by Gerard Colby
The Guanabara (Rio) police chief … described the text of the song as offensive to the armed forces because it includes a passage which says that soldiers in the barracks “learn to kill and lead a meaningless life.…”
Steps are being taken to ban sales of the record … and all performances.… Police in Rio also arrested people who allegedly carried copies of the text.
Rogers wrote of riots between pro-U.S. students at Mackenzie College, “apparently the headquarters of a rightist organization called the CCC (the Portuguese acronym for Commandos to Hunt Communists) who pledged to “kill five communists for every democrat killed,” and leftist students at the University of São Paulo. “The conflict is sharp and serious, and still another newspaper speaks of a ‘pre-Nazi’ atmosphere of fear and violence in the country.”3
Henry W. Bagley, public relations director for the International Basic Economy Corporation, dismissed this news with businesslike Realpolitik and a crisp philosophical air. “Rogers’s report seems accurate,” he wrote, “and is certainly interesting. But I doubt—as he does—that the students or others can oust the military right.… I can’t forecast what will develop, but personally, I would feel a little more secure in Brazil than New York City right now. I spent 8 days in São Paulo this month and really enjoyed it. But in that short time I obviously couldn’t get close to the political and economic trends.”4 Among these trends was the arrival of U.S. military officers, including an army captain fresh from Vietnam who was assassinated in the streets of Rio for allegedly helping the Brazilian military’s repression. The U.S. Embassy insisted that the captain was only a student at the University of São Paulo.
Two weeks later, Rogers wrote home again. The targets of the Brazilian police were now the same people who were being encouraged to move into Indian lands in the Amazon: poor families from the Northeast and other rural areas. “There seems to be little doubt that as cities like Rio and São Paulo experience the impact of migration from the countryside, urban life becomes more and more difficult for many thousands of the marginally poor, and crime rates rise to alarming proportions. It is principally in response to urban crime, and the inability of municipal governments to control it, that acts of the most brutal and deadly violence occur.”5
This level of violence by Brazilians against Brazilians was a new phenomenon—if one did not count violence against the Indians, who seldom were counted; since 1900, an estimated 800,000 people, including eighty whole tribes, had just “disappeared” into “extinction.”6
In Rio and its suburbs, as well as in São Paulo, local death squads murdered with impunity. Many leftists were murdered as “criminals”; newspapers were bombed; and in the Northeast, the home of an outspoken defender of human rights—the Catholic archbishop of Recife—was machine-gunned by CCC terrorists. Soon the sweep widened to include not only “respectable” opponents of the regime, but an increasing number of Rio’s migrant poor from the countryside; homeless and crammed into shantytowns, they had committed the crime of turning the beautiful mountains surrounding Rio into an eyesore of human misery. Eventually, with money from the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), the regime would save Rio’s status as a tourist mecca by tearing down many favelas (slums) and replacing them with public housing or a one-way ticket to the Amazon. But in the years right after the coup, as the regime struggled for its political and economic life, discouraging immigrants from choosing the cities over the jungle often meant inspiring terror with mutilated corpses.
SWIFT AND ROCKEFELLER: ALLIANCE IN THE AMAZON
Despite knowledge of this state of affairs, the Rockefeller office overlooked the link between terror in the urban slums and Operation Amazon’s hoped-for colonies while it made business decisions in Brazil. No sooner had the generals’ so-called supercoup taken place in December 1968 than Deltec International further consolidated its power in Brazil, buying up International Packers, Ltd. The purchase of this huge meat-packing conglomerate brought not only members of the Swift family and most of the Swift family’s international meat-packing empire into an alliance with the Rockefeller camp, but the Milbank interests through Deltec director Arthur Oakley Brooks, a longtime executive of mutual funds controlled by Sam Milbank,7 friend of Cam Townsend and contributor to the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Milbank’s largesse spanned the theological gap that separated the Townsends and the Rockefellers; he was chairman of the Milbank Memorial Fund, one of Wall Street’s richest foundations, which contributed funds to Nelson’s ALA.8
Through IBEC’s holdings in Deltec’s Brazilian Investment Bank (BIB), this alliance offered an unprecedented consolidation of foreign power in Brazil, with great expectations for the Amazon. International Packers chairman A. Thomas Taylor, husband of Geraldine Swift, was made chairman of Deltec International; Milbank executive A. Oakley Brooks was made vice chairman; Walther Moreira Salles, director of both IBEC and Deltec, continued as president of BIB, with IBEC’s Fulton Boyd also a BIB director; and David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank continued as Deltec’s transfer agent.
