by Gerard Colby
Galo Plazas counsel hit home. In the future, Nelson would caution against blaming “outside forces” for disrupting his mission. “There is strong evidence that there is some popular support for these demonstrations,” he explained.20
In Valencia, an industrial city 100 miles west of Caracas, hundreds of students stormed an IBEC supermarket, stoned First National City Bank’s offices, attacked a Mobil gasoline station, and battled police and the Venezuelan National Guard.
But Nelson was optimistic. He looked forward to his next scheduled stop. In Brazil, at last, he was certain to get a respectful hearing and good headlines, even if they were censored.
HOUSES OF GLASS
The long silver jet that flew toward the edge of the Amazon frontier with Nelson Rockefeller on board seemed to be casting a mirror image of itself as it descended over Brasília, the ultramodern city of glass. A long fusillade of government ministries stretched across a red-earth plateau, ending with huge fins of residential blocks jutting out like wings, as if wanting to take off into the future.21
Brasília had grown remarkably since the 1964 coup. If the city’s cathedral looked from the air like a crown of thorns surrounding the simple cross perched high on its belfry, Nelson did not see it as a sign of Brazil’s suffering. Rather, the country was now liberated, at least in his mind. Symbolized by the cathedral, Christ’s crucifixion had been reduced to a bloodless essence by modern architecture. Artificial cascades flowing among the columns of government buildings now signified a nation washed of its original sins as the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abandon slavery—and as the largest green hell for the Amazon’s native inhabitants. Brazil’s record in the Amazon had been sanitized by mysterious fires that swept through the archives of the Service for the Protection of the Indian shortly after the completion of Brasília at the gateway to the Amazon.
In the summer of 1969, Nelson did not ask about Indians. But he knew there were victims of repression in Brazil. One, in fact, was the creator of Brasília: the architect Oscar Niemeyer. Twenty years earlier, Niemeyer had joined forces with Nelson’s close friend Wallace Harrison to design the artifice for another great humanitarian dream, the United Nations. Now, his beloved Brasília had fallen into the hands of military chiefs who watched his every move. Niemeyer was allowed to go on designing the city, but Brasília belonged to the generals. The dream of an open, democratic government, symbolized by long transparent government ministries with polyglass walls, remained simply that: a dream.
In July 1969, the Rockefeller mission found Brasília locked under a political chill. Brasília’s deserted congressional halls spoke with an appalling, eloquent silence as Nelson walked through the chambers with Brazilian legislators and journalists. Only a dozen senators and deputies dared to be present: five dozen of their colleagues were under arrest. So were journalists, mayors, and 3,000 other political leaders and students, many of them subjected to torture.
Walking beside Nelson was Vice President Pedro Alexio. Before the year was out, he would be denied his constitutional right of succession to the presidency. Brazil’s Supreme Court could not help him, any more than it could help itself: After three of its justices were summarily removed from the bench by the generals in January, the president of the Supreme Court resigned in protest. The junta responded by simply announcing the reduction of seats on the Supreme Court from fifteen to eleven. Five state legislatures, after first suffering a 30 percent cut in federal funds, had been closed by military decree, and all municipal, state, and federal elections were suspended. Censorship was imposed, and movie theaters were required to show government-supplied “educational material.”
But perhaps the most poignant abuse, at least for Americans who were previously supportive of the 1964 coup, was the military’s purge of the universities. More than sixty-eight professors at São Paulo University and the federal universities in Rio and Brasília were “retired” in May. When thousands of students boycotted classes in protest, the military issued a decree outlawing all student strikes and demonstrations, removed eight judges who disagreed, and began kidnapping and torturing student-government leaders.
