by Gerard Colby
Nelson’s view of people and life had hardened since his last campaign, and not only because of the heavy political price he had paid for marrying Happy. In January 1964, Nelson had asked a judge in Westchester County, home of Pocantico, to declare his favorite son legally dead. The book on Michael Rockefellers life was closed on February 3. Its solemn finality echoed in Nelson’s soul like the closing of a tomb.
Nelson now viewed the world from behind a mask of iron cynicism. Despite power and riches that others could not even imagine (including a weekly dividend income of over $96,000),77 his life had become an endless series of frustrations. Even his one great chance for personal happiness, his marriage to Happy, had been strained by a loss so great he could barely speak of it.
But if his view of people—all people, “civilized” or tribal—had hardened in the process, he did not admit it. Indeed, his liberal positions on domestic issues, so well groomed by the late Frank Jamieson, seemed unaffected. Only in foreign policy could the glint of a steel will be observed in the eyes’ lunar glow.
30
BENEATH THE EYEBROWS OF THE JUNGLE
DONNING THE KENNEDY MANTLE–TOO LATE
In 1964, the Annual Report of the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC) pictured Quechua Indian peasants applying weed killer in the Peruvian Andes. The same year, nearly 1,750 workers, most of Indian heritage, effectively toiled for Nelson Rockefeller on IBEC’s sugar plantation on the coast in central Peru. Negociación Azucarera Nepeña, S.A., 61 percent of which was owned by IBEC, was one of Peru’s largest producers of sugar. Thanks to the U.S. boycott on Cuban sugar, the Rockefellers were enjoying record sugar prices on the world market; Nepeña, in effect, had replaced Rockefeller profits that would otherwise have been made in Cuba through such expropriated firms as Punta Alegre Sugar, just as Adolf Berle’s SuCrest hoped to score record profits through its mills in the Dominican Republic. But as in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, impatience was growing with the slow evolutionary schemes of Thomas Mann’s revised Alliance for Progress. Social reforms were urgently needed, even at Nepeña, where thousands of sugar workers and their families had erected a crowded town surrounding the mill.
Two hundred and fifty miles to the south, in Lima, the social crisis was worse. Encircling the capital, like the camp of a besieging army of the poor, was a vast slum: homes tacked together from tin cans and packing crates, children exposed to raw sewage picking through garbage, and always the dreadful meaning behind ugly black clouds of vultures circling overhead.
Peruvians mordantly called it the “Ciudad de Dios,” the City of God. But Peru now had a young liberal president who looked at these slums and knew that more than prayers were needed; otherwise it would be educated men like he, Peru’s own best and the brightest, who would also be needing prayers. The desperation in God’s City might soon bring its living hell right to the doorstep of Lima’s fashionable commercial and residential district, demanding immediate relief, if not heads.
Yet Fernando Belaúnde Terry, an architect by training, took the long view. The immediate origins of the slums and the anger simmering among their half million residents lay in the mountains to the east, where another storm of far greater dimensions was building like the Wrath of God.
In the Andean highlands, millions of Indian peasants, called Quechua after the language imposed on them by the Incan lords, still tilled a land no longer their own. Legal title had been taken from the Incas by the Spanish conquistadors and passed, through the psychological and military power of property laws, to the conquistadors’ wealthy descendants. Serfdom, abolished in the previous century by the laws of propertied liberal revolutionaries, still thrived in practice on highland manors and coastal plantations.
The enslavement of Indians under the Spaniards in the mines and plantations had led to the abandonment and collapse of Incan irrigation and terraced agriculture in the highlands. Overfilling what good land remained led to soil erosion, smaller crops, and larger debts. Fertile land became scarce, and starvation was common.
With conditions worsening, wave upon wave of Indians migrated down the mountain roads to the coastal cities that could neither feed nor house them. There, industry, dependent for capital on the ups and downs of world prices for Peru’s exports, was growing in fits and starts, but not fast enough to provide enough jobs or the kind of wages that could pay for industrial expansion as a consumer market. Unrest, born in the highlands, now spread into the streets of Lima.
