by Gerard Colby
The U.S. delegation, led by Interior Undersecretary Elmer F. Bennett, sought to silence the Indians by invoking the prohibition against nondelegates speaking at the plenary session. The Americans’ wrath extended to other delegates and even Ydígoras’s own officials for failing to follow the Eisenhower administration’s line on Latin America’s development. Guatemalan participants who dared to mention the agrarian reforms of the Arbenz years were branded as “commie liners”28 by the deputy chief of the U.S. delegation. The conference’s executive secretary, Jorge Louis Arriola of the Guatemalan Ministry of Education, was dismissed by Bennett in his classified report as “a collaborator with communist front groups.” Bennett based his case on the opinions of “our Embassy personnel.”29
When the conference’s Economics Committee (of which Bennett was co-chair), passed a resolution calling for agrarian reform, Bennett refused to support it. Then he had it changed to his liking in the steering committee. “In this way, we succeeded in modifying every important resolution to conform more closely to American interests.”30
When another resolution calling for a minimum agricultural wage arrived at the steering committee, it too was amended “to take into account expressly the productivity of labor.” Previous Inter-American Indian Congresses had adopted such resolutions, with U.S. support, on the basis of Indians’ needs, not how fast or much they worked. “The precedent established this time may be helpful in future Congresses,” Bennett reported to Christian Herter, Dulles’s successor as secretary of state.
Bennett reported that he was helped by some of Latin America’s most respected names in indigenismo. “In particular, I would like to mention the assistance we received from Dr. Walter Dupouy of Venezuela, Alfredo Fuentes Roldan of Ecuador, and Professor Darcy Ribeiro of Brazil.”31 The last two had developed a close working relationship with SIL in recent years.
Nor was that all. A well-known American anthropologist had joined with an American missionary in collaborating secretly with the U.S. government’s delegation. “We also were assisted by two Americans who served on delegations from the Latin American nations,” Bennett informed Herter. “These two were Mrs. Doris Stone of Costa Rica and Dr. William Townsend of the Peruvian delegation.
“We made every effort,” he added, “to keep our cooperation with these two as inconspicuous as possible.”32
For good reason. Doris Stone was the daughter of Samuel “Sam the Banana Man” Zemurray, former chairman of the United Fruit Company, which dominated Costa Rica’s economy and much of Central America’s as well. Because of her father’s largesse and her work among the Indians of Honduras and Costa Rica, the United Fruit heiress was a power at Tulane’s Middle America Research Institute and at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, as well as a director of United Fruit–endowed Escuela Agricola Panamericana (Panamerican School of Agriculture). Stone’s collaboration with Bennett revealed she was far from the usual apolitical social scientist. Angry over the attempt of the Guatemalan Indians and their allies in the Guatemalan Ministry of Education to sway “my Indians” in the Costa Rican delegation, Stone continued to provide political intelligence on her Guatemalan colleagues after the conference. She informed on Guatemalan delegate Joaquin Noval, who had been so upset by American dominance at the conference he had told her, “I am going to use everything in my power to see that this is the last Congreso Indigenista Interamericano. It has been a complete farce. The resolutions have been dictated by the United States and the Commission of Economy was ruined by Bennett.”
“I thought you might be interested in hearing this,” she wrote Bennett. “Just what Noval can do I am not sure. He belongs to the young intellectual group that has many connections in Mexico. I just site [sic] this to make it clear the kind of people with whom we are dealing.”33
Cam, for his part, was supposed to be representing Peru, not the U.S. government. Revelations of the missionary’s secret efforts on Bennett’s behalf might jeopardize SIL contracts with governments throughout Latin America and Southeast Asia, undermining SIL’s usefulness in the future.
Like Stone, Cam contacted Bennett after the conference; a month later, he tapped the undersecretary for a return favor, when Bennett helped Cam dedicate JAARS’s Catalina amphibian airplane to service in “the five Amazonian nations of South America”—Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia.
