by Gerard Colby
“We do not believe that there has been a planned or conscious effort on the part of the Government of Paraguay to exterminate, molest, or harm the Aché Indians in any way. The unfortunate acts in remote areas seem to have been individual ones.”21
Nothing was mentioned about Paraguayan military trucks that were seen moving captured Aché to the New Tribes colony. Or about Standard Oil of New Jersey, Pennsylvania Oil (Pennzoil), and Texaco preparing to explore for oil in the homelands of the Ayoreos, who were also “occupied” by New Tribes Mission. Or about these companies’ negotiations, with the regime of Alfredo Stroessner, of contracts that contained “some of the most generous clauses recently granted to foreign oil companies anywhere in the world.”22 Or about International Products Corporation, the American firm better known for its Ogden affiliate’s Tillie Lewis brand names, which owned 2 million acres of land for cattle breeding around Puerto Pinasco on the Paraguai River, about 150 miles southwest of Nelson Rockefeller’s Bodoquena ranch in Brazil.
Nelson had been apprised of International Products’ ranch when control of the firm was bought by Pamela Woolworth, an heiress of the F. W. Woolworth chain-store fortune in February 1956, just a few months before Nelson’s purchase of Bodoquena. The New York Times story reporting the purchase, a clipping of which was found by the authors in Nelson’s personal files years later,23 noted that the firm had closed down its meat processing operation in 1950, when economic instability under President Juan Perón made it difficult to acquire Argentine cattle. By 1955, Perón had been overthrown and Paraguay’s own cattle production was sufficient to assure ample supply. The firm shifted the ranch’s focus from producing tanning substances from quebracho trees back to producing cattle for slaughter and export. Neither the New York Times nor Kubisch mentioned the plight of thousands of Indians of the Angaité, Lengua, and Senapaná tribes who lived in the area. Dispossessed of most of their lands, the Indians had been reduced to the status of underpaid day laborers at Puerto Pinasco’s tannin factories, until those were closed; then, the Indians were forced to seek what little work they could find on the area’s revived cattle ranches. The ranches usually paid in kind rather than in wages, encouraged the use of credit that kept the Indians in peonage, and fenced all the fields and prohibited Indian agriculture.24 The presence of two Fundamentalist missionaries among the Indians was not mentioned either in the Times story: the South American Missionary Society and the New Tribes Mission.
The shaded areas represent the location of Indian groups. The word Guayaki is another term for the Aché Indians.
Source: Richard Arens, ed., Genocide in Paraguay, p. 2, based in part on map contained in Norman Lewis, “Manhunt,” Sunday Times Magazine (London), January 26, 1975.
Nor did Kubisch mention that Rockefeller’s American International Association had designed colonization schemes in Paraguay for the Agency for International Development and had gotten dictator Stroessner’s “green light” to “proceed with studies and preparation of the prospectus for presentation to U.S. and Paraguayan investors,” including the International Products Corporation, which wanted to expand its exports and had “shown interest in this proposal.”25 AIA’s Walter Crawford gave AID’s Paraguay Rural Development officers a tour of Brazilian institutions, which resulted in closer economic ties between the two dictatorships, including a host of cooperative research ventures and a visit by the manager of King Ranch of Brazil to an AID-affiliated experimental ranch in Paraguay.*
Kubisch also did not mention that the Itaipu and Acaray Dams were located near the forests inhabited by the Aché. These dams were part of a giant AID-backed development project designed to turn the Paraná River into a source of cheap hydroelectric energy for the mines and cities of Brazil to the east.
Kubisch was not ignorant of these links between AID’s development plans in militarized Brazil and militarized Paraguay. He had headed AID’s mission to Brazil from 1962 to 1965, when the agency was financing Brazilian state governors and politicians who were conspiring to overthrow the government of João Goulart. After the coup, Kubisch became chief of the Brazilian Desk of the State Department in Washington, arranging restoration of AID loans to the central government that kept the Brazilian junta alive and launched the first development schemes for conquering the Amazon. This work had catapulted him to Kissinger’s side as overseer of all Latin America.
