by Gerard Colby
Banzer must have agreed. He had posters plastered throughout the city of La Paz bearing a hand with the index finger pointing heavenward, as if to say, “Obey this government, for all authority does indeed come from God.”
SIL’s strict adherence to Romans 13 and its stoic code of obedience were at the political core of William Cameron Townsend’s success in building SIL into the Christian world’s largest nondenominational missionary organization. Through forty years it had taken him far, from Guatemala to Mexico, then to Peru, then to Ecuador, and on and on, marching as to war, riding the horse of nuclear apocalypse, the Cold War, in a race against time and a millennial prophecy, until now, at last, he had reached his original goal: L. L. Legter’s “naked savages,” the Bibleless tribes of the Brazilian Amazon.
And now, in August 1972, at Brasília, the city of dreams and host of the Seventh Inter-American Indian Congress, he had even lived to see himself applauded by the heirs of John Collier.
THE JUNTA’S SALUTE TO HUMAN RIGHTS
Under the cold eye of Brazil’s junta and its secret police, this conference could speak only official truth. Most scientists who disagreed with that version, including most of the signers of the Barbados Declaration, chose to stay home. “Those of us, both here and in Europe, who have been concerned about the critical situation of Indian peoples in Brazil, were outraged by the VIIth Inter-American Indianist Congress,” explained Harvard anthropologist Shelton Davis. “We had been following the situation closely through newspaper clippings and reports of observers, and knew that what was actually occurring had been clouded by secrecy, rhetoric, and lies. We knew that many others shared our beliefs within Brazil, but were silenced by a military government bordering on fascism and maintained by political repression and torture.”45 Davis joined other colleagues in refusing to attend.
The road to Brasília had already been sanitized. The previous September, National Geographic inadvertently did its part by publishing W. Jesco Von Puttkamer’s photographs and article on FUNAI’s first contact with the besieged Cintas Largas Indians—two years after the fact. In a story entitled “Brazil Protects Her Cintas Largas,” FUNAI was described in heroic terms, and its predecessor, the Service for the Protection of the Indian, was mentioned only once, in a single sentence, its crimes reduced to manageable proportions: “Over the years the old service had grown cumbersome and tangled in red tape.”46
Opening the Brazilian conference, FUNAI president General Oscar Bandeira de Mello proudly pointed to the hero of Brazil’s independence, José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, as the real spiritual founder of Brazil’s celebrated Indian policy. The director of the OAS’s Inter-American Indian Institute, Gonzalo Rubio Orbe, asked for compassion by scientists for the “delicate and complex problem of forest Indians” in the general’s country.
The Chilean delegate had the audacity to report on the Allende government’s new agrarian reform among the Mapuche Indians, but otherwise, the dining at the elegant presidential palace went undisturbed, and future programs for anthropologists were explored, along with Indian malnutrition, music, and integration.
Brazil’s Interior Minister José Costa Cavalcante’s claims that his government was “making a great effort to create a humane and objective Indian policy” was not challenged, even though his son was widely rumored to be the co-owner of one of Brazil’s largest land companies. Neither was Minister of Exterior Gibson Barbosa’s assurances that “your travels [around Brazil] will demonstrate that all we possess and are realizing is not only for the Indian, but for the nation as a whole.”47 Both men were warmly applauded. The delegates were looking forward to FUNAI’s tour of the Xingu Park and the Ilha do Bananal. Both Indian reserves were under severe attack by the regime’s development schemes, but the delegates knew how to behave. All was right in the Brazilian Indian world; most of the peoples of the thirteen nations represented by these delegates would never know what had been hidden from them. Fundamentalist Christians in the United States would learn, rather, that the conference, by resolution, and OAS Secretary General Galo Plaza, by decree, had officially proclaimed “Uncle Cam” Townsend “Benefactor of the Linguistically Isolated Human Groups of the Americas.”