Putting JAARS in the air over the Brazilian Amazon was the job of not just Cam, but also the U.S. government. According to Cam himself, the idea of Orlando, Florida, giving SIL’s Brazil branch a Catalina airplane named after the founder of SPI, General Cândido Rondon, originated with Christian Ravndal, the U.S. ambassador to Ecuador34 and a top Cold War operative. Ravndal came to Washington from Eastern Europe in 1954 at the request of Nelson’s friend and predecessor as presidential special assistant on Cold War propaganda, C.D. Jackson. Ravndal “understands and uses psychological warfare better than practically any other Ambassador I have ever met,” said Jackson. “He has been particularly helpful to Radio Free Europe,”35 the CIA’s radio propaganda operation. Now he was being helpful to Cam. Ravndal’s brother led the successful fund drive that enabled JAARS to buy the Catalina amphibian.
The dedication ceremony was a huge publicity success for Cam. It was attended by Bennett, an honor guard from McCoy Air Force Base, U.S. Senators John Baker and Spessard Holland, Orlando’s mayor, and representatives from the five Amazon basin governments, including José Chiriboga Villagomez, the Colombian ambassador who had helped Cam dedicate the Spirit of Kansas City Helio with former presidents Galo Plaza and Harry Truman. Mrs. Bennett christened the plane with water from the Amazon River sweetened with Florida orange juice by Orlando’s mayor, naming it Cândido Rondon—The Spirit of Orlando. Then Cam, the mayor, and a party of Orlando’s first citizens were off on a “brotherly loop around the heart of South America” in the Catalina. This trip gave Cam his first knowledge of gold mines and U.S. Steel’s iron mountain in Venezuela’s Orinoco basin and the Brazilian Amazon’s vast potential to become an “inland cattle empire.”36
The following year, many of the same CIA operatives that had overthrown the Arbenz government returned to Guatemala to begin preparations for another CIA invasion. With startling historical insight—or lack of it—the CIA code-named the operation after an Indian peasant revolutionary who once had troubled Washington with an agrarian reform plan for Mexico much more fundamental and far-reaching than Arbenz’s. Operation Zapata’s target was the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
SILers in Guatemala City, meanwhile, were enjoying their new headquarters in the capital on government-donated land. Just before the Inter-American Indian Congress closed in 1959, Cam paid a visit to General Ydígoras to express SIL’s desires. The grateful dictator simply picked up the phone and called his minister of education. “I’m sending Townsend and his assistant over. They need land.”37 SIL’s continued cooperation with Guatemala’s military dictatorships would earn Cam the Order of the Quetzal, Guatemala’s highest decoration.
In the United States, JAARS had much success, buoyed by a new federal law. Originally called “Townsend’s Bill” because of SIL’s lobbying effort, the law allowed religious missions to take abroad the surplus U.S. military apparatus the government sold or donated.38 The U.S. Constitution notwithstanding, Cam even got the U.S. Army to turn over an abandoned warehouse for JAARS’s plane repairs until a larger JAARS base could be built on one of Henderson Belk’s old antebellum cotton plantations outside Charlotte, North Carolina.
Cam could see only a bright future. Even Lázaro Cárdenas, whom he visited in Mexico while getting a government land grant for a new SIL headquarters, could not shake his confidence. Cárdenas publicly supported the Cuban revolution and Fidel Castro. But to Cam, Cárdenas was still an old friend to whom he owed much of his early success. Cam listened for hours as Cárdenas poured out his heart about the warlike climate between the United States and the Soviet Union, the push for a new arms race, and the growing threat of
nuclear war. To Cárdenas, who yearned for peace, Cam had only the Second Coming to offer. “The Bible tells us the Prince of Peace will return to earth and end all injustices. He will give everlasting peace,” Cam said. Then he attempted once more to convert the ex-president. The old politician was touched. “You’re the only one who talks to me about my soul,” he told Cam as they parted with an embrace.39
Leaving Cárdenas behind with his worries, Cam flew back home and into the future that seemed so promising. More than anything, more than the new Mexican headquarters that symbolized the power SIL had gained in twenty-five years of service, more than the church crowds that turned out to hear Cam during a hectic speaking tour across the nation, JAARS represented that future. Yet even as he recruited the Belks and the Grahams to help him build a JAARS base in North Carolina, he was confronted by the contradiction of SIL’s—and America’s—origins.
