.” Llosa attributes the leftward tilt to “a popular frustration with the failures of the 1990s, a decade of reform under governments of the right that were supposed to catapult the region toward development.”

  43 See, for instance, a May 31, 2016, article in the Americas Quarterly, “How Latin America Should Address the Crisis in Venezuela,” which admonishes Argentina and Brazil to “lead the diplomatic effort to change Venezuela’s behavior.” Completely ignoring any possible link between Venezuela’s problems depressed oil prices, and former neoliberal policies, the writer puts the blame squarely on President Maduro’s alleged corruption and hints at a military solution if Venezuela does not come into line: “Venezuela’s internal chaos—which is becoming a humanitarian crisis—poses the most severe challenge to regional actors in years. As President Maduro has debilitated the opposition-dominated National Assembly, imprisoned leading opposition figures and ended the independence of the judiciary, a democratic solution to the crisis is ever more remote, and Venezuela seems increasingly unable to overcome its internal divisions alone.”

  44 Simon Romero, “Scandal in Brazil Raises Fear of Turmoil’s Return,” The New York Times, May 19, 2017. See also Romero, “Brazil’s President Rejects Calls to Quit Amid New Corruption Claims,” The New York Times, May 18, 2017.

  45 “Uncontacted Amazon Tribe Members Reported Killed in Brazil,” The New York Times, September 10, 2017.

  46 In September 2013 President Rousseff complained to the UN General Assembly about U.S. spying on her personal internet correspondence. Eric Farnsworth, vice president of David Rockefeller’s Council of the Americas, quickly denounced her for breaking UN protocol by bringing up the NSA’s internet spying at the General Assembly. “After all,” Farnsworth said, “China, Russia, and India all spy, and so does Brazil.” “Dilma Rousseff Attacks U.S spying at UN,” Financial Times, September 24, 2013.

  47 “Dilma Rousseff on Ouster: This is a Coup That Will Impact Every Democratic Organization in Brazil,” Democracy Now, September 1, 2016.

  48 Marina Lopez, “Former Brazilian president Lula convicted of corruption and money laundering,” The Washington Post, July 12, 2007.

  49 Glenn Greenwalt, “As Momentum Grows to Remove Brazil’s President, New Pressure Campaign Sparks Rage,” The Intercept, July 12, 2007.

  50 Brian Winter, “For Brazil’s Lula, It’s Not Over Yet,” Council of Americas Quarterly, July 13, 2017.

  51 Rockefeller, Memoirs, p. 489.

  52 Richard Haas, A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order, (New York: Penguin, 2017) p.11.

  53 Zbigniew Brzezinski , “Toward a Global Realignment,” The American Interest, April 2016.

  54 Nick Hanauer, “The Pitchforks are Coming,” Politico, July-August 2014.

  55 CBS recently compared Nelson Rockefeller’s 1974 grilling by Congress over his vast fortunes during his nomination hearings to Donald Trump’s response to charges of conflicts of interest—the difference being that Rockefeller turned over many years of tax returns that, while highly embarrassing, won him the nomination because of his “transparency.” See “Conflicts of Interest: Donald Trump 2017 v Nelson Rockefeller, 1974,” CBS Face the Nation, January 13, 2017. It has long been believed that Nelson could not achieve his dream of becoming President because so many on Wall Street feared that his wealth and power could arguably put him above their influence.

  56 Rockefeller, Memoirs, 411.

  57 “David Rockefeller, Lion of the Americas,” http://www.as-coa.org/articles/david-rockefeller-lion-americas

  58 Rockefeller, Memoirs, 344.

  INTRODUCTION

  The dark, comforting silence of the confessional shattered as the tiny sliding door rapped open, spraying light through a small screen.

  “Yes, my son?” encouraged the priest when the male voice, whispering, faltered.

  Then, out of the shadows it came, a torrent of crimes so overpowering that Father Edgar Smith’s vow of silence shook to its Jesuit foundations.

  Murder, the man explained, mass murder had been committed, and he, Ataide Pereira, had taken part. He could no longer live with his conscience. Besides, he had not been paid the $15 he was promised.

  The victims were Cintas Largas, a small Indian tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. Named for the broad belts of bark that were their only clothing, this group of some 400 souls had lived for centuries along the Aripuanã River, hunting and fishing with arrows dipped in curare, successfully resisting all intruders. But now Brazilian and foreign companies coveted their lands. The Indians were marked for removal. Since Brazilian law technically protected the Indians as wards of the state, only surreptitious violence could be used.