It should have been the crowning achievement of Cam’s career. For most men over seventy-five, it would have been. Yet for Cam it carried a bittersweet message: He was already being treated as if he were history. The previous year, after a series of disagreements with the Wycliffe/SIL board, he was elevated out of SIL’s general directorship to the ethereal status of “Founder.” He had argued for the inclusion of Catholics, African Americans, and national languages within SIL’s lily-white Anglo-Saxon mainstream—and gotten nowhere. “Our folks were just too narrow,”48 he had told a colleague. But the final blow was the way he and his wife, Elaine, were treated after their return from a visit to the Soviet Union.
The Townsends had been impressed by Soviet bilingual programs for minorities in the Caucasus.49 They had been “taken in by the communists,” one financial backer told Elaine. “We didn’t go to the USSR to find fault,” she lamely replied. “We went to see how we could serve and pave the way for the Bible to be translated into more languages.”50 If SIL’s version of Romans 13:1 was good enough for colonels, it was good enough for commissars—at least in their own land. Cam saw nothing inconsistent about praising a country’s bilingual education programs in its and U.S. newspapers, just as he had done in the days of Cárdenas’s Mexico. He strolled about Red Square in his Texan fedora at peace with himself. Was not Russia just like any other new frontier for the Lord?
Even Cam’s allies began talking about his age and ailments often enough to give him a picture of what was desired. In 1971, he resigned as SIL’s general director, but not without some stinging last words. SIL, he warned, was guilty of “incomplete adherence to our non-sectarian policy.” It had shown intolerance of alcohol-drinking Lutherans from Germany and of American Pentecostalists who believed that the Holy Spirit’s possession gave one the power to speak in alien or dead tongues. It had exhibited an “almost unconscious going along with racist attitudes”; showed an “over independence” from national cultures; and what was perhaps most ironic, engaged in “missionary type activities” that could cost SIL contracts and retard the advance of the Lord’s Word among the Bibleless tribes.51
Now, a year later, the most prestigious Indianist organization in the world was paying his accomplishments and abilities the deference his own colleagues refused. Yet he knew that the Lord’s Will was still unfolding. Tribes were still waiting for the Word, and governments and anthropologists were increasingly in the way. His services and humble manner would be needed again.
43
CRITICAL CHOICES
NAVIGATING THE RAPIDS–RIGHTWARD
For Nelson Rockefeller, 1972 was the watershed in the United States’—and his—political life. At the zenith of its power, the presidency of Richard Nixon was self-destructing.
This time, there would be no Checkers speech, only tapes revealing the seamier side of big-league politics in the United States. The first revelation of criminal behavior came with a simple piece of adhesive tape affixed across the lock of an office door, not in the way expected of professional burglars—not vertically, so it would be invisible with the door closed—but horizontally, producing just the kind of telltale sign of intrusion that raw recruits at CIA’s Camp Peary learned not to do in Break-In 101. Yet, inexplicably, this was what the CIA’s former chief of security, James McCord, did at the entrance to the office of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex. Predictably, after a guard found, for the second time that night, that the door to the Watergate basement garage had been taped open and called the police, plainclothes officers entered the complex; they searched their way to the Democratic headquarters, immediately noticed the tapes, and advanced on the burglars with guns drawn. They never expected to bag such illustrious lights of the Cold War’s underworld, men with records of accomplishmen
t in CIA service in Latin America going back to the Bay of Pigs and before, to Colonel J. C. King’s Western Hemisphere barony. But once the perpetrators were brought in, for those in the know in Washington, it was obvious that the clock was ticking on the presidency of Richard Nixon.
For Nelson, it had been difficult watching Nixon’s heady ride from Capitol Hill to the White House on inauguration day almost four years ago. Nixon had outtoughed the party regulars from the Eastern Establishment, including Rockefeller. All Nixon had to do was move steadily forward as the central candidate, steering carefully between Rockefeller on the left and Goldwaterites on the right, to the nomination. Once the nomination was secured, all else followed: Rockefeller’s endorsement, Kissinger’s clandestine informing on the Paris Peace talks, and Nixon’s pledge of having a “secret plan” to end the war and return law and order to American streets and campuses.
