by Gerard Colby
Here, on the question of force, the value of regional junior partners could not be underestimated. In Latin America, as the invasion of the Dominican Republic demonstrated, only one country had both the means and ideological bent to play the role of regional policeman: Brazil.
Was it coincidental that many of the generals who now ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru had been the recipients of U.S. arms and training? Or that the most influential of Latin America’s war colleges, Brazil’s Higher War College, was modeled on the National War College in Washington? Or that two of the three members of the military triumvirate that ruled Brazil between Costa e Silva’s stroke and Médici’s assumption of the presidency were veterans of military collaboration with U.S. armed forces during World War II?51 Or that lecturers at the Higher War College inculcated officers with the concept of the “Brazilian model” for development of all Latin America? Or that these lecturers insisted, as the price for Brazil’s willingness to play junior partner in an American corporate and military strategy toward the Pacific Rim and Europe, that “free trade” doctrines like those espoused by David Rockefeller would have to be “imposed” not only on Europe, but on the United States as well? “The developed nations depend on us as markets for their exports,” explained one lecturer. “If we can bring about a more unified approach, then the nations of Latin America—with Brazil as their leader—will be able to impose conditions.”52
Should the United States wish to avoid such a North-South hemispheric economic schism, it would have to develop an alliance like that long envisioned by the Rockefellers; Washington would have to lower its own regulatory protections—and with them, over time, probably many of its environmental, health, and wage standards—to allow Latin American goods (including goods made by U.S. companies that had moved factories to the cheaper wage markets imposed by military regimes) to compete freely in the United States against not only Japanese, Pacific Rim, and European products, but American goods and jobs.
This, not mere continental strategy, was the global meaning behind Nixon’s startling toast to visiting General Médici that, “As Brazil goes, so will the rest of that Latin American continent.” But for the tribal peoples of Brazil in the early 1970s, corporate development in a new world order offered no more promise than it had for the tribal peoples of Southeast Asia.
David Lilienthal, who had been an architect of the Mekong Basin Development Project as cochairman of Johnson’s Joint Post-War Development Group for Vietnam, went to Brazil in 1971 to examine the U.S. aid program for Nixon. He returned with rumors of great dams in the mode of Herman Kahn. Lilienthal’s visit to the Amazon was at the invitation of the Médici regime, which was impressed by Lilienthal’s background as former director of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Atomic Energy Commission.
Lilienthal, who had also been ambassador to the OAS and to the Inter-American Council for the Alliance for Progress, was now an IBEC director and head of a wholly owned IBEC subsidiary, Development and Resources Corporation, which had a long history of being able to get U.S. foreign aid money for regional planning.
In 1970, Brazil’s rulers did not foresee the social and ecological furies that could be unleashed by rapid development. They saw only the promise of replicating the U.S. conquest of its own West and the historic link between that conquest and its current power and prosperity.
