by Gerard Colby
AID’s Public Safety Program, controlled by the CIA, made up the slack, providing Peruvian police with almost as much money, arms, vehicles, gases, radios, and paramilitary and police training as it gave to Brazil’s rulers.47 Many of these policemen were knowingly trained by the CIA at the AID-sponsored International Police Academy in Washington, D.C., except for three intense days at the renamed “John F. Kennedy” Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. At Fort Bragg, between briefings on “civil-military relationships in counterinsurgency operations and police support in unconventional warfare,”48 Peruvian police and military officers met some of the Green Berets who would help them destroy civilian rebellions, including that of the MIR.
The social sciences were the brains, what a computerized guidance system is to a deadly missile. In July 1964, the U.S. Army gave the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) at American University in Washington, D.C., the largest single grant ever awarded a social science project.49 The project’s targets for “field research” in Latin America were Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Colombia.50
Its name was Project Camelot.
The project’s purpose was described by the army as follows:
Success in such tasks as equipping and training indigenous forces for an internal security mission, civic action, psychological warfare or other counterinsurgency action depends on a thorough understanding of the indigenous social structure, upon the accuracy with which changes within the indigenous culture, particularly violent changes, are anticipated, and the effects of various courses of action available to the military and other agencies of government upon the indigenous process of change.51
Rex Hopper, director of the $1.5 million project, tried to recruit the preeminent behavioral scientists in the United States. Project Camelot, he explained, hoped to develop a “social systems model” that would allow the Pentagon “to predict and influence significant aspects of social change in the developing nations of the world.”
Hopper was more explicit in a working paper he wrote to orient the Pentagon about Camelot’s military applications, which included
forecasting the potential for internal war; … estimating the relative effectiveness of various military and quasi-military postures … over a wide range of environmental conditions; and means and procedures for rapid collection, storage and retrieval of data on internal war potential and effects of governmental action.52
Project Camelot was to be a broad sweep for local data collection, including everything from the language, social structure, and history of peoples to labor strikes, peasants’ seizures of haciendas, and violence. Anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, sociologists, and economists would be joined by political scientists, mathematicians, and the military to produce a deliberate political objective of social control.
While Camelot was gearing up, recruiting more than fifty top social scientists as consultants, the SORO assisted in the production of the U.S. Army’s field manual for Peru. Evaluating development projects and social communication, it took particular note of SIL’s bilingual schools among the Indians living in the rain forests of the lower eastern slopes of the Andes. The Peruvian government was eager to develop this region economically.
The SORO also produced a “Psychological Operation Handbook.” The title was changed to “Intercultural Communications Guide,” which provided “appeals and symbols of persuasiveness for communicating messages to specific audiences in a given country.” In addition,
each study … seeks to identify various groupings in the population—ethnic, geographic, economic, social, etc.—and their attitudes and probable behavior toward the United States. The studies assess the susceptibility of the various audiences to persuasion and their effectiveness or influence in their own society.53
Cornell University, through its CIA-financed School of Industrial and Labor Relations,54 in conjunction with six Peruvian universities, studied changes in Peruvian villages and industrial organization. It also sponsored the Cornell-San Marcos Project in Linguistics with the National University of San Marcos. One graduate was SIL’s top Quechua translator, Donald Burns.
*Apparently Cam and his Fundamentalist followers had never absorbed John Collier’s writings on the plight of Oklahoma’s Indians. Collier specifically referred to the period Cam praised (1880–1920) as an era of the “demolition of Indian rights” in Oklahoma. See John Collier, “Terminating the American Indians,” p. 4. Unpublished manuscript, February 13, 1954, Institute of Ethnic Affairs, in Papers of Philleo Nash, Harry S. Truman Library.
*William Cameron Townsend told the authors in 1977 of another possibility. A Peruvian general named Barbosa had recently visited him at his home near the JAARS base in Waxhaw, North Carolina, and claimed that he had deliberately disobeyed orders from his superiors while participating in the bombing of the Matses, dropping his bombs harmlessly in spots where he “knew” the Indians were not hiding.