Most recently, Nixon had outmaneuvered the Rockefeller camp on economic and trade issues as well. At first, David Rockefeller did not object to PepsiCo’s Donald Kendell being named chairman of the Emergency Committee for American Trade. But then Nixon did something highly unorthodox in an effort to reverse the first U.S. trade deficit in a century. To stem the flow of gold to overseas dollar creditors, he unilaterally suspended the convertibility of dollars to gold. Then he allowed the dollar’s exchange value to “float” in world markets, rather than to be anchored at a fixed value (previously $35 per ounce of gold).
This action came as a great shock to Wall Street. It ended the international monetary agreements that had provided stability for world currencies and for long-range corporate planning, which included such vital items on a balance sheet as the dollar-value of assets (like factories) and liabilities (like bonds).
It was a crude effort by Nixon and Treasury Secretary John Connally to reverse the deficit through a simplistic monetary manipulation: devaluing the dollar. Nixon followed up the devaluation in the fall of 1971 by forcing Japan and other Pacific Rim countries “voluntarily” to reduce their own textile exports to the United States and to allow more U.S. imports into their markets at favorable prices. He took the same audacious stance with Europe, causing West Germany’s foreign minister to warn, “By its decisions on trade policy, the United States may bring about the disintegration of the Western world.”1
The Eastern Establishment was appalled. Foreign Affairs magazine, published by the Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations, issued a blistering indictment on Nixon’s “disastrous isolationist trend.” Nixon had “terminated the convertibility of the dollar, shattering the linchpin of the international monetary system on whose smooth functioning the world economy depends.” He had “imposed an import surcharge, proposed both the most sweeping U.S. export subsidy in history and discriminated against foreign machinery by making it ineligible for the Job Development Credit,” a tax break for companies that upgraded their factories. He had “bludgeoned East Asia into ‘voluntary’ restraint agreements on textiles,” the article continued (without explicitly stating that this practice would also hurt Asian subsidiaries owned by American corporations that were often controlled by Old Wealth, like the Thai textile firm owned by Nelson Rockefeller’s International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC).
Finally, Nixon had “sought to extend and tighten the existing ‘voluntary’ agreement on steel—completely revising the traditional position of U.S. administrations in resisting protectionism and leading the world toward ever freer trade”—even if that trade was dominated by giant corporations. In short, Nixon had “violated the letter and the spirit of the reigning international law in both the monetary and trade fields.”2
To the older American corporations who called themselves “multinational” companies (even though by and large they were still American-controlled transnational corporations operating across borders), Nixon’s policy was a body blow. If unintentional, it was stupid; if intentional, it was treachery. The State Department suffered a hemorrhage of foreign-trade experts and investment bankers, who fled to think tanks, such as the Council on Foreign Relations or the Brookings Institution.
Nixon’s protectionism could not have come at a worse time for IBEC. The company had extended its investments to every continent, overstretching its capital capacities. More trade, not less, was what IBEC needed to make its assets abroad yield revenues for debt service at home. Some investments, like the Brazilian Investment Bank, were paying off; BIB almost doubled its stockholder equity from 1970 to 1971, from 59 million cruzeiros to 101 million cruzeiros, increasing the value of IBEC’s share in BIB from $2.4 million to $3.7 million. But other IBEC holdings, such as its hydraulics plant in West Berlin, sapped the capital of its parent, leaving Nelson’s pride and joy $138 million in the red in 1972.
And then there were the political blows as Rockefeller holdings were caught between the protectionist crossfire from Latin American governments and Richard Nixon. In Argentina, BIB’s parent company, Deltec International, was denied government loans for its huge Swift-Plata ranching and meat-processing operations, because it was not Argentine majority owned. It eventually closed its plants when cattle deliveries dwindled and cattle prices rose. Finally, failing to find Argentine buyers, Swift sought bankruptcy protection from its creditors.3
In June 1971, Deltec had secured an $18 million credit line in Eurodollars, only to see its value undermined by Nixon’s devaluation of the dollar. Investment banks (like New York’s Model, Roland, of which IBEC’s top Brazil overseer, Richard Aldrich, was vice president) dealing in Eurodollars for American and foreign borrowers were aghast at the instability in the European financial markets caused by Nixon’s suspension of gold payments and devaluation of the dollar.*
IBEC itself had suffered huge losses in South America for reasons ranging from the environmental to the political.
