Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Yet, in the end, it is the voice of indigenous peoples and their regard for the sacredness of the earth, their traditional respect for the earth as a living force, that offers alternative values to wanton waste and destruction. The European invasion of the Americas, begun by Columbus and pursued by Rockefeller and Townsend, has left little that is sustainable as a mode of production when left unrestrained. The destruction of the environment and the waste of resources is not accidental, but endemic, overwhelming even the private enterprises that seek to profit by desperate government regulation through environmental services and products. But even in this new industry, some companies grow and many die, and private capital, with all its powers of persuasion in the halls of government, tends to concentrate to the detriment, not the benefit, of political democracy. Where profit is its own reward, its conversion from means to ends is inevitable.

  So is the destruction of human beings. The burning of the rain forests is destroying not only the origin of 25 percent of all pharmaceuticals that benefit the world, not only much of the world’s species of plants and animals, not only a vast treasure of knowledge of these riches, but whole groups of people.

  Perhaps this is the real historical meaning of William Cameron Townsend’s reaching every tribe with the Word and Nelson Rockefeller’s reaching them with “development.” Both methods were destructive to tribal ways of communal sharing and respect for the land. Both stories told of the same result: It was not God being brought to tribal cultures, but an alien culture of possessive individualism grown to such a giant corporate scale, with its own rapacious, competitive needs, that it could only devour them.

  In 1976, with the publication of the book Genocide in Paraguay, Nazi holocaust chronicler Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor, analyzed the complicity of silence that linked the death camps of Germany with what was happening to the Aché Indians of Paraguay:

  … Our society prefers not to know anything of all that. Silence everywhere. Hardly a few words in the press. Nothing is discussed at the UN, nor among the politicized intellectuals or moralists. The great consciences kept quiet. Of course, we had an excuse! We didn’t know. But now, after having read these testimonies, we know. Henceforth, we shall be responsible. And accomplices.

  For some, this was an obnoxious burden of citizenship; for the governments involved, it was a cause for continuing denial; and for others who were seeking the warm bosom of corporate respectability and foundation grants, it was grounds for lofty refutation.

  As the “Age of Genocide” described by anthropologists in the 1970s continued toward the twenty-first century, questions persisted, challenging the ongoing policy of plausible denial: Must crimes against humanity be the result of written policy deliberations to be recognized as crimes? Who shares responsibility when the destruction of cultures and peoples results from good intentions guided by alien goals and a blindness toward crimes by the powerful? What have these questions to do with international rights and international law in an increasingly interdependent world?

  Adolf Berle, ironically, studied this issue even while chairing a sugar corporation that profited from low wages paid on Dominican plantations to descendants of Indian and African slaves. Among his papers are notes on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the United Nations on December 10, 1948, when the ovens of Auschwitz were barely cool and memories were still fresh of just how far civilized people could descend:

  Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for the dignity and the free development of his personality.

  Berle also studied the Genocide Convention signed by United Nations members three years later. In 1951, members of the United Nations, informed of the many ways that crimes against humanity had been carried out, gave genocide an explicit definition in Article II to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

  In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, such as:

  •Killing members of the group;

  •Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

  •Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

  •Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

  •Forcibly transferring children from one group to another group.

  This was not an argument against ethnocide, the term applied in recent years to the destruction of an indigenous group as a people through policies like forced removal or forced assimilation, even though people are not being killed. But the Convention on Genocide was also not ambiguous in its definitions. Genocide is limited to deliberate acts that intend the physical destruction of all or part of a human group. Punishment is not limited, however, to those who commit a physical liquidation; it is also applicable to those who are in “complicity in genocide … whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”69 In a democracy, it was assumed, citizens bear some responsibility for what is done in their name by their governments, even more so if they are aware of crimes and do not try to stop them.

  There was nothing inevitable, therefore, about the unwillingness of successive administrations in Washington to press the United Nations to enforce the Convention on Genocide in Guatemala or Brazil or Indonesia. That failure was deliberate, a choice as clear as Nelson Rockefeller’s choice of dictatorships over democracies that had policies he disliked, a choice as clear as William Cameron Townsend’s Hail, Caesar doctrine of faith. In the Dollar Zone of the Western Hemisphere, that choice continues.

  Only a few among the powerful have chosen a different route. One of them is Davison L. Budhoo, a former World Bank economist and Caribbean specialist who resigned in 1988 from his $100,000-a-year job as a senior official to the Washington, D.C.–based International Monetary Fund (IMF). In one section of his seven-part letter of resignation to the director of the IMF, Budhoo castigated the Fund for its “hypocrisy” in allowing millions of people to starve while turning a blind eye to the “Third World military expenditure binge, in deference to the arms exporters—its major shareholders.” With the “concurrence of the Fund,” Budhoo wrote,

  arms expenditures in developing countries rose from 7 billion [dollars] in 1975 to over 14 billion in 1980 and above 21 billion in 1986 … yet in 1985, over 1 billion Third World People lived in … absolute poverty, and over 500 million were in the throes of famine and incurable malnutrition.… We have no qualms in forcing governments to crush millions upon millions of their own people to death—look at the extremely serious allegations made recently by UNICEF against us in this respect—but when it comes to arms merchandising we are hypocritical enough to throw our hands up in the air and talk of “national sovereignty.”