Peasants had grown desperate after a drought in the Northeast in 1970. Fearful that this situation could affect the stability of Brazil, the rulers saw colonization along the trans-Amazon highway system—providing cheap labor for ranchers and jobs for peasants—as the solution. The generals did not want to listen to Lilienthal’s warnings that, given the Amazon’s delicate ecology and poor soil fertility, current farming practices would overgraze pastures and reduce their usefulness to at most five to ten years.53
This ecological disaster, of course, was not expected to affect the well-financed technically sophisticated ranches of the big corporations, like Deltec and King Ranch’s planned Swift-Armour 186,000-acre operation in Pará. Nor supposedly, would it affect the Amazonian mining operations serviced by the trans-Amazonian highways. As J. Stillman Rockefeller’s First National City Bank, one of Brazil’s largest creditors, would shortly acknowledge in a survey of the Brazilian economy: “The building of roads into the remote interior does not mean … substantial colonization of the area but rather … interest in finding and exploiting resources in the Amazon basin and the Central-West. Already, cattle raisers have extended their grazing land deep into Goiás and Mato Grosso, utilizing the Brasília-Belém highway to bring their produce to market. The Trans-Amazon highway may prove a deciding factor in the development of new mineral wealth.”54
The generals simply put on blinders as they focused on reviving the “Great Lakes” proposal of the Hudson Institute, which coincidentally the Rockefeller Foundation had recently begun joining Nelson in funding.55
Some years before, an unnamed American corporate group that was exploring for carbon along the Fresco River, a tributary of the lower Xingu, discovered not only the probability of carbon gas, manganese, and iron, but an ideal site for a dam, just where the Xingu joins with the La Paz between two mountain ranges. The dam would be able to flood nearby valleys to create the largest artificial lake in the world. The lake would be a natural system for penetrating the interior, allowing ships access to the nickel reserves, gas, iron, manganese, lead, diamonds, and gold and providing a fluvial tie binding Brasília with the rest of the Amazon, including U.S. Steel’s rich iron lode in the Carajás Mountains. The electricity generated for the mines would be enormous. The generals projected a dam 12 kilometers long and 50 meters high, confining a body of water four times greater than that created by Egypt’s Aswan Dam—in effect, a giant canal into the Amazon’s interior. This one project, they hoped, would bridge the gap of 100 years of development that separated Brazil from the United States.56
There was, as always, a human problem. The artificial lake could affect four Kayapó tribes of the Xingu valley: The Gorotíre, the Kubén-Kran-Kegn, the Tapirapé, and the Karajá. Most of these tribes had been pacified by the SPI, and one—the Karajá Indians—had been “occupied” by SIL since 1958.
Brazilian law had long recognized Indian land rights, even if Brazilian developers did not. Now FUNAI’s lease policies were opening Indian lands to American companies. Eleven companies were prospecting inside or near the Aripuanã Indian Park. Deltec’s Swift/King Ranch in Pará was jeopardizing the future of the Tembé/Urubús-Kaapor Indian Reserve.57 Daniel Ludwig’s Jari jungle kingdom in northern Pará was reported to be doing likewise to the Tumucumaque Indian Park and nine Apalaí villages, while Ludwig’s bauxite operation in the Trombetas River region, along with those of ALCAN and ALCOA, endangered the future of the Arikiéna tribe.58 SIL’s translators, who had worked and lived among the Urúbus-Kaapor and Apalaí Indians, remained silent.
U.S. Steel’s giant Carajás iron-ore project in southern Pará put Xikrín-Kayapó tribal lands under peril; SIL had “occupied” the Kayapó, too, since 1965. And Augusto Antunes’s manganese project in Amapá’s Serra do Navio was slated to be served by the trans-Amazon highway system’s Northern Perimeter Road.* The road would cut through Tumucumaque Indian Park.
None of these projects or the trans-Amazon road system that would service them was opposed by FUNAI. Instead, in October 1970, President Médici announced the impending agreement between FUNAI and SUDAM, the Superintendency for the Development of the Amazon, to pacify some thirty tribes who were known from an SIL survey to be living along the projected route of the system’s central road, the Trans-Amazon Highway. At the same time, Médici revealed that a new Indian Law was being written that would empower him to relocate tribes for six reasons: intertribal fighting, epidemics, national security, public works of national development, disorder, and “to work valuable subsoil deposits of outstanding interest for national security and development.”59
Nelson Rockefeller could take pride in his Brazilian accomplishments when he accepted the Man of the Year Award from the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce in 1971. Most of the equipment used in Project RADAM was provided by a new affiliate of IBEC, Westinghouse Electric. That year, Westinghouse’s senior vice president for Latin America, José de Cubas, had joined IBEC’s board. Also that year, Nelson’s cousin, Richard Aldrich, was elected president of the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce.