In Brazil, the entire 1971 crop of IBEC’s hybrid corn seed was destroyed by leaf blight, severely lowering the earnings of its most dramatic success story, Sementes Agroceres, S.A., now the fourth-largest seed company in the world, with research and production centers in five Brazilian states.
In Argentina, IBEC was left with large debts as a result of Nelson’s 1969 visit, when thirteen of the Minimax supermarkets were burned.
In Chile, workers seized IBEC’s ready-mix concrete plant, despite the opposition of the government of Salvador Allende. The plant would not be returned until after the military coup in 1973 displaced the workers at gunpoint.
In Venezuela, IBEC’s thirty-nine CADA supermarkets were still being criticized for favoring imported items over locally produced products, with critics charging that IBEC had reversed the 80:20 ratio in discriminatory purchases simply by buying from U.S. subsidiaries in Venezuela.4
In Peru, IBEC executives were still worried over the penchant of the government of Juan Velasco Alvarado for nationalization to bring foreign companies’ investments into correspondence with the government’s development agenda. Rockefeller Foundation trustee John Irwin’s negotiations on behalf of Washington still had not produced the money Standard Oil wanted for properties seized allegedly in lieu of back taxes. In 1969, the government limited to 25 percent foreign capital holdings in Peru’s banks, including Banco Continental, controlled by Chase Manhattan Bank. In July 1970, the government decreed that all industrial firms had to be Peruvian majority-owned, and followed that up the next year by nationalizing a mine owned by South Peru Copper Company, a subsidiary of one of Chase’s closest clients in mining, the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO). By 1975, a similar fate would befall the Peruvian holdings of Marcona Mining, Cerro [de Pasco] Corporation, International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), and Standard Oil of California (which shared ownership of a refinery with a Peruvian banking group led by David Rockefeller’s friend, Manuel Prado, and W. R. Grace & Company, chaired by another of David’s friends, J. Peter Grace).
The Chase bank also had its 70 percent-owned Banco Argentino de Comercio nationalized in Argentina, and in Chile
the Allende government nationalized the holdings of ITT and the three copper giants, Anaconda, Cerro, and Kennecott, regaining Chilean control over the source of 89 percent of Chile’s exports earnings; Allende offered compensation based on the companies’ own previous claims of the worth of the properties for tax purposes. Eleven banks were nationalized as well in 1971 to prevent denials of credits to the government’s agrarian reform program and its state-owned industries.
These were also bad times for Nelson’s political career. His reputation had suffered since the disastrous Latin American tour. There had even been demonstrations in the United States and bombings by American students of Rockefeller-affiliated companies, including the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center and the Standard Oil refinery in Bayonne, New Jersey.
Source: Wayne G. Broehl, Jr., United States Business Performance Abroad.
And then there was the nightmare of Attica. Nelson had been attending a meeting in Washington, D.C., of the Foreign Advisory Committee on International Intelligence when he got word of the rebellion at the state penitentiary at Attica, New York. Thirteen hundred, mostly African American, prisoners were holding 38 prison employees hostage. Their demands for safe transfer to a “nonimperialist” country were answered by his stony refusal even to come to hear their complaints about the brutality of their guards. After a five-day standoff, during which Nelson never visited the prison, a helicopter suddenly dropped pepper gas onto the yard.
When the gas had lifted and the six-minute volley from hundreds of police guns ended, 10 hostages and 29 inmates were dead, and 80 prisoners were wounded, some fatally. Nelson was “amazed” only that more had not been killed. He dismissed the medical examiner’s report, which disclaimed reports by prison officials of atrocities committed against hostages. The governor’s counsel’s claim—that the examiner was a “known leftist”—attempted to pull a Cold War veil over the bodies.