Rockefeller interests were now, through Deltec, interlocked with one of Brazil’s largest processors of frozen meats and one of the largest ranching concessions in the Amazon, Swift do Brasil, S.A. Deltec also began preparations to construct a meat-packing plant north of Pará at the mouth of the Amazon, at Ilha de Marajó, an island the size of Switzerland.
With Deltec’s purchase of the Swift and Armour beef operations, the twenty-year-old “shining dream” of developing South America’s interior seemed within reach. Within two years, Deltec would begin cutting down the rain forest at its 180,000-acre ranch straddling Maranhão and Pará. Shipping billionaire Daniel Ludwig, long backed by Chase Manhattan Bank, had decided to do his own cutting in the Brazilian Amazon, but on a far grander scale. He had plans for a giant project that would startle the world. Mining would be included, along with dams. The “Great Lakes” proposal for South America by Herman Kahn, the director of the Hudson Institute, also remained alive and well. In fact, Nelson’s good friend and trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, former Colombian president Alberto Lleras Camargo, was to head a special commission to investigate the Colombian part of that proposal: a series of low dams, or dikes, to flood western Colombia’s Chocó Valley, creating two huge lakes that would be linked by a canal excavated by nuclear blasts, creating a new waterway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. As Fortune explained, this plan would “open up the vast quantities of high-grade, fast growing timber that are known to be there, plus a variety of minerals, including gold, platinum, copper, zinc, bauxite, and oil, that are either known or believed to be there.”9 (Among the more active gold-mining companies in the region, coincidentally, was a subsidiary of the International Mining Corporation, chaired by Lewis B. Harder, a partner with Rockefeller ally Moreira Salles in the Brazilian mining company CBMM.10) The Chocó dams would provide electricity to power the industrialization of the Cauca Valley, fifty miles to the east, and its major cities, Medellín, Manizales, and Cali. No comment was made on how flooding the Chocó Valley would impact on the 13,000 to 20,000 Indians of the Catio, Embera, and Noanama tribes in the vicinity, but SIL did make the decision to send in translators among the Noanama in 1969, having already “occupied” the Catio since 1966.
That Kahn’s proposals received serious consideration was alone a triumph of will, and not just Kahn’s. Nelson’s CIAA had developed the plan in Washington as a proposed inland waterways project. That project proposed using the same rivers in Brazil and Venezuela as Kahn did a quarter century later—the Orinoco, the Casiquiare, the Negro, and, of course, the Amazon; then as now the object was to link oil, mining, and forest resources inside the Orinoco and Amazon basins for extraction to the war industries and markets of the United States and her allies.
For Nelson, the triumph of his ideals for growth—symbolized by IBEC’s own growth—was also personal. At IBEC’s April 1969 annual meeting, he had the satisfaction of seeing his eldest s
on, Rodman, installed as president of IBEC. Rockefeller family financial interests now shared control over Brazil’s largest mutual fund, Crescinco, through one of Brazil’s largest investment banks, BIB. They controlled outright one of Brazil’s largest commercial banks, Banco Lar Brasileiro, S.A. (through David’s Chase Manhattan Bank); its largest hybrid seed company, SASA, producing 45 percent of all hybrid seeds planted in Brazil; one of its largest manufacturers of CMC (carboxyl-methyl-cellulose, a vital moisture-control agent in detergents, paints, adhesives, ceramics, and oil-well drilling); and one of its largest drop-forging plants. Through Crescinco, they controlled stock holdings in more than 100 Brazilian firms; through Rockefeller Brothers, Inc.’s holding in Chrysler, they held a stake in one of Brazil’s largest car manufacturers. They owned a large share in one of Brazil’s largest ranches (Fazenda Bodoquena); and now, through Deltec, they had a stake in one of Brazil’s (and the world’s) largest beef-processing operations, which was about to launch another huge cattle ranch in the Amazon. With Rodman as president of IBEC and cousin Richard Aldrich on IBEC’s board as effective vice president of IBEC for Brazil, Nelson’s commitment to Brazil’s future seemed beyond dispute. And as his arch rival, Richard Nixon, would soon put it, as Brazil went, so did all South America. With Latin American leaders worried about their own future with the newly elected Republican administration in Washington, it made perfect sense to the new president to take the advice of Galo Plaza, secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS): tap Nelson Rockefeller to head a fact-finding mission to Latin America that would be designed to reassure its leaders. Such a mission would also give Rockefeller a consolation prize. No one anticipated that it would become, for all concerned, a nightmare.
