by Gerard Colby
Ribeiro officiated, breaking protocol to put his arm around Cam in praise, while an air force officer representing President Goulart and the ministers of foreign affairs and aeronautics looked on, along with a U.S. Embassy official and a film crew of the U.S. Information Agency, headed by Charles Mertz, a veteran of Lansdale’s psychological warfare operations in the Philippines and South Vietnam.
The Helio Courier itself symbolized the political and cultural contradictions that Cam had used to build SIL, explosive contradictions that he now brought into the long-sought Brazilian Amazon. At that time, the Helio Corporation was deeply involved with the same CIA that was seeking the downfall of Goulart’s and Ribeiro’s government.
The plane had been christened in Philadelphia by Mayor Richardson Dilworth, a cousin of J. Richardson Dilworth, Nelson Rockefeller’s top financial aide. The latter was the key representative of the Rockefeller family in the Hanna Mining–Chrysler–National Steel financial complex that Ribeiro’s government was fighting in the Brazilian courts. The Helio Courier had been purchased from a Cuban American in Miami with a $5,000 down payment donated by Sam Milbank, one of Cam’s most influential contacts on Wall Street and a key corporate link between SIL and Brazil.46 Until recently an investor in sugar plantations and cattle ranches in Cuba, Milbank was eager to preserve American influence in Latin America. The Milbank family’s law firm had presidential adviser and former Chase Manhattan chairman John J. McCloy as one of its senior partners. The firm had been retained by Hanna Mining; McCloy was in charge of Hanna’s suit against Brazil’s nationalization of its iron resources. Later, McCloy would represent Hanna successfully before the generals who would overthrow Goulart’s government.
The plane’s other major donor was the Pew Memorial Fund,47 controlled by J. Howard Pew, Sun Oil Company (Sunoco) competitor of the Rockefellers’ oil interests and a man so profoundly distrustful of everything to the left of Barry Goldwater that he thought Nelson Rockefeller was soft on communism. More to the point, Sun Oil was, after Texaco, the second-largest seller of crude oil to Brazil, most of it from Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo.48
None of this was known to Ribeiro, and it might not have made any difference anyway. Ribeiro was eager for SIL to help him set up a linguistics department at the new University of Brasília to train anthropologists for work among the Indians. And Townsend, in turn, was eager to reach the Bibleless tribes of Brazil. These Indians had been Cam’s goal for forty years, since the day his Presbyterian inspirer from Philadelphia, L. L. Legters, had sent him pictures of a “fine, stalwart, naked Indian” along the Amazon and Xingu rivers and awakened Cam to the dream of reaching “a thousand tribes without the Bible.”49 In Brazil, SIL was already suffering from the suspicions of foreigners operating airplanes in the undefended Amazon. According to Jim Wilson, SIL’s new branch director in Brazil, “support for our use of planes and radio must come from the top.… As far as I can see, the Indian Protective Service and the University of Brasília are the two most probable opportunities at present for underwriting our JAARS service.”50
Wilson, therefore, courted SPI’s new military director, using a document giving SIL authorization to set up and operate a radio and transport service in collaboration with the SPI. It was designed to help both SPI and SIL “give emergency help to the Indians,” as well as “for the benefit of whatever government services require collaboration.”51 The document was unsigned, but Wilson insisted that former President Quadros had given his OK. SIL informed the Brazilian ambassador in Washington, Roberto Campos, of this document to get his support.
Campos offered more than support. An active proponent of U.S. corporate investment in Brazil, particularly in the Amazon, Campos had originated the idea of SIL using the University of Brasília as a legal ownership cover for SIL’s Helios.52 Like the Rockefeller’s AIA, with which he frequently consulted, Campos understood the importance of brushing American enterprises with a Brazilian veneer.
For his own reasons, Darcy Ribeiro liked the idea of SIL’s affiliation with the University of Brasília. Ribeiro, in fact, had become so enamored with SIL that he offered its members the use of a tourist hotel in Goiás on the Ilha do Bananal, a huge tract of dry land jutting out of the Araguaia River that marks the border between the states of Mato Grosso and Goiás.53
The hotel, built to allow guests “a view of the Indians,”54 was the latest of the steps that were already bringing an end to the Karajá Indians’ rule over their own lands. SIL had sent a team into the tribe in 1958. In the 1930s, there were some 4,000 Karajás; by 1967, there were only about 400.55 The Karajás’ lands were rapidly being taken over by cattle ranchers. All this had been overseen by SPI agents.