23
ASCENT OF THE HAWK
THE FRUITS OF INTOLERANCE
Nothing like it had ever been seen before by the business leaders of Charlotte, North Carolina. The quiet commercial hub of the Piedmont textile belt and local big city of the billionaire Belks, the evangelical Grahams, and now Cam’s missionary air force was shaken in February 1960 by civil rights demonstrations. Hundreds of African American students seeking an end to discrimination began sit-down demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in the Belks’ new $4 million department store,1 the same one whose opening four years before David Rockefeller had celebrated as a “shining example” of “the dynamic growth of the South.”2
Southern intolerance toward African Americans, Jews, and Catholics was growing, recharging the Fundamentalist movement with renewed invective. Cam himself became a target. JAARS’s service to Catholic clergy in Latin America was viewed as close to heresy. Cam found himself once again pleading for more broad-mindedness in his own camp. “It’s possible to know Christ as Lord and Savior and to continue in the Roman Church,” he argued to the Evangelical Foreign Missionary Association. Anonymous charges against JAARS within the Interdenominational Foreign Missionary Association (IFMA) had become so strong in 1959 that the Summer Linguistic Institute (SIL) was forced to resign as a member. “We feel very strongly,” Cam wrote IFMA headquarters, “that the way our critics want us to treat the monks and nuns is unscriptural.”3
It was also strategically impractical. Anti-Catholicism would limit severely SIL’s expansion in Latin America, especially in Ecuador, Peru, and Cam’s next goal, Colombia, where the new presidency of Alberto Lleras Camargo offered hope that a way might soon be found to enter that Catholic fortress.
As Cam began to see the future JAARS base in North Carolina as a springboard for SIL’s entrée into West Africa and Colombia, the civil rights demonstrations at the Belk store in Charlotte and the growing anti-Catholicism in the South threatened the Fundamentalist base he relied on to fulfill his vision.
Even Billy Graham, who would soon join the Wycliffe board, was not immune to the pressures of racism among his supporters. Despite his earlier move to desegregate his crusades, Graham counted the Belks among his most powerful backers. Graham had personally commended the Belk managers of the segregated Charlotte store in 1958 during the Charlotte Crusade. He ignored the management’s upholding of an American apartheid, focusing instead on its willingness to hold prayer meetings and on his admiration for family patriarch Henry Belk, who once shook his hand while Graham sold shoes at a Belk store in Tennessee. “I didn’t wash my hand for a week,” Graham said.4
Another threat to the ethnoreligious tightrope Cam was walking between the United States and the Third World was the pastor of the Dallas church in which Graham held membership. Rev. William Criswell of the First Baptist Church attacked the presidential ambitions of Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy because of his Catholicism. Cam had known Criswell since World War II, when Criswell was the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Criswell was called to Dallas in 1944 to take over the 1,000-member congregation of George W. Truett, a supporter of Cam. Now Criswell’s anti-Catholic sermons were making headlines.5 But worse was to come: Some 100,000 copies of one of them would soon be distributed through the mails anonymously by oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, millionaire backer of Kennedy’s rival, Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. Senate investigators would later charge that, by its anonymity, the anti-Kennedy mailing had violated federal law.
The pastor of the largest Southern Baptist church in the world, a leader of Fundamentalism, attacking the only Catholic presidential candidate in thirty years and having his sermon distributed by one of the largest funders of Fundamentalist missions was in direct contradiction to the image Cam was trying to convey for his missionaries in Latin America.
It was also not the picture of the United States that Washington wanted to present to the world during the Cold War, especially to Africa. Africa’s independence movements inspired young African American students, and the antics of the Criswells and Hunts were sure only to convince the nationalist leaders of Africa that the similarity between apartheid in South Africa and mandated segregation in the American South was no accident of history, but a social phenomenon—racism—rooted in European colonialism. The death of John Foster Dulles from cancer seemed to symbolize the failure of a foreign policy that overemphasized military alliances and nuclear brinkmanship to the point of making the United States almost irrelevant in the Third World.