“ROCKY’S SIDESHOW”
It was difficult for Nelson to see his former adversary sitting behind the president’s desk in the Oval Office on his first day on the job. But after an hour of discussion, Nelson emerged with a new job: chief of the Presidential Mission to Latin America. The title was Nelson’s idea. So was the size of his mission. “Keep it small. Keep it small,” Secretary of State William Rogers warned Nelson. Nelson settled for an entourage of sixty, including twenty-seven experts on everything from counterguerrilla operations to women’s rights, some of whom were veterans of Nelson’s CIAA.* Before it was over, it would cost him $760,000 in personal funds above what the government would allow.11
No matter how expert Nelson’s delegation was, however, nothing could prepare it for the chaos that greeted their leader at each stop over the next months in Latin America.
In Honduras, Nelson was met by rioters shouting “Rockefeller, go home!” And in Managua, Nicaragua, he was again greeted by students chanting “Rocky, go home!” The students burned a U.S. flag to protest the visit. In Costa Rica, thousands of pro- and anti-Rockefeller demonstrators clashed.
Nelson was shocked. For decades, he had devoted time, energy, and capital to Latin America’s problems and potentials. He expected respect, admiration, and even love. He was not alone in this expectation. Indeed, that was the reason Galo Plaza felt confident in urging Nixon to send Nelson down. And the “magic” of the Rockefeller name still did work with Latin America’s elite; it was only with the rest of the hemispheres population, most visibly with its students and workers, that there seemed to be some insurmountable problems.
Nelson tried to blame it all on communists, and there was no doubt that they were agitating against him. But when Peru’s new military leaders declared that it would be “inopportune” to host him as scheduled, it was obvious that the opposition ran deeper than Nelson was willing to admit. Peru’s February 13 seizure of American tuna boats operating off that country’s Pacific coast demonstrated that more was involved in the anti-Rockefeller protests than communist agitators or the Cold War. IBEC’s own tuna boat and cannery in Puerto Rico may not have been threatened directly, but the issue of national sovereignty in Latin America stuck like a craw in the throats of multinational businessmen like the Rockefellers.
Adolf Berle had seen it coming the month before, after the Peruvian military’s seizure of Standard Oil of New Jersey’s oil refinery in Talara. “Practically all local sentiment is against the United States,” he noted in his diary, “and might be stirred to violent action if the [Hickenlooper] amendment is used [to intervene in Peruvian affairs]. The Peru government talks about throwing all Americans out within forty-eight hours. Given the sentiment elsewhere in the continent—Chile, Bolivia, possibly Brazil—we may see a clear breakdown of inter-American relations.”12 The Nixon administration had responded by halting arms sales to the Peruvian government. The Peruvians then canceled Nelson’s visit in the same official communique that declared that the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force missions in Peru were without further purpose.
“Rocky’s Road Show,” as the American press had dubbed it, now threatened to become a sideshow. After more protest-marred stops in Costa Rica and Panama, Nelson returned home to rest and confer with Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Then, despite Peru’s rebuff in May, he was off again to Latin America.
Nelson landed first in the home of his old friend, ex-president Lleras Camargo. But Colombia, long the site of Standard Oil operations and currently the host of Texaco-Gulf’s expansion in the Putumayo region, gave Nelson no relief. Rioting broke out in Bogotá. U.S. flags were again burned, and the student council at the National University declared a twenty-four-hour strike. Over 100 persons were reported injured. Liberals, Conservatives, and various leftist parties, including communists, had a common foe: him.