The SPI had great hopes of using JAARS to expand its control over the tribes. Wilson reported that Colonel Moacyr, SPI’s director, had SIL’s proposal for a contract between SPI and SIL that would allow SIL to work directly with the Indians, with no intermediary Brazilian sponsors. Moacyr had given reason for hope. He was taking a personal hand in helping SIL import a new Helio Courier and was interested in having SPI use SIL’s Pioneer 530 radio transmitters in order to “amplify the SPI network.”56
From Washington, Ambassador Campos continued to urge SIL on. He had discussions with AIA over the various colonization schemes and realized the potential usefulness of these resourceful Americans for conquering Brazil’s newest frontiers.57
THE CAMPOS CONNECTION
Roberto Campos was an active promoter of SIL. It was he who, after attending the 1961 Philadelphia dedication of The Spirit of Philadelphia, suggested that SIL’s Robert Schneider and JAARS’s Lawrence Routh come to the Brazilian Embassy to work out a tentative contract, assuring that “he would see that such a plan got into the right hands in Brasília,” Schneider wrote Wilson, urging him, Dale Kietzman, and Cam to send ideas.
Campos, however, had wider plans for the Amazon than saving the tribes for Jesus.
Campos was a clever U.S.-educated economist who had met Nelson Rockefeller while serving in Brazil’s embassy in Washington during World War II. He had worked closely with New York financiers during his years as director of Kubitschek’s National Bank for Economic Development, which promoted Amazonian development. He saw SIL as another tool for prying open the Amazon. If this perspective brought him into an alliance with Goulart supporters like Ribeiro, he accepted it only as a temporary pact of convenience. Campos was an internationalist when it came to development theories. He was no friend of Goulart and his nationalist policies.
Campos’s political loyalties were known in Washington, where the National Security Council (NSC) had embarked on a pressure campaign against Goulart. Unfortunately for Campos, despite his sympathy for U.S. corporate goals, he was caught between Goulart and the NSC’s desire for a “political confrontation” with Goulart that could “bring our influence to bear on important near future political decisions (e.g., appointments to the new cabinet).” There was no doubt in the NSC about the ultimate goal: removal of Goulart or Goulart’s retreat on policies that obstructed “the climate for private investment.”58
By December 1963, the pressure had become too great for Campos. He resigned as Goulart’s ambassador with the stated intention of engaging in politics when he returned home. The Johnson White House knew his number. The State Department noted to NSC’s McGeorge Bundy that Campos “is interested in financial success and sometimes regrets that to serve as ambassador, he had to give up his directorship of CONSULTEC, a profit-making consulting firm in Rio de Janeiro.… He has advocated the encouragement of private enterprise and foreign investments with specific reference to the participation of private foreign capital in the development of Brazil’s petroleum resources.”59
The departure of Campos was the last of a series of reversals for Cam in Brazil. Like Nelson Rockefeller’s AIA, Cam’s SIL had gotten only token support from AID during the Kennedy years. Only when the Johnson administration was in place did hope shine again. Cam made this fact clear in a cable
he sent to President Johnson only weeks after Kennedy’s death, “HERETOFORE, WE WERE NOT TREATED AS ALLIES BY OUR OWN GOVERNMENT, DUE PERHAPS TO THE EMPHASIS WE PLACE ON THE BIBLE AS A POWERFUL INSTRUMENT FOR FREEING INDIAN TRIBES FROM FEAR AND SUPERSTITION. YOUR GOAL, SO CLEARLY STATED, REPRESENTS INESCAPABLE DUTY [FOR] ALL OUR CITIZENS AGAIN. I CONGRATULATE YOU.”60
Carlos Sanz de Santamaría, the former Colombian ambassador who had been instrumental in SIL’s entry into Colombia, accepted the Johnson administration’s nod to become chairman of the Alliance for Progress’s executive advisory committee, the Inter-American Economic and Social Council. Since the council had a large technical secretariat to review national and regional development plans, Cam fired off a congratulatory letter to Sanz, loaded with proposals, and even visited Sanz to cement his relationship.