Genocide in Paraguay filled in some of these information gaps—and others. The book contained a full accounting by German anthropologist Mark Münzel of his experience not only with the Aché between 1970 and 1972, but with the New Tribes Mission that took over the Achés’ reservation after its administrator was forced to resign in disgrace for “killing, torture and slave-trading.” Münzel was unsparing in his criticism of the New Tribes Mission, noting that “inhuman conditions” continued to persist on the reservation and that an American missionary associated with the group “has himself been observed participating in Indian hunts within the forest areas and, beyond that, in the lucrative sale of captives in his charge.”26 Dr. Eric Wolfe, the same anthropologist who had exposed the CIA’s use of anthropologists and missionaries in Thailand, concluded that the reservation was nothing less than “an extermination camp” and that the New Tribes Mission was its “handmaiden, gun bearer and prison warden.” Norman Lewis, the author who had blown the whistle on the Cintas Largas massacres, captured the full horror of the Aché experience with a summary of indictments against the Paraguayan government by the International League for the Rights of Man and the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom in 1974:
1) enslavement, torture, and killing of the Guayakí [Aché] Indians in reservations in eastern Paraguay; 2) withholding of food and medicine from them resulting in their death by starvation and disease; 3) massacre of their members outside the reservations by hunters and slave traders with the toleration and even encouragement of members of the government and with the aid of the armed forces; 4) splitting up of families and selling into slavery of children, in particular girls for prostitution; and 5) denial and destruction of Guayakí cultural traditions, including use of their language, traditional music, and religious practices.27
Of all the 144 pages of Genocide in Paraguay, the implications of the horror were best conveyed in a single quote from Richard Rubenstein’s 1975 essay, “After Auschwitz”: “Perhaps we are at the beginning, not the end, of the age of genocide.”28
With SIL, the word genocide was never uttered and never even considered. Instead, SIL had a conspiracy theory of its own to fall back on. Sometimes it took supposedly material form as the International Communist Conspiracy, but always lurking in the spiritual shadows was Satan, who could be felt to be working his evil ways with lies, confusion, violence.
In Indonesia’s conquered Dutch West Guinea, renamed Irian Jaya by the Indonesians, evidence of the forces of Darkness—and Light—was seen in 1977 when the Baliem Valley “just blew up.” By the early 1970s, President Suharto, the general who led the Indonesian occupation of the copper-rich Baliem Valley, allowed not only the Rockefellers’ and Whitneys’ Freeport Sulphur to occupy and steadily export the valley’s legendary “Copper Mountain,” but Cam’s Christian missionaries to occupy the valley’s Dani tribe spiritually.
SIL’s officialdom, in its eagerness to show its devotion to Indonesian absorption of the Baliem, plunged to familiar depths. Ignatius Suharno and Ken Pike published From Baudi to Indonesian with Asia Foundation funds in 1976.29 But SIL’s field missionaries seemed to have cut their own path toward the Dani. It is some indication of the degree to which the missionaries shelved Cam’s Hail, Caesar! doctrine that when the Papuans revolted against Indonesian rule in 1977, they spared SIL’s missions. Nevertheless, the rebellion was ruthlessly crushed by Indonesian troops using U.S. weapons. The Dani language that Michael Rockefeller had once recorded with such wonder returned to SIL’s base at Danau Bira (Lake Holmes) in the words of language informants and grounds keepers. By then, as Caltex (a joint
venture of Standard Oil of California and Texaco) oil rigs sprouted in the seas off the Irian coast,30 Copper Mountain had all but disappeared into the maw of American industry.
CRACKING AT THE SEAMS OF EMPIRE
The same year that the Papuans revolted in Baliem Valley, Nelson Rockefeller was preparing to sell images of their art and that of the coastal tribesmen who killed his son. He had already published an earlier book on the “primitive” art Michael had collected. It had been a private edition and had cost him money. Now Nelson intended to make money. He had been astounded to learn that publishers would actually pay him to print books of photographs of his art collection. It also occurred to him that a marvelously accurate method of making reproductions might also be a moneymaker; using his own art collection would require no royalty payments to artists or other collectors.