The Brazilian generals had decided to use Nelson’s mission to create the impression of an official U.S. blessing of the regime by decorating Nelson’s top military adviser, General Robert Porter, the hero of the Bolivian campaign against Che Guevara. Nelson sidestepped the regime’s request that he attend the award ceremony. But he also refused to call for Brazil’s return to democracy, ordering aides to expunge such a reference from his arrival speech. He would speak privately to President Arthur Costa e Silva, not publicly, and not about specific victims of repression. That would be insulting to the general, who only two years before had been greeted with such high hopes as president-elect when honored at a luncheon of the Council for Latin America hosted by Nelson’s brother, David.
Instead, Nelson accepted a lecture on national security from Costa e Silva and a report written by the SNI, the regime’s secret police. Nelson would dutifully take the report to President Nixon, keeping its contents secret. He would rely on his closest political advisers on Brazil, Walther Moreira Salles and Berent Friele, to keep in touch with the SNI. His trust was not misguided. In September, while Nelson fretted that his own report was being held up by Nixon, Friele would reassure him that Moreira Salles had been “with the same young dedicated army officer in the SNI with whom I have been in contact and who wrote the report given to you by President Costa e Silva. Walther tells me that the influence of this group is increasing and that their confidence in you is unshaken. They understand the cause of President Nixon’s delay in releasing your report and recommendations.”22 Apparently, Brazil’s secret police had a better idea of what Nelson would recommend to the president of the United States than did the American people.
The power of SNI was indeed increasing. Within months, its chief, General Emílio Garrastazú Médici, would become president. “He reflects the thinking in the ‘secret’ report presented to you by President Costa e Silva,” Friele would write Nelson.23 That thinking included “agricultural development” in the Amazon at the expense of the Indians and a stifling authoritarian rule by decree.
Nelson was keenly aware, however, that beyond the generals’ ceremonial greetings, the band music and guards’ snapping salute, was hidden the fear and frustrations of Brazil’s future elite, its students. So Nelson’s limousine rolled out of the government complex as soon as protocol would permit and headed for the bow-shaped highway that bordered Brasília’s artificial lake and its airports, to visit the university that Darcy Ribeiro had founded.
They were there, young men and women, angry despite their fear, but hopeful, like so many before in the Rockefeller story, that here, perhaps, was a powerful ally against the repression. And he listened, his famous square jaw jutting, his rugged good looks masking the priggish displeasure that only his aides recognized when he pursed his lips. Some of what the students said was challenging, almost defiant, of the regime whose “revolution” he hailed. Many of their friends had disappeared in the labyrinth of military prisons, some forever. Others had simply been jailed and tortured without charges or hearings, much less trials. Nelson seemed sympathetic.
On his second day in Brasília, Nelson met at the ultramodern U.S. Embassy with another group of students, but this time, ones who were carefully chosen by the embassy staff. These students, too, were upset, and again he listened. But he did nothing, then or later, that could compromise his relations with the dictatorship.
He rode through a Brasília gripped in a tomblike calm. The tranquility had been ensured by mass arrests and a huge security force. The contrast with the 1965 visit by Bobby Kennedy, who had infuriated both the generals and the U.S. Embassy by his call for elections, stood in bold relief. “When Robert Kennedy came here three years ago, I was able to shake his hand at the airport,” said one man waiting to see Rockefeller after the small group he was in was herded by police far from the airpo
rt gates. “Now, I can’t even see Rockefeller,” he said, and he walked away in disgust.24
One group was thoroughly pleased with Nelson’s visit. The economic achievements of São Paulo businessmen were “the most tangible, inescapable evidence of the power of responsible private initiative to elevate man’s standard of life,”25 Nelson told the city’s Chamber of Commerce. Brazil’s economy was now growing more than 6 percent a year, he said, outpacing by two times the percentage of population growth that gave the Rockefellers nightmares about the Third World’s revolution of rising needs and expectations.