Cam urged essentially what was already well known as the new policy of AID Administrator Thomas Mann: The Alliance for Progress must become an alliance of businessmen. “How different it would be if business and professional men in the United States were encouraged to get together with their counterparts in Latin America and develop projects for whose success they would be responsible but for which they could secure financial backing from the Alliance for Progress. The American people have confidence in their business and professional men and would back them.”61
Cam’s specific proposal centered on transportation to move American tourists and machinery into Latin America. Use the U.S. Navy and Air Force to transport them free, he urged, and use private organizations, assisted by the Alliance for Progress and army surplus equipment, to airlift them over unfinished portions of the Pan American Highway and even to help “open up some important but isolated areas of commerce and colonization while roads that have been planned are being built.”62
Cam, of course, offered the service of SIL’s hundreds of linguists “and other technicians.”
Sanz could not take Cam up on his offer, however. He had no real power, which was why Alberto Lleras Camargo had turned down the chairmanship of the council when Johnson offered it to him. Stunned by Sanz’s unresponsiveness, Cam had no choice now but to seek sources of assistance for SIL and JAARS in the private sector.
The Rockefellers were the obvious source of funds, and SIL petitioned the Rockefeller Foundation office in Rio. Unfortunately, all contributions from the Rockefeller Foundation were earmarked for the University of Brasília, headed by Darcy Ribeiro.63
Ribeiro’s ties to Goulart may have hindered Cam’s access to AID funds, but precisely because of these ties, Ribeiro was too valuable a card to ignore. However, in March 1964, his ace was removed with the overthrow of Goulart. With it, ironically, went the last barrier to the genocide of the Amazonian Indian.
*Hanna Mining was the financial linchpin that held together an interdependent, industrial triplex: Hanna, National Steel, and Chrysler. Hanna’s iron and coal were crucial raw materials for National Steel; National Steel, in turn, supplied 40 percent of Chrysler’s steel needs.
George Love, National Steel’s head, had recently placed Paul C. Cabot, cousin of the former ambassador to Brazil, on the board of M. A. Hanna Company. He also invited Nelson’s top financial aide, J. Richardson Dilworth, to be a member of Chrysler’s board.
†AIA, Nelson’s nonprofit, “philanthropic” arm, was often used in conjunction with his for-profit International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC).
29
OPERATION BROTHER SAM
SETTING THE CLOCK
Adolf Berle’s Manhattan town house crackled with the sound of a shortwave radio on the evening of March 30, 1964, as Berle adjusted knobs, trying to hear the latest news on troop movements in Brazil. Listening with him was Alberto Byington, a Brazilian whose family had long linked the Amazon to the United States. Byington was a descendant of Confederate slaveholders who had migrated to the lower Amazon city of Santarém, where slavery was then still legal, rather than accept Abraham Lincoln’s forced emancipation of African Americans. Surviving Brazil’s own Emancipation in 1888, Byington’s ancestors had done well in business. Byington himself tied his destiny to ALCOA’s expansion in Brazil, which would soon include bauxite deposits in the Amazon. Since at least 1962, he had been passing U.S. funds to the rebels.1 He was one of the chief plotters of the military coup now under way.
“He laid out the plan,” said Berle. “Through the evening, we watched it work out with almost clock-work precision.”2
In Rio, President João Goulart watched also, but in dismay, as army after army deserted Brazil’s constitutional government and marched on Rio. Gone were the brave presidential words he used to answer the first news of the rebellion. Now Goulart was worried that he would not be able to get out of Rio alive.
