by Gerard Colby
The young priests claimed that the translators were really missionaries who failed to train Colombians as linguists. The atrocities in the Planas region had inspired warnings about the possibility that SILers were gathering political intelligence. Before long, an official commission recommended that a new contract be negotiated, striking the clause giving SIL the mission of the Indians’ “moral improvement,” since that mission violated the Colombian Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of conscience. Proselytizing under government contract must end, the priests declared, and SIL would have to share linguistic and educational responsibility with Colombians.
Similar thunder was heard over SIL’s Peru branch. In 1970, Indian teachers and students at the Andean bilingual school in Ayacucho revolted against the authoritarian rule of Nadine and Don Burns. In 1968, Nadine had publicly humiliated the general administrator of the Andes bilingual education project for hanging up a poster in the Ayacucho training school from a Lima newspaper expressing patriotic approval of the government’s nationalizing Standard Oil’s properties. Two years more, and the teaching staff had had enough. Risking divine wrath and the Cornell scholarships the Burnses offered, the staff petitioned the Ministry of Education for relief.26 Within weeks, the Velasco government sent the Burnses packing. SIL’s Peru branch was then given a more restrictive contract that limited translation work to only the thirty-two tribes already “occupied” by SIL. The contract required incorporating more Peruvian linguists and, for the first time, imposed an expiration date on SIL’s charter, five years away.
SIL’s leaders responded to these troubles with confidence in the Lord and in the knowledge that their services would be in even greater demand now that American oil companies were rushing into South America’s interior, spurring a new wave of speculative development. Two months after the Barbados Conference, International Petroleum Company, the South American subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), entered into an agreement with the Colombian National Oil Company to explore for oil in the Llanos. Continental Oil, another spin-off of the old Standard Oil Trust, did likewise. The new concessions covered more than 2.4 million acres, a huge tract stretching northeast between the Meta and Casanare rivers in Boyacá Department27 just north of the lands of the Sáliba and Guajibo Indians.28
This region was also designated by INCORA as a zone for colonization.29 By January 1972, International Petroleum and Continental would be joined in the same concession area by Superior Oil. At the end of the month, Phillips Petroleum and Standard Oil of California’s subsidiary, Chevron, joined the hunt for oil in the Llanos.30 By 1973, the year of the Middle East oil embargo, fifteen new exploration contracts would be signed in Colombia. The Llanos exploration zone would be stretched northeast toward the Venezuelan border31 and right through the lands of the Guajibo-speaking Macaguane Indians.32
In Peru, Petroperu and Occidental struck oil in the Amazon in 1972. The Velasco government plunged ahead with plans for the Trans-Andean pipeline, drawing down international loans to pay three Tulsa-based firms to build it. The engineering was left to the respected Bechtel Corporation, which estimated that the cost would be $250 million—a figure that would grow to $650 million by 1976. With feeder lines and a terminal, the estimated $1 billion total cost would make the Peruvian pipeline, mile for mile, the most expensive on earth.33 The Amazonian pipeline would become an Amazonian pipe dream.
THE BRAZILIAN-BOLIVIAN CONNECTION
SIL’s branch in Bolivia was worried. Gulf Oil’s restored properties had been nationalized, and the new government of General Juan José Torres had nationalized the properties of the International Metals Processing Company, a firm based in Dallas, where Cam and his fund-raisers, the Wycliffe Associates, were depending on local corporate support for SIL’s projected new International Linguistic Center. Torres also nationalized the Matilde zinc mine, a majority of whose shares were owned by two Rockefeller-allied firms, U.S. Steel and Engelhard Minerals. But perhaps most alarming from SIL’s perspective was the cutoff of SIL’s access to the Brazilian Cabinet, something it had enjoyed since it had entered the country in the mid-1950s. Then came a scandal over charges that the Peace Corps had carried out a birth control program among Indians in the Lake Titicaca region that had included the sterilization of women. Though the U.S. Embassy denied the charges, a documentary film entitled Blood of the Condor made it impossible for Torres to ignore the allegations and their widespread acceptance. Birth control had long been resisted by Bolivia, a country with a population density of only four inhabitants per square kilometer, when the United States first proposed it as a condition of loans after the 1952 Indian miners’ revolution and the Paz Estenssoro government’s nationalization of Gulf Oil holdings. The Peace Corps was expelled. Would SIL, facing similar rumors in Colombia, be next?
