Thy Will Be Done
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Shortly after President João Goulart had been removed in Brazil, Colombian President León Valencia gave his army the green light to move on the peasant republics. With CIA and Green Beret guidance, spies had already been sent in, informers recruited, and “civic action” initiated. The building of roads, bridges, and schools by the army was accompanied by the distribution of clothes and food from CARE, then under the control of the CIA35 and its Latin adjunct, Caritas. The army then set up a blockade around the strongest of the peasant republics, Marquetalia, to isolate the area and control the civilian population. But with the forced relocation of peasants to barbed-wired “strategic hamlets,” hostilities, as in Vietnam, ensued.
The Colombian generals felt obliged to speed things up. The air force was authorized to drop napalm on villages. Specially trained troops were whisked in at treetop level by machine-gun-firing helicopters; peasants were shot, and villages were razed. Time and other mainstream press sources were invited in to observe the victory. Sixteen thousand Colombian troops were airlifted in the first massive military use in Latin America of the Pentagon’s new counterinsurgency “limited warfare” tactics, a pre-Vietnam experiment in McNamara’s “systems” approach to integrating communications (command and control), rapid air mobility, concentrated firepower, and computer-assisted intelligence for finding and tracking an enemy.
The republic’s radical social policies were replaced by a timid agrarian reform necessarily crippled by the Liberals’ alliance with the landowning Conservatives. Roads came, but were fringed by shantytowns that defied the government’s propaganda with their silent misery. Progress arrived, but it was a strange kind of progress, heralded by growing poverty and tainted by crime. For with speculators buying land and merchants selling imported foodstuffs, commercial agriculture—with all its expensive fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and machinery—eventually forced many peasants out of subsistence farming toward the only crop capable of commanding high prices on the world market: marijuana.
With the military’s occupation of the Marquetalia stronghold, Colombia’s other smaller peasant republics also soon fell. It was during this tumultuous period that Colombian Air Force General Armando Urrego Bernal donated land near Puerto Lleras, a contraband center in the state of Metá, to the American Bible translators of William Cameron Townsend.
With the endorsement of Catholic Bishop Marceliano Canyes, won by Cam’s providing a librarian to help Canyes organize his late brother’s ethnographic papers, SIL missionaries marched triumphantly into the liberated Indian tribes of the southern Andes and eastern plains they had recently surveyed. By March 1965, when the end of “the zones of peasant self-defense” came with the fall of the thirteen-year-old Independent Republic of El Pato, Cam was overseeing the “occupation for the Lord” of nineteen Indian language groups.
In May 1965, the Left’s traditional strategy of self-defense zones suffered another blow in Bolivia. General Barrientos’s U.S.-trained army attacked the Indian miners’ “zone of worker self-defense” surrounding Oruro with bloody results. Thereafter the Communist parties’ traditional approach of self-defense zones would be dismissed by a younger generation as passivity and a failure of will to take the offensive through guerrilla warfare.
At the White House, the Special Group was keenly aware of the attraction that guerrilla war held for younger Latin Americans. The Special Group continued its reviews of CIA initiatives in Colombia, Bolivia, and Brazil, as well as the Agency’s preparations for the MIR in Peru. After the election in November, however, Johnson had no longer been willing to chafe under the advice of Kennedy’s appointees, including CIA Director John McCone. He began to rely more on the advice of Thomas Mann, the new assistant secretary of state for Latin America and coordinator of the Alliance for Progress.
But what was even more important during this period was the ascendancy of the Rockefellers in shaping the post-Kennedy policy toward Latin America.
THE ROCKEFELLER COURTSHIP
Nelson, smarting from his race against Goldwater for the Republican nomination, refrained from continuing his earlier campaign of criticism of Johnson’s “unilateral” Latin policy. Johnson had put out feelers to the Rockefeller brothers for help, and the brothers responded. With Thomas Mann’s appointment, Johnson had signaled that the Alliance for Progress was to change its goals from Kennedy’s rapid social and political reforms to the traditional path of political evolution based on gradual private economic development funded by loans and investments by the largest American banks and corporations. For the effective chairmanship of the finance committee of a new support committee (called the National Committee for the Alliance for Progress), Johnson chose David Rockefeller.
The Rockefellers were preeminent in their influence on American businessmen over Latin American policy. In addition to Nelson’s vast political networks, David was chairman of the Business Group on Latin America and the new International Executive Services Committee (essentially a Peace Corps for retired executives).
David was eager to speak for business’s perspectives on the Alliance for Progress. He was also willing to take on assignments that were directly related to Rockefeller investments, including Peru’s dispute with Standard Oil of New Jersey over subsoil mineral rights.
