by Gerard Colby
Cultural diversity is not only humanity’s hallmark of progress, but an insurance policy against extinction as a species. Diversity gives not only cultural and economic riches derived from different perspectives on natural resources and what it means to be human, but options to problem solving that are stifled in a homogenized society. When such a society is organized around economic goals that are measured by profit margins for private gain by powerful elites, where the demands of those who bear cash as the ticket of admission to the marketplace rule rather than the needs of people, then those who are deprived—and those who have never been part of such a global economy—must necessarily suffer. The genocide of tribal peoples, therefore, is symptomatic of a deep malaise in the world’s metropolises. Indigenous peoples will suffer the most, but humanity as a whole will suffer the loss of some of its memory, not only of a unique knowledge of the natural world, but of its ability to cope with the future in various, diverse ways. Unless scientists can persuade their colleagues and other important constituencies in society to intervene.
This was the meaning of Scott Robinson’s report on Texaco and on SIL’s collaboration in the penetration of Kofán Indian lands in Ecuador’s rain forest;9 of Victor Daniel Bonilla’s report on the same oil company moving into Colombia’s Putumayo River Valley, where the Sibundoy and other tribes lived, and into the lands of the Guajibo as part of a cultural penetration again facilitated by SIL; and of Miguel Chase Sardi’s report on European Mennonites marketing cotton produced by Indian Mennonites to world markets. It was also the meaning of Nelly Arvelo de Jimenez’s plea for enforcement of Indian land guarantees in President Betancourt’s 1960 Agrarian Reform Law (a toothless law without rules for implementation) in Venezuela, and of Esteban Mosonyi’s report on the massacre of forty Guajibos by ranchers in Venezuela’s Apure state on the Colombian frontier; of Guillermo Bonfíl Batalla’s analysis of the Indians suffering under South America’s “internal colonialism,” including the detachment and careerism of the “indigenist” school of anthropologists in the face of a $60 million U.S. grant for development of the Chocó Valley, including studies on Herman Kahn’s proposals for giant dams and canals; of Georg Grünberg’s searing bibliography for the study of discrimination against the Indians in Brazil; of Jürgen Riester’s report on Indians enslaved in eastern Bolivia, where rubber, sugar, and, clandestinely, cocaine were shipped by Santa Cruz’s railway to Brazil and then overseas; of Gonzalo Castillo-Cárdenas’s accounts of the struggle in Colombia of the Motilone Indians against the oil towns of Standard Oil’s Barco concession, and of the similar struggle waged by the Guajibo against oil-crazed land speculators and ranchers; of Miguel Alberto Bartolomé’s analysis of the impact of the timber and cotton industries on the Indians of northern Argentina and of the Indians’ susceptibility to “millenarian and messianic elements present in Protestant teaching”; of Bartolomé’s criticism of anthropologists who, trained as “specialists completely cut off from the actual national reality,” seldom concerned themselves with the “socioeconomic situation of the aborigines in their conflict with the national society”; and of Stefano Varese’s report on the expansion of ranches and plantations into Indian lands in Peru, including the colonization of the oil-rich upper Marañon River, and of SIL’s success in creating dependence among the Indians, while excluding Peruvian linguists and anthropologists from decisions that ended up introducing SIL’s Bible-based bilingual education into 146 schools with more than 260 teachers who were trained at SIL’s base in Yarinacocha.
As Scott Robinson explained, “A global market system links the society that produces missionaries with those regions and communities where they work. What is too often overlooked, however, are the set of social relations and economic transactions born of industrialism that evoked changes in rural America as significant as those occurring presently in the strategic, back-country portions of nations such as Ecuador.”
This “global reach,” coupled with SIL’s millennial vision of the Second Coming, gave meaning to SIL’s silence in the face of the official repression of Indians. It explained the secrecy of SIL’s new contract with the Colombian government to carry out a pilot program of bilingual instructions of the Guajibo;10 it explained SIL’s 99 personnel, 3 airplanes, and 40 runways in Colombia alone; it explained why, with more than 1,500 missionaries in Latin America and some 2,200 missionaries in 22 countries throughout the world, SIL seemed everywhere.
To the anthropologists, this was not a sign of blessing from an omnipotent God. On the contrary, they concluded that SIL’s presence was more destructive than helpful to the Indians. Darcy Ribeiro, notwithstanding his previous role in bringing SIL into Brazil, signed the conference’s call for the expulsion of missionaries from Indian lands.
The Declaration of Barbados charged that
there occur both active interventions to “protect” Indian society as well as massacres and forced migration from homelands. These acts and policies are not unknown to the armed forces and other governmental agencies in several countries. Even the official “Indian policies” of the Latin American states are explicitly directed toward the destruction of aboriginal culture. These polices are employed to manipulate and control Indian populations in order to consolidate the status of existing social groups and classes, and only diminish the possibility that Indian society may free itself from colonial domination and settle its own future.