He had expected the coup attempt. As long as John F. Kennedy was alive, he believed, he could expect restraint. Even so, Kennedy had been tough, sending his brother, Robert, the previous year to lay down a series of demands. The demands were so similar to those of Goulart’s domestic opponents that the Brazilian president, astonished, had looked at the U.S. attorney general and asked, “How can it be that you are in contact with my enemies?”3
His enemies were legion, starting with the admirals and generals who had tried to prevent his succeeding to the presidency after Jânio Quadros had resigned. Then there were conservative state governors like Juracy Magalhães, the former informant and confidant of U.S. ambassadors since Berle’s wartime tenure, and now governor of Bahia; Governor Adhemar de Barros of São Paulo, a wealthy physician who had left the União Democratica National (UDN), which had helped overthrow Vargas in 1945, to form his own Social Progressive Party; and UDN governors José de Magalhães Pinto of Minas Gerais, a banker, and, of course, the ever-vengeful Carlos Lacerda of Rio’s own Guanabara state. The generals had been preparing for this day for years. Moreover, they knew they had support from the new Johnson administration in Washington: tangible support—money, arms, the promise of diplomatic recognition, and even a U.S. Navy carrier task force ready to steam into the fray.
Goulart’s long deathwatch over his credit-starved government was over. His fortunes had declined rapidly since Kennedy’s death. In early January, shortly before the petroleum workers’ strike, he had made the mistake of expressing his belief that the political crises he had faced during the previous year were even more dramatic in other countries in Latin America. He did not specifically mention the many CIA-backed military coups that had swept the hemisphere in 1963. He did not need to. Everyone knew to what he was referring. But he did note that “the phenomenon that generated these times was the same in all countries. It is that the popular masses are becoming more politically aware at each step; it is that popular hopes are becoming more forceful, leading society to conquer barriers so as to transform itself into the democracy of all for all.”
The U.S. Embassy’s political officers underlined that last phrase in reporting his speech to Washington. They also underlined two other sentences: “That we may be able to make Brazil overcome that phase of transition, emerging from an egoistic and capitalistic democracy into a Christian and social democracy, within a climate of understanding and brotherhood. That will be the great victory that history will record in favor of the government.”4
The CIA had been active in Brazil since the 1962 elections. Brazilian agents controlled by J. C. King’s Western Hemisphere Clandestine Services infiltrated the Peasant Leagues, it was later charged.5 Following the passage of the Rural Workers Law in March 1963, detailing the rights of rural workers and unions, the CIA-funded American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD) initiated attempts to penetrate the rural labor movement in the Northeast. AIFLD, with the support of Nelson Rockefeller’s old labor ally from Rockefeller Center days, AFL-CIO president George Meany,6 was quickly becoming an arm of the CIA.
By the autumn of 1963, São Paulo Governor Adhemar de Barros was telling AIFLD’s executive director, former Rockefeller wartime associate Serafino Romualdi, of plans “to mobilize mi
litary and police contingents” against President Goulart. AIFLD then hurriedly set up a training session for thirty-three Brazilian unionists in the United States. “When they returned … some of them … became intimately involved in some of the clandestine operations of the revolution before it took place on April 1,” explained Romualdi’s successor as executive director, William Doherty, Jr., in a radio interview after the coup. “What happened in Brazil … did not just happen—it was planned—and planned months in advance.”7
Part of the planning included the use of yet another front group, the Brazilian Institute of Democratic Action (IBAD). Like AIFLD, IBAD’s money was assumed to come from American big business. Some 1.4 billion cruzeiros were passed to IBAD through the Brazilian branches of three North American banks. The North American banks refused to reveal the names of IBAD’s depositors when subpoenaed by Brazilian congressional investigators, but all three were subsequently identified as CIA conduits by a former CIA officer.8
Nelson’s International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC) was also later named as one of IBAD’s major benefactors,9 as were Standard Oil of New Jersey, Hanna Mining, Bethlehem Steel, Texaco, Gulf Oil, U.S. Steel, and General Motors.10 In 1975, former CIA officer Philip Agee confirmed that IBAD was “one of the Rio [CIA] Station’s main political-action operations.”11
But the CIA’s most important asset was the Brazilian army. IBAD had hired retired senior officers in an attempt to influence the 1962 elections at the Club Militar against Goulart candidates. A congressional investigation ultimately led to Goulart’s closing IBAD’s offices in October 1963, but by then it was too late. IBAD’s operators were in place, continuing to function in the labor movement, the Higher War College, and the powerful Fourth Army. The veterans of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force who had fought with military attaché Colonel Vernon Walters in Italy during World War II emerged triumphant in the Club Militar elections. This group, called the “Sorbonne” Group, branded all criticism of the United States as inspired by the Communist party and subversive.