In March 1965, with Chase’s associated bank, Banco Lar Brasileiro, S.A., standing at the ready, David traveled to Rio to see about the financial needs of the Brazilian junta’s development plans. He reported to Johnson on his return. In April, Johnson appointed David to a new special review panel on AID, chaired by Cornell University’s president, Dr. James Perkins, a Chase director—and by 1966 a director also of Nelson’s IBEC and of the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, a Pentagon contractor for research and military aircraft, chemical and biological warfare, and “Project Heatwave,” to study the effectiveness of napalm.
Called the General Advisory Committee on Foreign Assistance Programs, the AID review panel would provide the Rockefellers with a strong influence on policy deliberations. At the same time, David made plans to absorb Nelson’s old Inter-American Council and the Latin American Information Committee into the Business Group for Latin America. What emerged was the Council for Latin America (now called the Council of the Americas), which united more than 200 corporations with more than 80 percent of U.S. investments in Latin America into a common business front.36 David set up the council in a Manhattan town house across the street from the mansion Junior had given the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He used the CFR’s influential magazine Foreign Affairs to explain what had happened to the Alliance for Progress, stressing that the “new concept of the Alliance for Progress with its emphasis on economic development” was restoring the confidence of companies that were considering investments in Latin America. This was a marked improvement from the “overly ambitious concepts of revolutionary change of the program’s early years, because it created a climate more attractive to U.S. business.” David also prescribed Nelson’s old formula: Remove tariff protections for local industries and agriculture and replace them with free trade in a hemispheric community. Free trade, in turn, necessitated “modernization, diversification and expansion of agriculture” based not on the redistribution of land to the peasants who worked it, but on the transformation of the great landed estates into capital-intensive commercial farms that used modern machinery, fertilizers, and scientific techniques.37
David cited Chase’s financing of a “scientific program of seeding, feeding and breeding” cattle in Panama for corporate exporters to the international market, including the American market. It was the same formula being prescribed by Nelson’s American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) and IBEC for the Amazon. This formula, of course, precluded the nationalization of resources held by foreign interests. In 1965, David visited Peru to make that point clear to Belaúnde’s government. Standard Oil’s subsoil properties must remain with Standard Oil, he intimated, or Peru would suffer the consequences.
“If we cannot control population growth,” he told the audience, “life as we know it, or—more important—life as we want it to be, shall surely, slowly waste away.”38 John had taken up the mantle of his father.
Junior had been influenced by eugenicists like Frederick Osborn, Henry Fairchild, and Warren Thompson, who, despite their conscious disdain for racism, still subscribed to Malthusian arguments about population growth causing poverty, with a curious focus on populations who were poor or in the Third World. That such arguments did not seem to apply to men like Junior, who had six children, never bothered John 3rd (who had four children), or Nelson (who had seven) or Laurance (who had four) or David (who had six).
What bothered the Rockefellers were the dangers created by social unrest and the fact that the world’s majority seemed to be turning to native communists or nationalist leaders in their impatience with starvation. In the 1950s, as Nelson’s IBEC expanded its investments in Teodoro Moscoso’s Operation Bootstrap industrialization program in Puerto Rico, John’s Population Council was actively encouraging sterilization as a means of birth control. By 1965, about 35 percent of Puerto Rico’s women of childbearing age had been sterilized.39
Inadequate health care was the basis of the argument for sterilization as a means of promoting better health and protecting incomes from falling any lower than they already were.40
In early 1964, Thomas Mann had established an Office of Population within the Alliance for Progress and got Congress to fund the office through AID. Now John 3rd wanted more. He urged that a presidential commission be formed to investigate the implications of population numbers for aid to Third World countries. He hoped that the intrauterine device might be the beginning of the “ultimate solution of the population problem.” But that did not remove the immediate threat of starvation, as he explained in Honolulu.
Until population is stabilized, every increase in food production is an important holding action. In effect, we are “buying time” until the scales of survival can be brought into lasting balance. How then can we best increase food production? I believe an important key to the answer is the subsistence farmer.… He is found wherever land is arable.… He almost always works close to the edge of poverty, seeking out a living as best he knows how, with implements that are often primitive.
The problem was how to persuade the subsistence farmers to increase their productivity, and to do so, they had to be able to afford and use modern techniques, machines, seeds, and insecticides. The problem was compounded by the First World’s ignorance of Third World people. “Despite the importance of the subsistence farmer, little is known of him,” Rockefeller complained. What knowledge existed suffered from “little coordination and exchange between disciplines. Anthropologists have studied the primitive tribes of Borneo and Congo while economists have tended to focus on the more commercialized farms.”
John intended to change that situation with behavioral studies and cross-disciplinary approaches.
The subsistence farmer is not merely an economic man; he has a psychological side, a social side, and a cultural side. Too little is known of his motivations and human responses, of his sociocultural environment, of his ability to change the age-old patterns of his life.
… Then there are all the questions of individual motivation. How can he be induced to put aside centuries-old methods to experiment with the new and the foreign, when he is experimenting, literally, with the food his family must have to survive? How can one persuade an individual, self-reliant by nature, to work in intelligent concert with others, who are sometimes total strangers?