As a consequence, we feel the several states, the religious missions and social scientists, primarily anthropologists, must assume the unavoidable responsibilities for immediate action to halt this aggression and contribute significantly to the process of Indian liberation.
The declaration charged the state with “direct responsibility for and connivance with its many armies of genocide and ethnocide that we have been able to verify.” Furthermore, it called for guarantees and protection of Indian lives, of tribal land “as perpetual, inalienable collective property,” for Indian rights to their own traditions and self-governance, and for “recognition that Indian groups possess rights prior to those of other national constituencies.”
The anthropologists had even more to say about the responsibility of religious missions: “The missionary presence has always implied the imposition of criteria and patterns of thought and behavior alien to the colonized Indian societies. A religious pretext has too often justified the economic and human exploitation of the aboriginal population.” They criticized “the inherent ethnocentric aspect of the evangelization process” as “a component of the colonialist ideology.” They insisted that missionaries must end the “essentially discriminatory nature implicit in the hostile relationship to Indian cultures conceived as pagan and heretical.” Instead, they argued that “true respect for Indian culture” was needed to end “the long and shameful history of despotism and intolerance characteristic of missionary work, which rarely manifests sensitivity to aboriginal religious sentiments and values.”
They demanded that the missions “halt both the theft of Indian property by religious missionaries who appropriate labor, lands and natural resources as their own” and “the indifference in the face of Indian expropriation by third parties.” They condemned the missions’ practice of sending Indians to “long-term boarding schools where Indian children are inculcated with alien values.” They called on missions to suspend immediately all practices of population displacement done “in order to evangelize and assimilate more effectively” and described the process as provoking “an increase in morbidity, mortality, and family disorganization among Indian communities.”
“To the degree that religious missions do not assume these minimal obligations,” the anthropologists concluded, “they, too, must be held responsible by default for crimes of ethnocide and connivance with genocide.”
Never had social scientists so taken missionaries to task. But the anthropologists saved their strongest criticisms for their own profession. “Anthropology took form within and became an instrument of colonial domination,
openly or surreptitiously,” they confessed. “It has often rationalized and justified in scientific language the domination of some people by others. The discipline has continued to supply information and methods of action useful for maintaining, reaffirming and disguising social relations of a colonial nature.”
Anthropologists, they maintained, must join the struggle for Indian liberation by correcting stereotypes of Indians in the national culture, providing Indians with data on their colonizers, and “denouncing systematically by any and all means cases of genocide and those practices conducive to ethnocide.”
Finally, the Barbados Conference rejected any patronizing “right” to interfere in Indian traditional forms of self-governance, including “development and defense programs.” The transformation of national society, they said, was “not possible if there remain groups, such as Indians, who do not feel free to command their own destiny.”11
This last point not only struck at the heart of Euro-American ethnocentrism, but echoed the very basis of evolutionary science: Diversity is the most successful means of ensuring the survival of species. In the human species, this means cultural diversity.
Ethnologist Betty Megers had warned about the potential environmental disaster that could happen in the Amazon if its treasure of diverse botanical and fauna species was no longer protected. The airplane runways cut out of the jungle by the likes of SIL missionaries and the Villas Boas brothers had been mere beachheads for a larger invasion of tribal lands. The trans-Amazon highway system would make that invasion irrevocable and would break through the geographic barriers that enabled flora, fauna, and human cultural diversity to resist destruction.
Meanwhile, SIL’s flying translators would break down the last linguistic barriers, language having long been recognized as one of the most effective means humans have to save a culture from absorption by a more aggressive culture.12 However sincere SIL linguists may have been about their work, many of the anthropologists who worked among the same tribes saw a different reality: one of Indian languages being “reduced” to writing, not with the purpose of empowering the tribe with communication skills to protect the existing tribal culture, but to destroy the culture’s core belief system, its pre-Christian religion, and replace it with an American version of Fundamentalist Protestantism. This penetration and “occupation,” linguistic and religious, economic and cultural, led to the Indians’ absorption by the national economy and often the rapid extinction of the language and the tribe.13 With game depleted, the forests burned for pasture, and the Indians reduced to a source of cheap labor, poverty—the kind that can be measured not in naked communes of well-fed tribesmen but in the rags worn by malnourished people infected with disease and despair—took root. As income disparities and debts grew, the dream of capitalist development became the nightmare of under-development.
The reaction from mainline Fundamentalism toward the Declaration of Barbados was immediate and predictable. “A highly biased and inaccurate report,” charged Wade Coggins, associate director of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association. “… It promotes a neo-racism similar to ‘black power’ and ‘black nationalism’ in the U.S.”14 An editorial in Christianity Today, the Pew-funded magazine founded by Billy Graham’s father-in-law, urged the WCC to “promptly disassociate itself” from the conference’s findings. “At best [the findings] are gross oversimplification, at worst a calculated attempt to undermine biblical Christianity.”15 And Fuller Theological Seminary’s professor of missionary anthropology, A. R. Tippett, blasted the declaration as “thoroughly racist.… The Declaration of Barbados is not a scientific document, but a radical opinion statement. Its credibility lies in the current secular situation, the permissive mood, the general hostility toward the establishment.”16
THE RETURN OF BILLY GRAHAM
The Establishment, on the other hand, was not hostile to Fundamentalist missions. Only two years before, Billy Graham had returned to the spotlight at Madison Square Garden, twelve years since his last New York Crusade. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was not there this time to give another $50,000. But David contributed, and Chase Manhattan Bank chairman George Champion again helped lead the fund-raising drive.