Worse awaited him in Galo Plaza’s Ecuador. Club-swinging police had to battle through Quito’s narrow streets to cut a path for the Rockefeller motorcade. Rocks pelted the cars, smashing windows and injuring three American reporters. Rockefeller’s men feared for their lives, but not Nelson. “I didn’t see a thing, not a thing,” he told reporters when he pulled up to the presidential palace.
Throughout this violence-plagued tour, Nelson never lacked courage. In Guatemala it was the CIA, not Nelson, that insisted he restrict his movements. In Honduras, after the killing of a student by the police, he had dismissed warnings by his Secret Service detail and waded into the crowd to argue with the youths in Spanish. “See, nobody laid a hand on me,” he said later, “but somebody lifted my wallet.”13 In Ecuador, where Nelson owned a coffee plantation north of Guayaquil, ten students were killed at Guayaquil’s university by army troops, but Nelson was not dissuaded from offering a hand of friendship. “We have come to listen, not to fight,”14 he told a news conference while police beat students at Quito’s Central University. His offer to talk with student leaders was rejected.
Even his visit to Bolivia, “where we have come as Good Neighbors,” was reduced to a three-hour meeting because of his concerns over possible bloodshed between soldiers and students. Meeting with President Adolfo Siles Salinas at the heavily guarded John F. Kennedy Airport outside La Paz, he found Siles urging the United States to refrain from dumping tin from its strategic stockpile to force down prices. Meanwhile, thousands of students, prevented by troops from accepting Nelson’s challenge to come and talk instead of throw stones, carried placards against U.S. “imperialism” in front of La Paz’s presidential palace. Nelson turned their marginalization into his own political asset.
“I’m not going to take responsibility,” he explained to reporters, “for bringing about an incident that would cause loss of lives if the armed forces had to act against demonstrators to provide security.”15
Reporters next found him resting with Happy beside a pool in Trinidad, awaiting news from Venezuela, his next scheduled stop. The Venezuelans were understandably nervous. So far, the Caracas government and Nelson had not been disturbed enough to scratch Venezuela from his itinerary. Venezuela was, after all, Nelson’s second home, the site of his huge Monte Sacro ranch (which had briefly been seized by guerrillas in September, just six months after Adolf Berle had visited “for three days loafing”16).
Venezuela was the place where he discovered South America’s oil as a personal investment, the place where he had put IBEC and AIA to the test, the place he even had chosen to bring his wife for their honeymoon. Venezuela had been special. Until now.
Students announced plans to hold sit-in demonstrations at IBEC-owned supermarkets. Strong objections to Nelson’s visit by opposition parties put the Venezuelan cabinet in a crisis. The Venezuelan government begged Nelson off, explaining that it could not guarantee his safety, even if he spent most of his visit, as planned, behind a heavy security guard at the swank Club Militar built by former dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez.
“In all the years I worked for him, the hardest thing I ever had to do was deliver the word on Venezuela,” one of his top aides, James Cannon, said later. “They were uninviting him.”
Nelson was having lunch when he heard the bad news. He stopped and looked up at Cannon, stunned and pained. “After all that country has meant to me. And all I’ve done for them?” His head shook sadly. “This is a terrible blow.”17
Nelson’s immediate reaction was defensive. “Extremists are out to destroy the unity between the United States and her Latin American neighbors,” he explained to the press troupe. “We must recognize what our friends are up against.”18
He was saved further gaffes by the very man who had urged Nixon to send Nelson on the mission: Galo Plaza. Flying into Trinidad from Washington to confer with Nelson between sessions of an inter-American educational conference, the OAS secretary general urged his old friend to change course from such simplistic explanations.
“Whatever interest outside groups may have,” he told the Rockefeller party, “there is a genuine national resentment that doesn’t need much outside influence.” Instead, look to the discontent over the slowness of the Alliance for Progress to achieve its stated goals, he advised, and to the feeling that the United States regards Latin America as merely a backwater.19