Belaúnde had vowed to avert impending disaster with modern technology when he campaigned for the presidency in 1963. He had lost twice before, campaigning around the country much like John F. Kennedy. A charismatic candidate in his forties, he projected youth, vigor, and the power of a good education. Everywhere he went, he brought a team of university experts for answers and modern advertising techniques for image. His calls for progress and change to get the country “on the move” bore a strong resemblance to Kennedy’s pledge to “get this country moving again,” stirring the hearts of newly enfranchised women voters and the social aspirations of young male professionals.
By borrowing from rival Haya de la Torre APRA’s vague mystical nationalism but not its working-class ideology (“Peru is its own ideology,” he insisted), he also attracted the hopes of patriotic young army officers.
Many of these officers had, like Belaúnde, been trained in the United States and had seen its technological development and material wealth as their own future. They also knew firsthand of the conditions in the highlands. They had been ordered by President Manuel Prado and his military successors to put down mounting revolts in the Andes in 1962–1963 that were unprecedented in their lifetimes. Moreover, they were obliged to use Indian soldiers who were forcibly conscripted from Quechua villages. Facing possible mutiny, these officers understood that the desperation and anger of the Indian peasantry had reached the breaking point.
They demanded reforms, and Belaúnde promised agrarian reforms in the highlands and Peru’s recovery of its oil resources from Standard Oil’s control. In both cases, Belaúnde would confront powerful enemies.
Standard Oil of New Jersey owned a huge refinery at Talara; it also controlled the pace of the extraction of oil beneath the sands of Peru’s coast. To meet Peru’s needs, Standard Oil was importing oil from its huge reserve in Venezuela, while conserving Peru’s oil for its own future use. As a result, oil import charges were taking a huge cut out of Peru’s export earnings, retarding the capital reserves the country needed to pay debts and finance improvements in the infrastructure, agrarian reforms, and industrial growth.
After his election in 1963, Belaúnde was forced to reconsider the initiation of many of the far-reaching reforms he had promised. He had anticipated assistance from President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. But Teodoro Moscoso of the Agency for International Development made it clear, on a trip to Lima, that U.S. private and government loans could be suspended if Belaúnde did not comply with Standard Oil’s wishes.
Kennedy’s assassination became Belaúnde’s tragedy as well. It effectively eliminated any chance of achieving the promised reforms without provoking a violent reaction from either the landed oligarchy or from their American allies in mining and oil.
No funds were available to the Peruvian government to pay the landlords what they demanded for their estates. Agrarian reform, without immediate cash payments, would provoke the ire of the powerful landed interests, previously tied to General Odría and ex-President Manuel Prado, an ally of the Rockefellers and Chase Bank. And even if Belaúnde wanted to assert state control over Peru’s oil and other subsoil mineral resources, he was faced with the Hickenlooper Amendment, which required the United States to suspend aid to any country that expropriated U.S.-owned property without compensation. Not to mention the wrath of Standard Oil and, behind it, the Johnson administration’s powerful assistant secretary of state for Latin America, Thomas Mann, a former petroleum lawyer.
Although perhaps not convinced
that Moscoso’s freeze on new loans had now been made permanent by Mann, Belaúnde certainly suspected it. For this reason, he continued to balk on his inaugural promise to submit a bill to Congress within ninety days that would lay the legal foundation for reclaiming Peru’s control over its oil.
Instead, he took up the dream of his predecessors, the Amazon. It was not a new dream for him. Like Juscelino Kubitschek’s use of Brasília as a symbol for Brazil’s determination to conquer the Amazon, Belaúnde had held his party’s national convention in Iquitos to signal his own intentions to do likewise. He hoped that the colonization of the Peruvian Amazon would provide the Andes with a pressure valve. Tapping its mineral and agricultural resources might even spur Peru’s economic development.