There were greater stakes in Bolivia for the Nixon administration. Torres’s independence in foreign affairs, including his lack of enthusiasm for the U.S. campaign to isolate Cuba, threatened to give credence to what Che Guevara had fought against. Despite military defeat, Guevara’s guerrilla band had a profound political impact on Bolivia. The army’s massacre of eighty-seven men, women, and children at the Catavi mine in July 1967 may have discouraged miners from following up on their vote of support for Guevara’s guerrillas at a subsequent miners’ conference, but Guevara’s courage and death had left them inspired rather than defeated. In just a few years, Guevara’s public defiance of U.S. power and corporate property rights was given new life by Torres in Bolivia, Salvador Allende in Chile, and Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru. Such formerly stalwart U.S. allies as Guyana and Ecuador were seizing, respectively, ALCAN’s bauxite mines and American tuna-fishing boats. In Suriname, suggestions were being aired in government circles that ALCOA’s huge bauxite mines should go the way of ALCAN’s in neighboring Guyana. Venezuela was moving toward pressuring American companies to sell majority holdings in key profitable ventures to Venezuelan nationals; only Brazil, thanks to the 1964 military coup, resisted this trend, instead opening the Amazon, including rich bauxite lodes, to ALCOA’s and ALCAN’s roving eyes.
And it was here, at the Brazilian border, that Torres met his Waterloo. A branch of Brazil’s trans-Amazon highways, which served as both commercial and military roads, was pushing steadily toward Corumbá, Brazil’s southeastern border with Bolivia. Iron and manganese deposits recently found by U.S. Steel in Mato Grosso, just south of Corumbá (and north of the Rockefellers’ Bodoquena ranch), stretched across the Bolivian border into the isolated region of Mutun. Mutun’s 40 billion tons of iron made it the largest estimated lode in Latin America and the third largest on earth. Brazil, with U.S. Steel’s immense Serra dos Carajás deposits in the Amazon and Hanna’s rich mines in Minas Gerais, did not need iron. But Argentina, Brazil’s traditional rival for dominance in the “southern cone” of the South American continent, did. In January 1971, former Brazilian ambassador General Hugo Bethelen was caught in La Paz financing a conspiracy against the Torres government. Bethelen was convicted of passing about $60,000 to Bolivian plotters, whose leader was Colonel Hugo Banzer Suarez, a graduate of Green Beret counterinsurgency training at Fort Bragg and former military attaché to Washington.34 Banzer’s close ties to the U.S. Embassy and the support offered by the Santa Cruz-based Falange party emboldened him not only to attempt the coup, but not to be discouraged by its failure. Indian miners, armed with only machetes, picks, and dynamite from the mines, mobilized in trucks in defense of the government, persuading the army to continue to back Torres.35
Torres’s survival now depended on maintaining his own support among the Indian miners and peasants. In June, he allowed them to convene a Popular Assembly. This assembly and the press coverage that resulted inspired Indians to seize mines and plantations where they worked. It was as if the spirit of the Indian Revolution of 1952 had reappeared to sweep through the Andes and appeal once more to the Indians in the army rank and file. Confrontation with the U.S.-trained officer corps was inevitable. B
y early August, when rumors spread of another military plot being organized in Santa Cruz, there was a call for arms to be distributed to the populace to “defend their revolution and the positive steps toward socialism.”36 This call only convinced the generals that the Falange party was right: A communist conspiracy was afoot.