31
MISTAKEN IDENTITIES
THE PACIFICATION OF THE ANDES
In 1964, while Peru’s Matses Indians still remained the unsolved problem for President Fernando Belaúnde Terry’s road-building march to the Brazilian border, his minister of education, Francisco Miró Quesada, arrived at Yarinacocha, the jungle base of the Summer Linguistic Institute (SIL). He had come to attend a graduation ceremony for Indian bilingual teachers. Like so many others before him, he would be amazed at what he saw in the middle of the rain forest.
Yarinacocha seemed to be living proof of how ingenuity, dedication, and the spirit of the Lord could tame the Amazonian wilderness—and its people. Modern, low-slung bungalows, with screened porches, manicured lawns, and flowering shrubs, greeted visitors who landed on the river in a single-engine amphibious plane. Once on shore, the tour would proceed up dirt paths, past smiling missionaries on motorbikes, to a complex of classrooms, administrative offices, a church, a clinic, a soccer field, a dining hall, a hangar, an airfield, and finally, the nerve center of the base: a simple, two-story, one-room radio tower that connected Yarinacocha with all SIL’s tribes scattered up and down the jungle for 1,000 miles. This radio tower, along with JAARS’s Helios, was perhaps SIL’s most important possession.
Visitors like Miró Quesada could get a taste of the daily life of the SIL missionaries by just listening to the squawking transmissions between Yarinacocha and its outposts. Field reports from remote areas ranged from the relatively mundane (“Bob needs a box of .22 rifle shells and requests that some Indians from the occupational course be hired to cut his lawn for the next two Saturdays”) to the mildly unnerving (“The monkey that bit Mrs. Dunca did, repeat, did, have rabies”) to what one amused SILer called “a riot,” when a JAARS pilot was interpreted as announcing that he had a “pair of live Indians on board” when he had actually said, “I have a paralyzed Indian on board.”1 In exchange for such field reports three times a day, the isolated missionaries were treated to the latest gossip from Lima and “a bit of world news.”
Not every visitor, however, would get the full lowdown on what crackled over the radio. “We are being a little mysterious, I’m afraid,” admitted the radio transmitter. “We have the army’s permission for all that we are doing up there, but we don’t want everyone in the jungle to know about it. Many Peruvians might get upset over our trying to contact this hostile tribe. They wouldn’t understand just what we are trying to do and that we have the government’s blessings.”2
Lima’s blessings for the Matses’ pacification and more originated in Miró Quesada’s 1964 visit to Yarinacocha. During SIL’s annual graduation ceremonies for its Indian bilingual teachers, SIL made it a habit of showing its guests how the linguists instilled pride and patriotism among their Indian students. Even out in the remote villages, linguists would have their students “line up in formation, salute the Peruvian flag, and sing the national anthem.”3 That year, as MIR dropped out of sight in Lima and rumors of an imminent guerrilla war spread, premilitary training of Indians
had been introduced by SIL at Yarinacocha. Cam proudly reviewed the uniformed students parading before the visitors from Lima. The lesson was not lost on either Belaúnde or Miró Quesada. The education minister saw clearly that SIL offered a step toward greater national integration and thereby greater national security. Before he left, he would grant SIL the franchise for the pacification not only of the Matses, but of the Andes.
If the Andes were feared as the potential Sierra Maestra for South American revolutionaries, the Amazon was the Sierra Maestra’s soft underbelly. With about 60 percent of Peru’s territory, the Amazonian Oriente had only 623,000 people. Virtually unoccupied except by tribes and isolated towns of whites and mestizo traders, the area was considered vulnerable to both guerrilla insurgency and the claims of neighboring nations like Brazil. Indeed, one war had already been fought with Ecuador over oil. Now oil and gas had been found near the Brazilian border, and Brazil was a much stronger country than Ecuador or Peru.
Miró Quesada’s approval of SIL’s attempt to pacify the Matses was, therefore, not surprising. But it was not the Matses who were his greatest worry that day at Yarinacocha. It was the millions of landless peasants and miners in the Andes, most of them Quechua. The greatest obstacle to giving the Quechua some hope of relief from centuries of slavery and powerlessness in the Andes was, as in the Amazon, the patrón.