“OVER THE HUMP”
Collecting General Porter, now sporting his new Brazilian medal, Nelson flew off to Paraguay, where force of arms assured another undisturbed welcome by Latin America’s longest reigning dictator, General Alfredo Stroessner. A crowd of 3,000 carefully chosen Paraguayans welcomed him cordially. Photographs of Nelson shaking their hands at the Asuncion airport also revealed the strain on his face; his ambitious trip was exacting a price.
A price was also exacted by Stroessner: He wanted $108 million in long-term U.S. loans for roads, railroads, and even a satellite communications station. It seemed a small price to pay in a country where, as early as 1963, AID had admitted to AIA’s Walter Crawford that the “rural situation seems quite serious, almost to the stage of crisis.”26
In the absence of serious land reform by Stroessner, AID was already considering relocating landless peasants who were crowded into the area around Asuncion to colonies in the Alto Paraná region and the savanna lands in the Chaco to the north. There they could work on cattle ranches or establish small farms with AID-sponsored loans.27 Crawford, as he had done in Brazil, made no mention in his reports to Room 5600 of the land rights of Indian tribes in Alto Paraná or the Chaco.
After the counterfeit peace of militarized Brazil and Paraguay, Nelson proceeded to unruly, democratic Uruguay, where students battled police in the streets while a General Motors plant erupted in flames. Nelson prudently shifted his visit to the resort town of Punta del Este, whose beaches and limited access controlled by a single highway had long made it a favorite of OAS conferees. Behind a shield of troops and guard dogs, he met with Uruguayan leaders, who two years earlier, backed by the local CIA station and the pro-Brazilian wing of the military, outlawed the Uruguayan Labor Confederation.28
“We are over the hump,” Nelson told reporters afterward. “People are beginning to recognize the real potential of this mission.”29
The potential was seen a week later in the streets of Argentina, where Nelson was surrounded by 10,000 troops with machine guns and police dogs. The smell of tear gas still wafted through Buenos Aires. Earlier that day, the police had attacked an impromptu demonstration of mourners at the funeral of a communist trade union leader, who, although he had opposed a recent general strike, had been machine-gunned by police during an attempted anti-Rockefeller demonstration two nights before.
The good news at Room 5600 was that Nelson had arrived safely. He had again eluded protesters by avoiding a car caravan from the international airport, taking a small U.S. Air Force plane into the heavily guarded downtown airport only a dozen blocks from his hotel.
The bad news was that he did not escape financial injury. Seventeen IBEC supermarkets in cities across the country were firebombed.
This was the worst, but Nelson was determined to extract some political victory. He swung back to his old tactic of confronting his opposition, to disarm them with his presence, and to live up to his pledge to skeptical American reporters that his visits would not be limited to meeting Latin America’s Establishment. He wanted to meet his critics, he said. Argentine officials objected. The Secret Service said no. But Nelson, grabbing some aides, slipped out of his hotel for an hour with six young students at a prearranged meeting. “They studied him with disbelief,” recalled aide Joseph Persico, “as though unable to accept that the living symbol of all they abhorred was actually with them in a small middle-class living room. He spoke in Spanish, which helped dissolve the tension, as he answered their politely phrased but increasingly probing questions. He and the students parted as philosophically distant as ever, but with friendly handshakes. Outside, this great city of three million lay under a pall. Streets were dark and deserted, and the atmosphere was of a nation on the brink of civil war.”30
It was. Before long, once the “compromise” ghost of a returned aged Juan Perón and spouse was exorcised by a military coup, many of Argentina’s dissenting youths would “disappear,” much like the Indians of the frankly termed “Wars of Extermination” of a century before.