  It was a common enough solution. The general overseer of a local rubber company, Francisco de Brito, had already earned the local title of Champion Indian Killer by taking any Indians he captured on “a visit to the dentist”: the victim was forced to “open wide” and shot through the mouth with a pistol. But one band of Cintas Largas had eluded the final solution by living deep in the jungle. Fortunately for de Brito, a man was found who knew enough of the culture of the Cintas Largas to tell him the precise day when most of the people of this village were likely to gather. The occasion would be deceptively joyful: their annual family reunion. The Indians would gather in the center of the village to pray, feast, and consult ancestral spirits represented by masquerading dancers.

  De Brito concluded that the ceremony would be the perfect target for an aerial bombing. He hired a pilot and a commercial Cessna that flew over the village on the holy day, dropping sugar on the first pass and dynamite on the second. To hunt down the survivors seen fleeing into the jungle, de Brito turned to his underling, Chico, a man with a fondness for the machete. Pereira was one of Chico’s recruits.

  “We went by launch up the Juruena River,” Pereira said.

  There wer
e six of us, men of experience, commanded by Chico, who used to shove his tommy gun in your direction whenever he gave you an order.

  It took a good many days upstream to the Serra do Norte. After that we lost ourselves in the woods, although Chico had brought a Japanese compass with us. In the end the plane found us.

  It was the same plane they used to massacre the Indians, and they threw us down some provisions and ammunition. After that we went on for five days. Then we ran out of food again.

  We came across an Indian village that had been wiped out … and we dug up some of the Indians’ manioc for food and caught a few small fish. By this time we were fed up and some of us wanted to go back, but Chico said he’d kill anybody who tried to desert. It was another five days after that before we saw any smoke. Even then the Cintas Largas were days away.

  We were all pretty scared of one another. In this kind of place people shoot each other and get shot, you might say, without knowing why. When they drill a hole in you, they have this habit of sticking an Indian arrow in the wound, to put the blame on the Indians.

  The men hacked their way through the jungle, fighting off hordes of insects, enduring heat and downpours. “We were handpicked for the job, as quiet as any Indian party when it came to slipping in and out of trees.

  “When we got to Cintas Largas country, there were no more fires and no more talking. As soon as we spotted their village, we made a stop for the night. We got up before dawn, then we dragged ourselves yard by yard through the underbrush until we were in range, and after that we waited for the sun to come up.”

  The clamor of the jungle night hushed as dawn broke over the village. A young Indian boy of about five had just stepped out to watch his elders work on the new huts they were building, when a murderous barrage of bullets poured on the village, cutting the men down where they stood. Armed whites appeared among the huts, firing their weapons indiscriminately, until only the boy and a young Indian girl (to whom he had fled for safety) were left. The terrified child was “yelling his head off.” Pereira tried to stop Chico when he moved on the children, but Chico shrugged him off.

  Chico shot the boy through the head. Pereira pleaded for the girl’s life, reminding Chico of de Brito’s penchant for prostituting Indian girls and of their own sexual appetites. Chico was unmoved. He gained sexual satisfaction through violence.

  “We all thought he’d gone off his head,” Pereira said,

  and we were pretty scared of him. He tied the Indian girl up and hung her head downward from a tree, legs apart, and chopped her in half right down the middle with his machete. Almost with a single stroke I’d say. The village was like a slaughterhouse.

  He calmed down after he’d cut the woman up, and told us to burn down all the huts and throw the bodies into the river. After that we grabbed our things and started back. We kept going after nightfall, and we took care to cover our tracks.… It took us six weeks to find the Cintas Largas, and about a week to get back.

  When they arrived at Aripuanã, a tropical Dodge City, Chico brought samples of ore he found in the area to de Brito “to keep the company pleased.”

  Father Smith kept his head. Using all the powers of absolution at his command, he prevailed on Pereira to repeat his story on tape. “I want to say now that personally I’ve nothing against the Indians,” Pereira claimed. But the Indians’ lands were rich in gold, diamonds, and rare minerals. “The fact is the Indians are sitting on valuable land and doing nothing with it. They’ve got a way of finding the best plantation land, and there’s all these valuable minerals about, too. They have to be persuaded to go, and if all else fails, well, then, it has to be force.”1

  Father Smith turned over the tape to local authorities, demanding an investigation, but for years the 1963 massacre of the Cintas Largas was covered up. Three prosecutors had withdrawn from the case, claiming conflicts of interest. Only when a congressional outcry over the growing sales of Amazonian lands to foreign companies prompted revelations in 1968 by the interior minister of widespread Indian genocide did the attorney general press for a trial. The Cintas Largas massacre turned out not to be an exceptional case.

  More than $62 million worth of Indian property had been stolen in the previous decade, and at least 1,000 crimes—ranging from embezzlement to murder—were laid at the doorstep of the government’s world-acclaimed Indian agency, the Service for the Protection of the Indian (SPI). A special commission had spent fifty-eight days traveling 10,000 miles to survey the Indian tribes, visiting more than 130 posts.