As he watched the Indians receive their teacher certificates, Miró Quesada understood that Cam’s Bible translators offered at least some Indians an entrepreneurial alternative to the patrón’s debts and wage slavery.
The American translators brought Western medicine more powerful than the herbs prepared by the traditional medicine men. They brought pots that did not break, nylon fishline and hooks, axheads and nails, matches, kerosene and flashlights, gasoline for water pumps and generators, and often an American wife who was a nurse.4 From these Americans came education in the Indians’ own languages, a bilingual program instituted by William Cameron Townsend’s contact with the ministry in 1952. SIL’s bilingual schools were a linguistic highway to the national language, Spanish, the prerequisite for commercial communications with the coastal cities and Peru’s dominant mestizo culture.
SIL developed Indian-owned rubber cooperatives and stores, cutting out the local mestizo middleman. More often than not, it was SIL’s local bilingual teacher who now played the role of middleman. Through him grew the desire for more cleared land, seedlings, insecticides, land titles, more schools, and more business.
This, then, was how SIL could unlock the spell that the centuries-old feudal manorial system had cast over the Andes. The key was bilingual education.
Belaúnde had only to look at Peru’s recent economic history to see the link to language barriers. Where modern commercial relations had entered as a result of economic development, linguistic homogeneity had triumphed at the expense of Quechua and other Indian languages, but where they did not enter, Indian tongues continued to prevail. The result was a linguistic fragmentation that retarded commercial growth and the orthodox nation-building process.
SIL’s method used bilingual education to erode traditional authority in the tribe, undermining the power of the chief and the shaman by replacing them with the native bilingual teacher—who, hopefully, was also a convert to Fundamentalist Protestantism. In at least one case, SIL translators were able to win over even the son of a chief. This man became a storekeeper, replacing the patrón, but he also brought the cash economy directly into the tribe’s values, with all its unintended results: private hoarding of wealth, resentment, theft, locked doors, and the call for a jail.5
This erosion of community will to resist change was valuable to Lima’s development officials who were planning for the Amazon and the Andes. SIL was a more immediate option than the small long-range experiments that the Vicos Project exemplified. In 1963, therefore, Belaúnde and Miró Quesada initiated the National Bilingual Education Program through a network of linguists, anthropologists, and educators.
SIL followed up in the summer of 1964 with a pilot project to promote bilingual education in the Sierras, with Donald Burns as director. The franchise for the pacification of the Matses had become a franchise for the pacification of the entire Andes.
The Quechua bilingual training center would become a springboard for Quechua scholarships to Cornell University—and for a growing resentment against the conservative politics and Fundamentalist proselytizing practiced by Burns and his wife, Nadine.
Before launching his new career, Donald Burns acceded to an urgent request from Cam. SIL had opened an exhibit hall at the 1964–1965 World’s Fair in New York, featuring the story of a Peruvian Indian convert. The exhibit hall had rapidly proved to be a financial disaster, threatening SIL’s viability and undermining confidence in Cam’s judgment within SIL.
“FROM SAVAGE TO CITIZEN”
Cam hoped that Peru would catapult SIL to world status among missions. He had coordinated the World’s Fair exhibit with the publication of Matthew Huxley and Cornell Capa’s Farewell to Eden about SIL’s activities in Peru. But the real force behind SIL’s promotion was New York financier Sam Milbank, owner of mines and plantations throughout the Caribbean basin.
Milbank had helped underwrite the book’s first printing. Although Cam actually thought the book was “not the weighty presentation of the Indian problems we had hoped for,”6 he hoped to sell 75,000 copies.7 He was severely disappointed.
But the greatest mistake was SIL’s pavilion at the World’s Fair. To be sure, its simple style, modeled after a thatched hut with brand-new carved totem poles in front, offered welcome relief from some of the other religious exhibits, such as the ostentatious miniature of Salt Lake City’s Mormon Temple and the forty-four-second spin past Michelangelo’s Pietá on moving sidewalks offered by the Vatican.