Inflamed by Cold War ideology, the generals accelerated their preparations for the coup. General Bethelen had already proposed to Brazil’s Visão magazine that countries like Bolivia might have to be taken over as protectorates if they maintained relations with countries (such as Cuba) that were outside the Organization of American States (OAS) and were, therefore, deemed a threat to internal security.37 Denunciations of his statements by Torres’s foreign minister as “provocative and imperialist” only encouraged Bethelen to repeat his demand for “a form of intervention which the Brazilian imagination, creative in developing new forms of co-existence among men, can discover in the realm of international relations, principally among Latin American nations which I consider one family.”38
The junta’s “Brazilian imagination” had come up with a strategy as old as the CIA coup in Guatemala: an invasion of “volunteers” from neighboring Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina to back a move for power by the neo-fascist Falange party and its army coconspirators. CIA money was said to be involved. That same month, Nelson Rockefeller’s friend, Victor Andrade, former Bolivian minister of labor and of foreign affairs and ambassador to the OAS, arrived in Brasília as a special envoy of OAS Secretary General Galo Plaza. (Three years later, during Nelson’s confirmation hearings for the vice presidency, congressional investigators not only would reveal that Andrade had received gifts totaling $38,000 from Nelson, but would secretly identify him as a conduit “for CIA funds for the purposes of manipulating elections in Bolivia.”)39
A delegation of Brazilian businessmen failed to convince Torres to accept Brazilian control over the Mutun iron deposits. Torres could not acquiesce to their demands; he had decided to accept $200 million in Soviet loans to develop Mutun through the construction of a metallurgical processing plant. His hesitation removed all doubts about what was to be done. Two days later, the first planes of the Brazilian air force arrived at Santa Cruz airport, bearing machine guns for the Falange party.
Torres’s interior minister issued a formal protest to Brazil. La Paz’s Jornada described the appearance of mercenaries from Brazil and Paraguay. How much of this was true, how much inadvertently contributed to fears, and how much was fabricated to create hysteria would never be known. But the resemblance to the CIA’s “black propaganda” operation against the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala twenty years before was striking: an invasion from neighboring countries by “liberating” troops, foreign bombers with freshly painted national insignias, and a U.S. Air Force radio transmitter lent to the rebels by the U.S. military attaché in Santa Cruz.40 There were even scratchy radio broadcasts of an appeal allegedly by former president Paz Estenssoro to the armed miners of Siglo XX mine, urging them to surrender the airport at the key mining capital, Oruro. When the miners later tried to rescue the airport from the coup, they encountered a hail of automatic gunfire from U.S.-trained Rangers who had been flown in from Santa Cruz.
If the coup’s success was helped by international conspiracy, it was just as much the result of Torres’s own vacillation at critical moments. On August 14, Santa Cruz’s labor union leaders warned Torres that subversion was under way in their city, but Torres did not respond to their request for arms. Only after the negotiations over Mutun’s iron had collapsed and Brazilian planes had begun landing in Santa Cruz did he arrest Banzer and thirty-eight other conspirators, then only to release them after a day in prison because of Falangist demonstrations. Ironically, the lessons of Torres’s hesitation to distribute arms against a military coup were not learned by Allende’s government either, which met a similar fate for similar reasons. In Chile, like Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, and Peru, there were no Minutemen ready to defend their government.
Within twenty-four hours, Torres was seeking asylum in the Chilean Embassy. The Indian peasants and miners, mostly armed with only machetes and dynamite, and unarmed students were left to face Banzer’s fascists and Rangers alone; their resistance was met with massacre. Some 120 were killed, and more than 700 wounded.41 In 1974, more than 100 peasants would be murdered in the Cochabamba Valley, as would dozens of miners in 1976; and that July Torres would be gunned down in Argentina, where he lived in exile.
On August 22, General Emílio Garrastazú Médici’s Brazilian junta rushed to recognize the new Bolivian cabinet headed by Banzer. Practically all the important ministries were held by the Santa Cruz Establishment. The important post of interior minister was given to Colonel Andrés Selich, field commander of the Rangers who had hunted down Che Guevara.42 As president, Banzer conceded that Bolivia now had an “interest in Brazilian investment.” A week later, the Brazilian Investexport gave a $5 million credit to the Bolivian Agricultural Bank for loans to allow larger landowners in the Santa Cruz region to purchase heavy machinery from Brazil, most of which was sold by American corporations like International Harvester, Deere, and Caterpillar.
Banco do Brasil chipped in another $5 million. In September, the link between the coup and Brazil’s economic interests became clearer: $10 million in credits was provided to allow the Banzer regime to import more machinery for completing the rail line between Santa Cruz and Corumbá in Brazil and to construct a highway along the route to connect with Brazil’s trans-Amazon highway system.