  The evidence of genocide was overwhelming. Twenty volumes of evidence had been collected, documenting the destruction of whole tribes. Attacks by outsiders using everything from poisoned food to clothing infected with smallpox had resulted in Indian deaths by the tens of thousands. Anthropologists’ estimates of the Indian population in Brazil ranged from just below 100,000 to a high of 200,000 Indians in 1957.2 By 1968, these estimates had been cut by 50 percent3: anywhere from 40,000 to as many as 100,000 men, women, and children had died. The Indians north of the Amazon River had suffered particularly after 1964, when a military coup overthrew the elected government. Now nationalist army officers, led by General Albuquerque Lima, the interior minister, wanted the holocaust stopped—along with the foreign corporate penetration of the Amazon that, they claimed, had fanned the flames.

  By then, however, most of the witnesses of the Cintas Largas massacre, as well as Father Smith, either had disappeared or were dead. The archives of the SPI had been destroyed in a mysterious fire. Finally, guns and tanks intervened. A military coup in December 1968, the second in four years, deposed the nationalist attorney general and the interior minister. None of the 134 SPI officials charged with crimes would ever stand trial. The attorney general’s charge that SPI had been corrupted by starvation of government resources and “the disastrous impact of missionary activity” remained officially ignored. So did the claim of Jornal do Brasil in 1968 that “in reality, those in command of these Indian Protection posts are North American missionaries—they are in all the posts—and they disfigure the original Indian culture and enforce the acceptance of Protestantism.”4 But officials of the American Fundamentalist missionary organization that worked with the SPI among the tribes—the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), known in the United States by its less scientific alias, the Wycliffe Bible Translators—denied that any genocide took place. The head of SIL’s branch in Brazil disclaimed all reports of genocide,5 and the founder of SIL, William Cameron Townsend, denied any knowledge of the massacres at all.6

  The Cintas Largas case—and the Indians themselves—seemed slated for oblivion until The Sunday Times of London resurrected the genocide charge in 1969. Norman Lewis again raised the specter of foreign companies moving into the Brazilian Amazon. He reported that “deposits of rare metals were being found in the area [of the Cintas Largas]. What these metals were was not clear. Some sort of security blackout has been imposed, only fitfully penetrated by vague reports of the activities of American and European companies, and of the smuggling of planeloads of the said rare metals back to the U.S.A.”7

  A little over a year later, the International Police Academy, a school in Washington sponsored by the Agency for International Development (AID) but actually run by the CIA,8 would report that a new Indian Guard was being trained in Brazil.9 The Indian Guard, modeled after the Tribal Police of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), was placed under the authority of the regime’s hurried replacement for the disgraced SPI, the National Foundation for the Indian (known in Brazil by its Portuguese acronym, FUNAI). FUNAI, in turn, was placed under the command of the former chief of military intelligence. It would take another two years before a top FUNAI agent would reveal that the Indian Guard was rounding up resisting Indians for “reeducation” at a concentration camp at Crenaque in the mining state of Minas Gerais.10 “I am tired of being a gravedigger of the Indians,” the agent stated on resigning from FUNAI. “I do not intend to contribute to enrichme
nt of economic groups at the cost of the extinction of primitive cultures.”11 By then, FUNAI had adopted the BIA’s policy of leasing Indian lands to mining companies, while its military superiors in the interior ministry in Brasília were cooperating with the U.S. Geological Survey in an AID-sponsored aerial survey of the Amazon.12

  Among the American companies that would be allowed to enter the Cintas Largas reservation to explore for cassiterite, a vital component in tin production, was a firm partly controlled by a friend of Nelson Rockefeller.

  In June 1969, a huge silver jet bearing the words “The United States of America” descended toward the airport of Brasília, the nation’s futuristic capital in the Amazon basin. As the airliner’s shadow passed over the shining steel and glass buildings that symbolized Brazil’s pledge to conquer its wild interior, thousands of soldiers surrounded the ultramodern airport and lined the streets. Air Force Two landed with a screech and rolled toward the crowd of dignitaries waiting near the terminal. A door swung out and a man, his familiar square jaw cradling a wide smile, stepped briskly down the ramp. Nelson Rockefeller had arrived.

  To most of the American Embassy staff, Rockefeller was just another powerful politician who happened to be a very wealthy man. He was the Republican governor of New York who had twice failed to win his party’s presidential nomination. By all accounts, he was not through yet. His presence here on a presidential fact-finding tour left little room for doubt about his political ambitions.

  But to many of the Brazilian dignitaries on hand, Nelson Rockefeller was much more than a rich politician. He was, to a degree, a personification of their fondest hopes in a troubled world. Perhaps more important, he was also a living symbol of the past, beginning thirty years before when they knew him simply as the Coordinator.