Richard Nixon was there, too, returning Graham’s favors during the previous year’s presidential campaign, when the minister bestowed blessings on Nixon at the Republican Convention, preached at the funeral of Nixon’s mother, and then appeared with Nixon in church after the election. It was 1957 all over again: the reserved block of seats for evangelical churches and the enthusiastic response of the already converted to Graham’s exhausting exhortations to come forth and “make a decision for Christ.”
Graham’s attacks on sin focused on symbols. “The Bible teaches that the policeman is the agent of God,” Graham told the St. George Association, New York’s organization of Protestant policemen, gathered at the swank Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for a communion breakfast. “And the authority that he has is given to him not only by the city and the state but … by Almighty God. So you have a tremendous responsibility at this hour of revolution and anarchy and rebellion against all authority that is sweeping across our nation.”17
Graham’s message, presented in the context of “law and order” during growing public dissent over the Vietnam War and racism, had a decidedly political content that was in sync with the Nixon White House’s war drums. Social action and suffering for justice were not at the heart of the Gospel, Graham insisted. Social problems like racism were signs of man’s fall from Grace and would not be solved “until Christ comes back again and rules as a benevolent monarch.’”18
This argument set Graham at loggerheads with the views of both the WCC and the Barbados Conference. Catholic bishops, too, had recently gathered in Medellín, Colombia, and espoused the belief that Christ was found in the poor and the struggle for peace and justice, inspiring a “Theology of Liberation” that spread among liberal Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike. This belief that personal salvation was found through the struggle for virtue in social behavior, not just individual piety, was vehemently derided as “humanist” by Graham and his more conservative followers.
Graham’s vision of Fundamentalism, like Cam’s, could embrace Catholics who unquestioningly accepted every word of the Bible as literal truth; since individual piety outweighed social behavior, Graham could even accept a former torturer from Uruguay’s Death Squad, Nelson Bardesio, as an advance man for his Mexico Crusade in 1977, when Graham made a big push to attract carismáticos.19 Bardesio had been the chauffeur in Montevideo for William Cantrell, the CIA operations officer who, acting under cover as the AID Public Safety adviser, helped establish Uruguay’s dreaded secret police.20 Bardesio had bombed the homes of teachers and lawyers with gelignite that was passed through Sidney Gottlieb’s CIA Technical Services Department office in Argentina.21 The darker implications of Nelson Rockefeller’s policy recommendations to Nixon to support the “new military” had entered directly into the evangelical crusades of Billy Graham.
In the years that followed, Nelson Rockefeller and Billy Graham would have a peculiar common point of contact in Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Nelson would be made privy to state secrets by Kissinger as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. And Nixon would insist that Kissinger listen to Billy Graham about what was happening in the world and give briefings to conservative evangelical Christian leaders like Graham and Dallas’s Rev. William Criswell, publisher Pat Zondervan, Holiday Inn’s president William Walton, and the publishers of magazines like Christianity Today.22
The sessions were only one more price that Kissinger, the urbane Harvard professor and Rockefeller confidant, had to pay for power. “Mr. Nixon always considered me somewhat of an authority on world affairs,” Graham later recalled. “He wanted to know what missionaries were thinking in certain countries because he felt that they knew more, many times, than the embassy knew about what was going on because they were much closer to th
e people.”23 And of all the missionary organizations that Graham had come in contact with over the years, few were better known to him than SIL. “I meet the ambassadors, I meet the heads of state and I meet different people and talk to them,” said Graham, “and sometimes they’ll tell me things they’ll never tell a visiting political leader—they’d never tell Kissinger, for example.” Only after the disgrace of Richard Nixon and the damage done to Graham’s public image by accompanying Nixon to a prayer breakfast during the Watergate investigation would Graham realize how dangerous it was to give political information to the White House. “I don’t think I would now [be an informant] because of the CIA revelations … that they have used missionaries [to get foreign political information].… I would shy away now from giving counsel and advice to a President [that is] purely secular. Mine would be of a spiritual nature now. I had to learn that lesson the hard way.”24
So, apparently, did SIL. After charges appeared in the Colombian press alleging SIL’s collaboration in the repression of the Guajibo Indians, SIL came under increasing scrutiny. Indians in the eastern Vaupés region expelled teams of translators from two tribes,25 and Catholic clerics, led by Bishop Gerardo Valencia Cano, a proponent of the Theology of Liberation, attacked first the domination of rubber patrónes and then the missionaries of the “independent republic” within Colombia, SIL’s Lomalinda.