The Nelson Rockefeller Collection, Inc., could make a fortune, just as long as he ignored the art critics’ disdain for such “tacky” behavior by a collector, and a Rockefeller at that. Nelson thought it all fun, potentially lucrative, and a way to share the art that he had enjoyed privately; he saw it as almost a profitable public service.
“Tacky” had also been hurled at him when he sold his Foxhall Road estate in Washington, D.C.—a stately relic of his CIAA days—to a developer for subdivision into house lots. The property was a rarity in Washington, D.C., in that it included twenty-five wooded acres along the Potomac and a large colonial house. More important to Nelson, it had been the symbol of over three decades of dreams of someday occupying another house in Washington. He had paid only $225,000 for it in the 1940s. Local assessors now placed a value for tax purposes at $2.1 million, the second highest in the capital. Now that he no longer needed it, Nelson quickly discarded this symbol of his dreams, offering it for sale before he even left Washington. He wanted $8.8 million.
Outraged neighbors wailed at the developers’ plan to carve up the old property. Nelson shrugged, moving on, characteristically never looking back.
He sought similar liquidity from assets by selling part of his Fifth Avenue luxury duplex apartment in New York, pulling in his belt to the twenty-two-room notch. Furthermore, during his protracted absence while vice president, some of his father’s Navajo Indian rugs from those early trips to New Mexico had been stolen from an unlocked building on his estate on Mount Desert Island, Maine. It was a sign of the times; never before in his adult life had such disrespect been shown. He concluded that it did no good to try to keep what was not used. So, he put that estate up for sale as well, asking $1 million for the property. Systematically, piece by piece, every tangible part of his past was being expelled from his life, as were his dreams.
Only Pocantico remained, precisely because it belonged not to him, but to the whole family as part of its heritage and legend, designated by outgoing President Ford as a national historic landmark at a special ceremony that brought Nelson, David, and Laurance together with other family members. Ironically, the ceremony was performed on the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Here, too, were bitter memories. Kennedy, who had disagreed strongly with the Rockefellers about the exclusive reliance on private enterprise in foreign-aid grants and loans, was the first president—and the last—who did not ask Nelson to help in his administration. Yet Kennedy’s name was still revered in Latin America, while Nelson’s was reviled. Kennedy had brought out cheering crowds; Nelson, jeering mobs and riots.
Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was remembered, more even than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, as a Camelotian “one great shining moment” in the United States’ relations with its southern neighbors, yet Nelson’s own philanthropic and business efforts in the development in Latin America, which had preceded Kennedy’s by many years, had suffered under a twist of fate. Its philanthropic face had been sacrificed for its business side. It had been a vain forfeit. Because of Nelson’s political ambitions, the overarching nature of Rockefeller investments throughout Latin America had been revealed during his vice presidential confirmation hearings. Nelson’s philanthropic focus on Latin America, embodied in AIA, survived only in memory and in the government programs it spawned.
His model for private businesses, the International Basic Economy Corporation, was also dying, another victim of the ambitions of its founders. IBEC’s growth had overextended its reach; there were simply not enough successes or enough of a track record to encourage private investors to provide the capital IBEC needed to reach out to its far-flung subsidiaries with nurturing finances, technology, and administrative skills.
IBEC would have been sustainable if its costs had remained tolerable and its revenues had showed promise of growing at a faster pace. But with the hike in oil prices increasing energy costs and sales hit by ensuing cutbacks, IBEC had racked up $98 million in debts by September 30, 1974.
Rockefeller’s IBEC World Holdings (1972)
In the six years between 1966 and 1972, Latin America continued to outpace all other areas of the world in return on investment for Rockefeller’s IBEC. By 1972, IBEC’s revenues from Latin America were $20 million more than in 1966, while its assets were only $2 million more.
Source: IBEC annual report, courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center.