“Peru’s young president,” the New York Times’s Tad Szulc wrote, “whose great dream is an international highway running along the Andes, once told me that he hopes only to be able to do what his Indian [Inca] forefathers did.… The desert, the Andes and the jungle, he said, must be crisscrossed with penetration roads. Then the Indians and the Cholos [a title of contempt that is used for lower-class people of mixed Indian and European parentage], instead of crowding the high plateau cities and adding to the coastal cities’ slums, could move out into the fertile jungle lands, clear them and colonize them.”1 Internal infrastructure, agrarian reform, and industrialization for an internal market might all be paid for by the Amazon’s development.
There was another ingredient, too, one that made the lure of the Amazon even more inviting: newly discovered oil.
Belaúnde could smell it in the air when he flew to the Amazon in January 1964. Only a month before, oil had been struck in a new well at Ganso Azul.2 Texas Gulf Producing Company used the find to springboard into a more lucrative concession in Libya, selling the Ganso Azul oil field to Sinclair Oil.
For Lima’s financial and industrial promoters, this was good news. Sinclair was a large, powerful company. Its banking ties included David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank and James Stillman Rockefeller’s First National City Bank.3 Its experience in Latin America included a giant success in Venezuela and a hopeful recent excursion into the Llanos plains of eastern Colombia. And in recent years it finally had made the big leap into retail marketing abroad, requiring new sources of crude.4
Belaúnde was so eager for Amazonian oil and development that he signed into law a ten-year moratorium on taxes in the jungle provinces east of the Andes.5 One of the beneficiaries was Texaco, which owned a huge concession in Peru’s upper Marañon River Valley. Another was Texaco’s Peruvian legal representative, Antonio Miró Quesada, whose enormously powerful family would prove crucial to the Summer Institute of Linguistics’ prospects in the Peruvian Amazon and the Andes.
The Miró Quesadas shaped law, politics, and public opinion. They owned Lima’s most influential paper, El Comercio. And despite patriarch Carlos Miró Quesada’s infatuation with Spanish fascism before the war, they now boasted a son, Francisco Miró Quesada, who was moderate enough to be chosen Belaúnde’s minister of education. Francisco took charge of overseeing SIL in much the same way that air force generals commanded the resources of SIL’s Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS). Both were integrated into Belaúnde’s grand scheme to conquer the Amazon with roads and planes, for both highways and jungle aviation were common immediate goals of Cam Townsend and the new Peruvian president. If Cam did not see the connection immediately during Belaúnde’s campaign, he did so after the election, when Francisco Miró Quesada inducted Cam into the Order of Distinguished Service, a high honor.
Counterinsurgency, if not the motive, was a useful rationale for Cam to act on Belaúnde’s behalf. He now used it for Belaúnde in Washington, just as he had intervened for Lázaro Cárdenas a quarter century earlier. “Any help you may be able to give the [Peruvian] project in Congress would be an effective way of combatting communism in South America,” Cam wrote Oklahoma’s Senator Mike Monroney, chairman of the Senate Aeronautics Committee, “for it would give poverty stricken laborers on the coast and in the highlands a chance to start a new life in a new region with new hopes. The results of their getting such an opportunity would be, I believe, not unlike what happened in Oklahoma eighty years ago.”6
Referring to Oklahoma as if it were an example of Indian opportunity was revealing. It underscored how much racial bias still penetrated Cam’s and his missionaries’ understanding of American Indian history.* Monroney’s state, in fact, had originally been set aside by the federal government as Indian Territory for expropriated Cherokees and Creeks of the Southeast and the butchered tribes of the western Plains and Texas. Then, eighty years ago, came an onslaught of white settlers and oil companies of such huge dimension and official sanction that the Indians were overwhelmed in their last refuge. Carved up and parceled out, Indian Territory was turned into a white-dominated political state called Oklahoma, current academic home of Cam’s grateful Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Now Cam wanted to replicate the “Oklahoma experience” in the Peruvian Amazon, using Belaúnde’s architectural vision of roads as instruments of social engineering.
Cam wrote to the Helio Corporation offering to suggest to Belaúnde that he purchase Helios for a network of small airports strung across the jungle. Cam wrote Lynn Bollinger, attempting to renew SIL’s brokerage relationship. He assured Bollinger that together they could help Belaúnde’s effort to colonize the Peruvian Amazon, hinting that Belaúnde was very friendly with SIL.7
Belaúnde’s $2 million “peripheral road” scheme through the Amazon toward the Brazilian border was approved.