How, indeed?
THE FRONT IS EVERYWHERE—FROM VICOS TO CAMELOT
Allen Holmberg had come far from his days at Yale University, when he helped the Yale Cross Cultural Survey Program (the origin of Yale’s Human Relations Areas Institute) set up the cross-cultural index that was so valuable to the intelligence activities of Nelson’s CIAA. Now, an anthropologist at Cornell University and director of the experimental Vicos Project in Peru, he was at the height of his career.
Vicos was a model land-reform project in the highlands that offered Western development agencies like AID important lessons in how a community-owned and directed agricultural cooperative might be a model for peaceful change. Even with the backing of American technicians, it had taken Vicos more than ten years to earn enough money to purchase a local estate. In the process, the Indians had founded a credit union, communal workshops, and a forestry program and developed incomes and skills in democratically controlled and rotated self-management that preserved the family-owned community and ended outmigration. Vicos’s success made AID officers in Lima green with envy, but they also realized that its success was a qualified one. It had relied on the project’s ability to purchase land from local landlords; others, they knew, would not be so quick to sell out.41
Holmberg described his efforts to “modernize” agriculture to John D. Rockefeller 3rd and a specially selected audience meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii, at a subsistence agriculture conference party sponsored by Rockefeller’s Agricultural Development Council. The key, Holmberg explained, lay in changing the cultural and social patterns of the Indians.
He did not describe, however, how his project had been financed by the Department of Defense, as well as AID, to the tune of $662,000.42 Neither did he mention that he had given a similar accounting of his methods and their results in April 1963 to the first civic action course offered at the Army Civil Affairs School at Fort Gordon, Georgia.43
Americans’ quest to mold indigenous people into their own image of success was not, of course, a new phenomenon. Missionaries and the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been trying for decades in the United States. Since World War II, social scientists knew that effective psychological warfare operations required in-depth knowledge of a population’s culture. Researchers had to study and master a people’s belief systems, expressed most truly through their language, and their social organization, the most significant means by which people can mediate successfully with nature and adapt to changes in their environment. They knew that culture is one of the great advantages Homo sapiens has in the struggle for survival: Through intelligent deliberate selection, culture allows people to adapt much more quickly than does genetic mutation through natural selection, which can take thousands of years. They also knew that culture allows a group of people—a tribe, even a nation—to adapt to changes in an environment initiated by another people’s actions. Learning a culture’s key components—its genetic structure and neurotransmitters, so to speak—could also give social engineers, whether armed or not, the tools to manipulate minds. In the quest for control, the CIA’s counterinsurgency practitioners already had learned that there were weapons other than guns and gases, and that the path from the social sciences that engineered whole societies, to the physical sciences that engineered minds, was short indeed.
The Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA), founded in 1956 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Case Institute, Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology, and United Fruit’s favorite university, Tulane, had led the way in an unprecedented marshaling of academic, social, and physical scientists to serve the Pentagon and the CIA in preparing for “remote area conflicts.” After Kennedy’s death, IDA’s work expanded under the guidance of its new president, former Special Group-C.I. Chairman General Maxwell Taylor (now retired) and a board that included former Special Group members and Rockefeller allies such as C. Douglas Dillon and Roswell Gilpatric. Though focused mostly on the phased escalation in Vietnam, IDA’s r
esearch also included special designs for weapons and vehicles to be tested and used in the jungles of Latin America, such as in eastern Bolivia. These weapons included infrared photography and heat-seeking devices for aerial reconnaissance and electronic sensors to track movements along jungle trails.44
Beyond the use of physical sciences to design such weapons was the application of social sciences as part of a “systems management” approach to judging the cost-effectiveness of the command and control of counterinsurgency programs. IDA was trying to develop “integrated, functionally-oriented counterinsurgency programs … wielding weapons and politics, mobility and social development, communications and economic progress into effective instruments for counterinsurgency … in present and incipient conflicts.”45
Meanwhile, the work of anthropologists at Vicos, done under academic cover for a U.S. government-sponsored program, fit into the Pentagon’s and CIA’s efforts to neutralize the opposition of indigenous people in Latin America that raised the potential for “internal war.”
Fear had been growing in Washington that the Andes could become the Sierra Maestra of South America. If Communist guerrillas were to be prevented from winning an indigenous base of support along the Andes the way Castro had done among peasants in the Sierra Maestra mountains, every effort had to be made as quickly as possible.
Peru was the center of the Andean spine. U.S. military strategists had long recognized the importance of the Peruvian military, training 3,000 Peruvian officers under the Military Assistance Program between 1950 and 1963.46 In 1964, however, the second year counterinsurgency training and supplies were made available to Latin American armies, Washington gave more military aid to the Peruvian generals than to the military of any other country in Latin America. Aid to the Peruvian generals dropped to second place in fiscal year 1965, behind aid to the Brazilian generals, who by then had seized power.