Already, Fidel Castro in Cuba and Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo were demonstrating that irrelevance by asserting, in the face of Washington’s hostility, a dangerous economic and political independence. Washington responded with murder plots.
Castro was targeted for assassination as early as December 11, 1959, by Nelson’s old friend from the CIAA days, J. C. King, now the CIA’s Chief of Clandestine Services in the Western Hemisphere. Even before Castro had forced Fulgencio Batista to flee Havana, King and Adolf Berle had met to ponder the fate of Freeport Sulphur Company’s mining project at Nicaro, in Oriente province. Now the Nicaro deposits and sugar plantations in Cuba were facing nationalization. It was clear to King that a “far left” government existed in Cuba. “If permitted to stand,” he wrote CIA Director Allen Dulles, it would encourage similar actions against American companies elsewhere in Latin America. One of King’s “recommended actions” was explicit:
Thorough consideration [should] be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro. None of those close to Fidel, such as his brother Raul or his companion Che Guevara, have the same mesmeric appeal to the masses. Many informed people believe that the disappearance of Fidel would greatly accelerate the fall of the present Government.6
By July 1960, King would cable the CIA station in Havana informing it that “possible removal of top three leaders is receiving serious consideration at HQS.” Some $10,000 was authorized for “arranging an accident” for Raúl Castro before King would fire off another cable ordering the station “to drop [the] matter.” The CIA had decided instead to turn to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb’s Technical Services Division for poison.7
The same recipe was prescribed for Patrice Lumumba. The Congo’s independence leader had made the mistake of informing a group of visiting New York businessmen in 1959 that he meant to put his own country first when he became prime minister. “The exploitation of the mineral riches of the Congo should be primarily for the profit of our own people and other Africans,” he declared. “We have decided to open the gates of the Congo to any foreign investors prepared to help us get the fullest and most immediate value from mineral resources and energy, so that we may achieve full employment, an improved standard of living for our people, and a stable currency for our young country. Belgium will no longer have a monopoly in the country.”
A New York banker put the question of American access to uranium directly to Lumumba: “Do you know, for instance, that Congolese uranium is sold in the United States as Belgian uranium, according to a legal and formal agreement between ourselves and Belgium?”
The Americans, “all of whom represented powerful financial interests, looked at one another and exchanged meaningful smiles.”8
Lumumba did not know that American corporations already had a big stake in Belgium’s powerful copper and uranium monopoly in the Congo’s Katanga province through Tanganyika Concessions, Limited. The Rockefellers were shareholders in this company;9 in addition, the Rockefeller and Guggenheim groups held stock in Forminière, the Belgian diamond-mining operation in Kasai province, directly northwest of Katanga. The total American investment was about $20 million; that of their Belgian partners, $2 billion.
Lumumba’s naïveté would be evident during his visit to Washington in late July 1960, one month after the Congo declared independence from Belgium and Katanga province seceded under a rich Congolese collaborator, Moise Tshombe. Prime Minister Lumumba and President Joseph Kasavubu, faced with Belgian troop landings, had appealed to the United Nations and the Soviet Union for assistance. U.S. Air Force planes hurried troops in, and Lumumba, upset at the unwillingness of the U.N. troops to move against the Belgian-inspired secession in Katanga, flew to the United States to appeal to the United Nations and to the Eisenhower administration.
The State Department Lumumba visited was then deeply divided between those who were worried about losing face with African nationalists and those Atlanticists who did not want to rupture relations with a NATO ally, Belgium. In his meeting with Christian Herter, John Foster Dulles’s successor as secretary of state, and Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs C. Douglas Dillon, Prime Minister Lumumba spoke about his government’s concerns, not theirs. Dillon, a former ambassador to France and a firm Atlanticist, recalled that “his words didn’t ever have any relation to the particular things that we wanted to discuss.”10