Aldrich was now overseeing IBEC’s growing stake in Brazil’s economic expansion, leaving behind, he would later confess, sleuthing for the CIA. His new mission was an indication of just how important Brazil’s success—and the trans-Amazon highways—had become to the heavily indebted IBEC. Despite losses in other countries, IBEC’s interests in Brazil were solid moneymakers with premium value as salable assets. Its 19 percent stake in the Brazilian Investment Bank alone was reaping rewards, and BIB had almost doubled its stockholders’ equity in the preceding year.60
Aldrich embraced his position with the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce with gusto, promoting the trans-Amazon highway system with a zeal worthy of his cousin’s trust. “This highway is terrifically important to the development of the hinterland,” he told journalist Robert Hummerstone, who was preparing an article for the New York Times Magazine. “It’s already drawing people in, and it will make raw materials far more available to the outside world.” Aldrich asserted that Caterpillar and John Deere had done extensive studies, “showing that properly cleared and fertilized, the Amazon soil can support ranching and certain crops.”
Hummerstone was skeptical, noting that Aldrich was “a relative of the Rockefeller brothers, who have vast cattle ranch holdings in the western Amazon basin.”61 He wrote of the danger in the military regime’s haste to build the highways, of the worry that the Amazon forest supplied one-fifth of the world’s oxygen, of the failure of past attempts at Amazonian agriculture, and of the predictions of dirt roads collapsing under the heavy pounding of the tropics’ rainy season.
And he wrote of the Indians. “This road could be fatal for the Brazilian Indian.… FUNAI, charged with the Indian problem, is basically a military-run organization. The agency’s main purpose is to get the Indians out of the way of colonization and onto the four reservations that have been set up for them.”62
Project RADAM used specially equipped jet aircraft to map the Amazon basin.
Source: Engineering and Mining Journal, November 1975.
The Aero Service/Goodyear mapping system’s side-angle radar cut through the Amazon’s dense jungle to reveal its mineral riches.
Source: Engineering and Mining Journal, November 1975.
Starting in 1971, Project RADAM used side-angle radar imaging to map the Amazon basin, providing important data on the soil and water conditions as well as pinpointing areas with significant lodes of minerals.
Source: Engineering and Mining Journal, November 1975.
Yet the territorial integrity of even these reservations was under attack, not only by mining companies and ranchers but by FUNAI. In 1971, FUNAI had allowed the Cuiabá-Santarém highway to slice off a forty-kilometer northern section of the Xingu National Park. “You cannot stop the development of Brazil on account of the Xingu Park,” FUNAI’s director General Bandeira de Mello explained.63 The Txukahamei tribe, whom Senator Robert Kennedy had visited in 1965, would end up decimated by measles and bronchial pneumonia that were brought in by the highway crews.64
“We want to integrate the Indians into Brazilian society,” Bandeira de Mello continued, “to make them Brazilians, like we are.”65 But FUNAI was no model. Corruption was rife among its top command and within much of the government. SIL, which had “occupied” both the Cintas Largas and the Txukahamei Indians for the Lord, said nothing. The Rockefellers, whose close ally, J. Peter Grace, was chairman of a company (W. R. Grace & Company) that was named as having participated in surveys of the Cintas Largas lands for tin and would indeed mine tin in Rondônia,66 said nothing. Nelson’s closest Brazilian business partner, IBEC director Walther Moreira Salles, and Molybdenum Corporation chairman Lewis B. Harder (like Grace, a director of Brascan, which would buy the Jacundá tin mines in Rondônia within a few years), said nothing; Moreira Salles’s and Harder’s joint venture in mining, Companhia Brasiliera de Metalurgía e Mineracao (CBMM), was named by a group of Brazilian anthropologists as one of ten companies having been authorized by FUNAI to prospect for tin in the Aripuanã Indian Park.67 And Aldrich said nothing, save praise for the regime’s effort to conquer the hinterland.
Project RADAM found “significant” copper deposits in Bodoquena area (inset map). Other resources in the area of Rockefeller’s ranch included uranium, zinc, lead, and quartz.