In the following month, the Brazilian construction giant ALFONSECA agreed to build a $50 million, 558-mile paved highway between Bolivia’s interior and Brazil’s Mato Grosso. Meanwhile, the Nixon administration offered a $2.5 million loan for cotton growers (many of whom were in the state of Santa Cruz); a grant of $2 million for Banzer’s Plan de Emergencia for schools, hospitals, and commercial infrastructure; $20 million in additional credits; and increases in military aid.
Mounting unrest in the highlands was answered, as elsewhere, with Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) loans “for maximum occupation of the Amazon Basin” where fertile lands were falsely promised to those who would join some 100,000 Andean peasants who had moved there since 1960. A massive birth control program, promoted by the World Bank and John D. Rockefeller 3rd’s Population Council, was unleashed in the highlands to curb what an IDB consultant had termed the “incredible rate of fertility” among the “primitive” Andean people.43
The price Bolivians would pay would be high: a 15 percent increase in their debt in one year; devaluation of their currency; a dramatic shift in their trade reliance from Argentina to Brazil; and, for Banzer, a rupture of his ruling coalition with Paz Estenssoro’s MNR party. Banzer would also have to borrow from the First National City Bank and other creditors to pay $13.5 million to U.S. Steel and the other former owners of the Matilde Mines and another $1.5 million for the nationalized holdings of Texas’s International Metals Processing Company. On April 4, 1972, Banzer met with Brazil’s president, General Médici, at the Brazilian border town of Corumbá. Médici pledged aid for the Banzer government, including $1 million to help plan development in the lowlands around Santa Cruz. That week arrests swept through La Paz as the army seized arms caches of leftist guerrillas. Among those arrested was Loyola Guzmán, who had been purged from the Bolivian Communist party for acting as courier and treasurer for Che Guevara. Now her capture was used by Banzer as an excuse to show his pro-U.S. loyalty by expelling sixty-nine Soviet diplomats and embassy staff.
In June 1972, Treasury Secretary John Connally visited La Paz to extend Nixon’s “warmest wishes” and praise for Banzer’s “great courage.” Bolivia was now a junior partner of Washington’s alliance with the junta in Brasília; within the next few years, as Henry Kissinger took over the State Department, Nelson Rockefeller took over the vice presidency, and George Bush took over the CIA, Banzer would be joined by military rulers in Chile, Peru, and Ecuad
or.
Che Guevara had believed that the popular struggle in Bolivia would cause the United States and its client allies to internationalize the conflict in the Andes, just as U.S. intervention against the revolution in Vietnam had ignited all Indochina. He had been proved correct. But the outcome had not been as he expected. He had underestimated the depth of U.S. penetration of South America’s rural interior and overestimated the capacities of his own ideological compatriots to unite. Many Vietnams would not be created, but many dictatorships would. The regimes of Nelson Rockefeller’s New Military, not successful revolutions, would be South America’s destiny for the next quarter of a century.
Now that the Lord’s Will had come upon Bolivia, SIL was restored to its former respected status. Its leaders again were given access to government on a high level. Banzer, in turn, was given access to SIL’s jungle base in the eastern lowlands, Tumi Chucua.
A year after the coup, in 1972, SIL’s Bolivia branch published a yearbook of students’ activities at the base called “Jungle Gems,” showing their American children “listening to the Presidential Prayer Breakfast,” presumably Banzer’s celebration with a Graham protégé from Argentina. If the presidential prayer breakfast had been Billy Graham’s and Nixon’s, the effect would have been no different. “Is God’s time your time?” wrote “Best Groomed” Calvin Shoemaker. “If it is, use it wisely. Christ is coming soon.”
Banzer came sooner. A section called “President’s Visit” was a pictorial account of the warm reception offered the dictator. “We welcome the Banzer family with flowers, then up to the Main Building for refreshments and a program” before assembled Indians, including the presentation of SIL’s bilingual primers. Banzer took such a shine to Tumi Chucua that it became his favorite vacation spot for escape and relaxation from the rigors of dictatorship. SIL sanctified the use of the base with Romans 13:1 in Spanish and eight Indian languages. The translation was a multilingual wonder: “Obey legal superiors, because God is one who has granted the office. There is no government on earth which God has not permitted to come to power.”44