There, however, the contrast ended. For beneath Wycliffe’s global logo and the words “2,000 Tribes” hung a garish sign over the entrance, flanked by another stuck in the earth to catch the attention of fair goers:
See the
“From Savage to Citizen”
mural
At a cost of $20,000, Cam had commissioned painter Douglas Riseborough to paint five scenes on a 100-foot-long, 10-foot-high canvas supposedly depicting the life of Tariri, a Shapra (Candoshi) headhunter from the Peruvian Amazon who had been brought to peace in the Lord by SIL translators.
Cam instructed the hapless artist to increase his colors to resemble the special effects of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Under Cam’s advice, Riseborough produced a vision garish and horrifying: A wild Tariri at war, holding a weapon in one hand and a blood-dripping head in the other, became the model Christian. If the reality of Shapra headhunting was debatable according to anthropologists, and Tariri (except when prodded to brag) himself denied ever severing a head,8 Cam was not to be put off.
Tariri was news, and had been used once before, in 1957, when he accompanied Rachel Saint and Dayuma on tour. A powerfully built man with shoulder-length black hair and a winning smile, Tariri had been a hit on Ralph Edwards’s This Is Your Life television program for Rachel Saint and at the Billy Graham Crusade in New York. Tariri had enjoyed all the attention, and Hollywood’s audiences liked the feathered and earringed chief as well. Now the publisher of Farewell to Eden was interested in having Tariri give his recollections of the good old days, as well as of the newer, holier ones. Cam’s eyes widened when he realized the book would be sold at the fair. Then, just as the fair opened, word came from Peru that Tariri was about to ruin everything by going on a rampage.
Cam fired off his alarm to SIL’s branch director in Peru, Eugene Loos.
“Tariri was drinking, seeing the witchdoctor, and talking of revenge killings in the Upriver group,” Loos wrote back. “I immediately asked the group to pray for him, not only because of the ruination that would result if he destroyed his testimony, but because we know that the publicity and the strength of his testimony as it is given in the
World’s Fair will surely bring on renewed attacks from Satan upon him.”
Meanwhile, an American physician had speculated that Tariri might be suffering from brain damage acquired from a bout of cerebral malaria the year before.
What Tariri needed, Loos concluded, was the Lord’s Word, preferably from a man. Perhaps Cam could write him?9 Cam sent a message.
But there was a problem. Tariri, having been introduced by SIL missionaries to the Protestant work ethic and associated notions of possessive individualism, seemed less the model Christian than he testified to being. Tariri’s response was full of tenderness (he expressed his love for Cam), denials (stories told about him at Yarinacocha by children, he explained, were lies), and dreams of success (he wanted to hold on to land that had belonged to the family of a dead chief). He had big plans for this land: rubber, cedar, peanuts, beans, rice, sugar, and coffee. He did not desire a fight, and if SIL could help him, he would construct a church and a school. His conception of civil service for this community was classic nepotism: one of his children could be the health worker, another could be the mechanic, and his nephew could be his official aide. As for himself, he would settle for a large house.10
Cam was despondent. Tariri’s behavior made it too dangerous for SIL’s reputation to bring him to the United States right now to have the publishers tape him telling anecdotes, experiences, and impressions. But Cam had an idea to save the project: Perhaps he could send Ethel Wallis, SIL’s trusted in-house writer, to Peru and meet Tariri in Yarinacocha. She could put the book together there. The only hitch was that the publisher would have to pay for her trip. “Wycliffe can’t do it when we are in such a bind on our World’s Fair project.”11
“Bind” was the height of understatement. The entire cost of the World’s Fair pavilion had been estimated at over $600,000. Cam had already appealed to everyone who had ever contributed to SIL. First, were the rocks on which he had built SIL, the American Fundamentalist preachers and prominent educators who gave Cam’s vision both its religious foundation and its scientific legitimacy. Then there were the donors from big business who provided the heavy beams of finance on which all else rested.