Source: Engineering and Mining Journal, November 1975
Meanwhile, despite evidence of “death squads” of “off-duty” policemen prowling through the Brazilian night, Nelson characteristically never looked back. He would not contribute to doubts about the wisdom of his recommendation to Nixon that “the United States should meet reasonable requests from other hemispheric nationals for trucks, jeeps, helicopters, and like equipment to provide mobility and logistical support for these forces, for radios, and other command control equipment for proper telecommunications among the forces, and for small arms for security forces.”68
POLICING THE AMAZON
Within a year, Nelson’s recommendations were translated into action. The U.S. Senate reported that the number of Brazilian policemen brought to the United States for training, mostly at the CIA’s International Police Academy in Washington, had tripled in one year and that the number of Brazilian military officers being trained in the United States had reached the highest level since World War II.69
Nelson’s search for Realpolitik support for the new military gave this U.S. trend toward militarizing Brazil a shot in the arm, reversing the fever of guilt and embarrassment that had swept the U.S. Congress after the regime closed down Brazil’s Congress and forced Kissinger and Secretary of State Rogers to suspend economic aid for a few months.
For fiscal year 1969, five years after the coup, U.S. military aid to Brazil was cut to $800,000; a public outcry over abuses and death squads following on the heels of the regime’s supercoup had prompted Congress to put a halt to the steadily increasing military grants and sales on credit, which had reached over $36 million in fiscal year 1968 (approved before the supercoup). In 1969, Congress still held the line at $800,000 for fiscal year 1970. But after the release of the Rockefeller Report on the Americas, it was raised to $12 million; in 1972, after Nixon arbitrarily waived Congress’s four-year-old annual ceiling of $75 million in arms assistance to Latin America, military aid and sales to Brazil soared to $20.8 million.70
In October 1970, the same month the Interior Ministry and other agencies of the military regime launched Project RADAM, the magazine of the CIA’s International Police Academy, acting under the cover of AID’s Office of Public Safety, reported that one of its Brazilian graduates, Colonel José Ortiga, was setting up an Indian police force to enforce the regime’s laws. Ortiga was commander of Minas Gerais’s feared military police.
Ortiga had been asked by the Interior Ministry to use his military police to train a Rural Indian Guard selected from five tribes in the states of Pará, Goiás, Maranhão, and Minas Gerais. And soon eighty-five Indians arrived at Ortiga’s Military Police Academy in Belo Horizonte, ready to receive training in arrests, search and seizure, crowd control, firearms, unarmed defense, civics, and the regime’s Indian laws. The academy’s IPA Review billed the Indian Guard, modeled after the BIA’s tribal police, as a means of defending Indian lands from unauthorized prospectors, settlers, and other intruders. The example given for the Indian Guard’s effectiveness, however, was how the guard had defended a mestizo trespasser and murderer from the anger of Indians and spirited him away to the safety of federal authorities.71
It took two years before the full story of this experiment got out. The Indian Guard was seizing recalcitrant Indians, including tribesmen who were resisting the military regime’s laws and development projects. Amazonian Indians were taken far from their villages to Crenaque in Minas Gerais, where they were subjected to imprisonment, hard labor, and forced indoctrination. The commander of Crenaque was Manuel dos Santos Pinheiro, a captain in the federal military police who had been commissioned by General Bandeira de Mello himself when the FUNAI president was still a functionary of the military intelligence division, an arm of the regime infamous for its use of torture during interrogation. Captain Pinheiro had gained special attention from his superiors for putting down a revolt by Maxakalí Indians against land invasions by squatters in Jequitinhonha Valley in northeastern Minas Gerais. Pinheiro seized the Indian leaders, imposing order and charging the squatters rent, and then used the funds to build three irrigation dams and other development projects. “My work was considered excellent, and I was therefore invited by the President of FUNAI to work with Indians in the state of Minas Gerais,” Pinheiro later explained.72 He helped Captain Ortiga set up the Indian Guard and, in 1971, was put in charge of Crenaque, to deal with “bad” Indians who were rounded up for “rehabilitation.”