Nelson flew home via the Caribbean, where he mortified State Department officials by appearing before cameras smiling with his arm draped around Haitian “President-for-Life” François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. In Haiti, however, Nelson’s wish to meet the opposition was not granted. “In Haiti,” the U.S. ambassador said dryly, “he’ll have to do it in the cemetery.”31
His last stop was the Dominican Republic, the sugar kingdom in which Nelson’s friend, Adolf Berle, began his Latin American career. The U.S. Marines were still there, a remnant of the 20,000 marines who stormed the beaches allegedly to fight fifty-six identified communists and to restore the “democracy” of a military-backed regime. Now, despite four bodies removed by the police after demonstrations, “democracy” prevailed along Nelson’s path. He was safe as long as armored carriers escorted his bus to and from the capital, ignoring the 450-year-old cathedral where Christopher Columbus was believed buried and where striking metalworkers had hung a banner over the entrance the previous week: “OUT WITH ROCKEFELLER.”
Nelson Rockefeller would never be the same after this trip.
Neither would Latin America.
*See Appendix A for the names of some of the most interesting members of the mission.
41
FORGING THE DOLLAR ZONE
THE “NEW MILITARY”
Three months after his last trip, without having any of the experts who accompanied him review the last draft, Nelson submitted The Rockefeller Report on the Americas to President Nixon. In this, his last public attempt officially to shape U.S. policy toward Latin America, Nelson pushed for greater centralized power in Washington over the Western Hemisphere’s economic and political developments.
For two decades, he had urged that there be an undersecretary of state for Latin America; now he raised the stakes. Nelson called for two undersecretaries, one each for economic and political affairs, and again argued for his cherished all-powerful “first secretary” position. This time, however, he scaled down the proposed office’s global scope of authority to the Americas. He called for a secretary of “Western Hemisphere Affairs,” to be directly under the secretary of state to “coordinate all United States government activities in the Western Hemisphere.”1 This secretary would represent both the secretary of state and the president and presumably would have direct contact with the Oval Office. He would also command a Western Hemisphere policy staff in the National Security Council (NSC). Those above the hemisphere secretary (the president and the secretary of state) and other departments and agencies that were involved in the NSC would also be served, but there was little doubt that the hemisphere secretary would be in charge of all U.S. policy toward Latin America and probably Canada as well. Nor was there much doubt who Nelson thought might best hold this powerful new post.
Nelson’s goal was not merely the centralization of power for its own sake, but the marshaling of U.S. power to achieve a long-desired objective he shared with his brother, David: the creation of a Western Hemisphere Free Trade Zone. This “Dollar Zone,” as it would later be called, anticipated the future emergence of the Pacific Rim, dominated by Japan’s yen, and the European Currency Zone, dominated by Germany’s deutsche mark.
Both Rockefellers recognized the practical problems of dealing in a real world of powerful competitors. In the late nineteenth century, the United States had been joined by three ot
her newcomers in the struggle for markets, colonies, and political influence in the world: Germany, Japan, and Russia. After World War II, the Soviet Union had been the U.S.’s only serious competitor, contending on an ideological level, as well as in the more traditional economic, political, and military spheres. In the late 1960s, however, reconstructed Japan and West Germany were reemerging as world powers with new factories and higher productivity. Although not yet competing militarily or politically, their economic competition was not to be ignored.
In the face of the traditional Soviet commitment to back insurgent movements even when Soviet national interests were not threatened, some U.S. strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski of the Rockefeller-funded Russian Research Institute at Columbia University reasoned that Japan and Germany had to be kept within the postwar alliance. As long as the Cold War demanded unity among capitalist great powers, the United States would have to concede a sharing of power with governments of powerful economies. If some “free traders” earnestly believed that free trade prevented trade wars that became world wars, it was still the Cold War that was the immediate imperative for sharing power with former enemies. But if that concession was not to become merely a stopgap tactic, it would have to be a political corollary to a broader economic strategy. For the United States to maintain its political domination in the long run, it had to retain economic domination. To overcome the country’s growing trade problems in overseas markets, it was essential for American corporations to develop a wider home market: a strong trade zone in their own hemisphere where “free trade” would mean domination by American companies and local allies sweeping over national boundaries as “multinational” corporations.
IBEC by Areas (1966)
Latin America was IBEC’s biggest moneymaker.