Before his confirmation, Nelson had agreed to help his son, Rodman, save IBEC. The Rockefeller company was unable to meet its obligations to its biggest creditors, a banking group led by Chase Manhattan and two insurance companies. During the confirmation hearings, Nelson had assured senators that “I have no active part, no interest in business affairs.” Three weeks after he took office, Room 5600’s J. Richardson Dilworth sent a letter to IBEC confirming the tentative agreement of two unnamed Rockefeller family members (Nelson and Laurance) to provide IBEC with up to $3 million in credit in return for IBEC’s major lenders extending their loans. Neither insurance company knew who the “principal interests” were, but the fact that the term indicated that the parties had a current investment in IBEC made a mockery of Nelson’s claim to have put his holdings in a blind trust. Nelson was obviously not so blind.
Rodman worked to get IBEC’s house in shape. He had already sold off over $50 million in assets in the previous two years. Some $20 million more were targeted for disposal in 1975, including stock holdings in IBEC’s Arbor Acres chicken subsidiaries in Mexico and Venezuela and 51 percent of one of IBEC’s most lucrative operations, its CADA supermarket chain.
In all, Rodman sold seventeen companies and merged or liquidated nine more, including IBEC’s once-vaunted precast concrete housing project in Puerto Rico. Rodman succeeded in reducing IBEC’s debt by $60 million, including Eurodollar notes. But former IBEC executives were not sure that Rodman could steer IBEC out of the storm. “To run a far-flung company like IBEC,” one said, “you need imagination, a strong managerial talent and the ability to pick out profitable ventures. With regard to Rodman, the jury is still out.”31
By 1978, the jury had come in, and the verdict was not good for IBEC. Despite Rodman’s strong will and courage, IBEC’s $16.6 million loss in 1976 had obliged him to borrow $10 million more from institutional investors.32 The following year, he sold IBEC’s Bellows International subsidiary for $26.5 million to Scovill Manufacturing, headed by Ronald Reagan’s future secretary of commerce, Malcolm Baldrige.
But politics again intervened, this time the CIA’s civil wars in southern Africa, where IBEC’s Arbor Acres had subsidiaries in Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Zambia. Currency fluctuations also had their impact. In Zambia, Arbor Acres was hit with a $500,000 fine for currency violations.33
To offset another $13.2 million loss suffered in 1977, Rodman spun off a housing project in Caguas, Puerto Rico, for $3.3 million. IBEC’s prognosis was grave. Like the charitable mask that had covered it, Nelson’s business empire was cracking apart.
Still hoping that IBEC could weather the storm, the Rockefellers continued to throw off dead wood. If it could not survive as a company,
perhaps it could at least hold itself together long enough to find a safe harbor with a purchaser.
REVOLT IN THE PROVINCES
News on other fronts was also grim. In 1978, General Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua was besieged by a popular revolution led by the Sandinistas. Although Nelson had never liked Somoza’s father, he had dealt with him during World War II. The Somozas subsequently got Nicaragua into debt to the tune of $580 million to some 100 banks, including Chase Manhattan. Now it was not clear that a revolutionary government would honor that debt. American corporations might lose assets, including gold mines owned by ASARCO, a mining concern with Rockefeller ties represented on ASARCO’s board by Chase directors George Champion, Willard Butcher, and Charles Barber. The mines were worked by Miskito Indians who had been evangelized by the American Moravian Church, which was based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, home of Bethlehem Steel.
The news was equally bad from the Middle East, where both Chase and IBEC had been involved in development projects in Iran and Lebanon. The Palestinians, expelled in 1970 from Jordan by King Hussein’s army, were becoming a serious force in Lebanon, and unrest was growing in the Shah’s Iran. The Soviets had grown close to the independent-minded new strongman in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, the Shah’s arch rival for control of the Persian Gulf. Thanks to U.S. support for the Shah’s territorial ambition, the CIA was losing its influence to the Soviet KGB in neighboring Afghanistan.
Nelson had plans for the Shah and the other leaders in the Middle East. He had just launched Saraborn, a company he hoped would become the conduit for recycling OPEC’s petrodollars back to the United States for investments. It would provide OPEC leaders like the Shah—especially the Shah—with a safe refuge for their wealth, tie them closer to U.S. policies, and fatten the coffers of banks like Chase that could hold their money as deposits and perhaps back up joint ventures suggested by Nelson’s firm. The Saraborn conduit might even help lower the balance-of-payments deficit, a perfect example of a corporate merger of profits and patriotism.