The first victims of Cam’s promotion of road colonization were not, of course, communists, in either the highlands or the Amazon, but Amazonian Indians.
THE MAYORUNA MYSTERY
In March 1964, SIL’s Harriet Fields was working hard at Yarinacocha with two Indian informants to prepare for SIL’s first contact with the elusive Matses Indians. Developers at the time were taking a renewed interest in their territory, east of Pucallpa along the invisible border with Brazil.
The Matses had earned a reputation for fiercely resisting encroachment on their lands. Nature had conferred upon them the unhappy fate of living among some of the richest rubber forests in the world. Promised wages, goods, and medicine for their labor, they were often rewarded with massacres during the rubber boom of the 1900s. The Matses responded in kind, driving rubber hunters and settlers out of their homelands.
For defending the great rain forests between the Tapiche, Blanco, and Yavarí rivers, the fast-hitting Matses became a subject of fear and mystery among the settlers, who adopted the Quechuas’ term for them, “Mayoruna,” or “Man of the River.”
While Harriet Fields got ready for the Lord’s first peaceful contact with the Matses, preparations of a different kind were taking place at Requeña, a small town at the junction of the Tapiche and Ucayali rivers. Members of a road-survey expedition armed themselves with heavy weaponry before heading off into Matses territory. They expected trouble.
Now that Pucallpa was developing into a large timber exporter, the Matses’ territory, long referred to as “the most productive region of the entire Peruvian jungle,”8 was rediscovered. It contained not only the highest-grade rubber, not only vegetable oils and thirty-four different species of rose orchids (including from the genus Cattleya), but an immense forest of cedar—and possibly even oil.
Since the strike in Ganso Azul in December and Belaúnde’s visit to Iquitos in January, oil fever had swept through the region. Then the Peruvian Times announced on January 31 that a consortium of German companies was joining Standard Oil of New York (Mobil) to investigate the possibility of huge natural gas deposits in the Aguaytia River region north of Pucallpa.9 Although the Matses’ potentially lucrative tropical hardwoods were the most immediate motivation for the road, the promise of oil hovered over the jungle like an evil spell.
As the expedition hacked its way for twenty days through the j
ungle, the fleshy leaves and strangler vines seemed alive with danger. The suffocating heat and eerie silence that pervade the Amazon in daylight deepened the men’s dread. The men were marching along a spine of land that ran from Requeña through the wetlands to the Matses villages. It was rainy season. They knew that the flooded rivers had covered the forest floor with water, driving the Indians up to the spine.
Peru’s Indians and SIL
Sources: Hugo Pesce, Mapa de Selvícolas del Peru, Ministerio de Educacion Publica, 1969; Stefano Varese, “The Forest Indians in the Present Political Situation in Peru,” pp. 14–15; IBEC annual reports.
Peru Oil and Mining (1974)
Sources: Latin America Economic Report, May 9, 1975, pp. 20, 70; “Peru Petroleum Survey 1974,” Andean Times, September 20, 1974, pp. 69–74; Peruvian Times, June 1953; The Andean Report, December 1976, pp. 226–28; Shelton H. Davis and Robert O. Mathews, The Geological Imperative, pp. 64, 66.
At any moment, the Mayoruna could attack, first silently with curare-poisoned blowguns and arrows, then loudly with shotguns and Winchester Repeaters smuggled in from Brazil.
When, at last, the great green vault of the rain forest opened and they emerged into a clearing near the Yavarí River, they found crops ready for harvest. The Matses were less nomadic and more settled than anyone in Requeña or Lima had cared to believe. The men of the expedition showed their intent by cutting down the crops, depriving the Indians not only of a vital food source, but of prima facie evidence of any claim for title to the land.
Now the Indians attacked, and with swift, precise fury. From all sides came arrows. Two Indian guides and three members of the expedition fell wounded. The Matses vanished again into the dense foliage.