  Claiming he had been haunted by his participation in “our own peculiar Holocaust,” Budhoo wondered if “the heirs of those whom we have dismembered” would one day “clamor for another Nuremberg.”70

  It has not happened yet, even as huge arms expenditures continue in the Third World despite the end of the Cold War. But the clamor against the crime itself, genocide, has been spreading; the struggle for or against communism no longer can be offered as a rationale for such a terrible excess as genocide during wars between nation-states, civil wars, or campaigns of internal repression. Beyond the norms of international laws against aggression, human rights, it is now increasingly argued, stand above the benefits or exigencies of political alliances.

  The recent unwillingness of the United States and other governments of the West to intervene promptly and forcefully against the Serbs in their “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims in Bosnia appalled many Americans; so
did the failure to stop the Rwandan government from committing an even greater genocide, slaughtering as many as 500,000 Tutsi people, Rwanda’s minority tribal group. But Americans did not need to look outside their own hemisphere for examples of genocide.

  In 1991, protests erupted throughout the world against the West’s Quincentennial celebration of Christopher Columbus’s expedition to the Americas. That year, while honoring Pope John Paul II’s during his visit to Mato Grosso with a Xavante chief’s headdress of blue macaw feathers, representatives from thirty-two Indian nations (linguistic groups made up of many more tribes) in Brazil informed him they would protest celebrations marking the 500th anniversary of Colombus’s landing. “Amerindia was invaded, not discovered,” said the daughter of a Guarani chief whom the Pope had met eleven years earlier during his first visit, since murdered. Many of the Indians wore T-shirts with the names of murdered tribesmen and the dates of their deaths. Over 140 murders of Indians had been documented since the Pope’s previous visit.71

  Many more were not documented. The numbers sometimes staggered the imagination. In 1992, ten years after Guatemalan Indians seized the Brazilian Embassy to protest the massacres, the dead were still being counted by international investigators. But now the hemispherewide links between genocide and “development” were no longer in the shadows of a coincidental site for desperate protest; in October 1991, Indians from South America’s Amazon basin had been greeted in broad daylight by Guatemalan Indians hosting the first international conference of indigenous peoples at Quetzaltenango. As official commemorations of Columbus’s 1492 landing took place the following year, Amerindians mourned the holocaust that had destroyed millions of their people, celebrated their own indigenous consciousness, and watched—somewhat surprised—how fast many Euro-Americans throughout the hemisphere were moved by the power of that consciousness.

  In August 1993, millions of Americans were startled by national television broadcasts reporting that Brazil’s Yanomami Indians, having fought mining companies’ efforts to delay the demarcation of their lands, had suffered a massacre at the hands of miners. The American public witnessed scenes of Indian women and children innocently naked and defenseless before a well-armed aggression from the “civilized” world. Then came word that Brazilian authorities had quarantined the area. The bodies of the slain Indians, it seemed, could not be found. They had disappeared.

  A month later, after the charred remains were found and the murders exposed by chief Davi Kopenawa Yanomami as having an economic motive, came news of another Indian event, this one far north of the Amazon, in Central America. While Guatemala’s human rights leader struggled to hold on to the presidency he had won, a long line of Indian women streamed down from the Guatemalan highlands and entered the capital. American military advisers and missionaries watched from the sidelines as hundreds of women passed silently by, carrying in their hands small crosses bearing the names of loved ones who had died at the hands of the military. Cakchiquel Indian leader Francisco Cali had conveyed the full horror of their suffering to the public the previous year: 100,000 killed in the previous fifteen years, more than 1 million displaced, 250,000 children losing one or both parents, 50,000 widowed, and 40,000 “disappeared.”

  As they had so often in the past, the women were taking their grievances to the capital city. But now they were hopeful that with the new civilian government and the recent awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Rigoberta Menchú, one of their own and daughter of one of the campesino leaders who died in the Spanish Embassy massacre over a decade before, the reporters could take their plight beyond editors and governments, to the people of the world.

  Six months later, Nelson and David Rockefeller’s dream of a hemispheric Dollar Zone seemed to be becoming reality. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Mexico, and Canada finally had been pushed through Congress by the latest Trilateral Commission member to occupy the White House, Democratic president Bill Clinton. NAFTA went into legal effect on January 1, 1994. And as it did, the Indians of Chiapas, Mexico, revolted.

  Armed with machetes, guns, and even wooden models of rifles, they seized towns, battled Mexican federal troops and issued a manifesto to the world, calling for economic justice and political reform in all Mexico. They especially wanted a new and fair national election; they, like many in Mexico, believed the fifty-year reign by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had resorted to fraud in the last election to defeat the main opposition candidate, Senator Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the son of the late president Lázaro Cárdenas.

  The name of Cárdenas was not the only one to haunt the Rockefellers. For their name, the Indian rebels chose the “Zapatista Liberation Army”; Zapata’s spirit, they proclaimed, was still alive. For their mediators in negotiations with the embarrassed PRI regime in Mexico City, they chose Chiapas’s Catholic Bishop Samuel Ruis, a former critic of SIL when it was still officially in Mexico, and Guatemala’s Rigaberta Menchú. The choice was no accident of history, for this was a Mayan revolt against genocide and ethnocide that straddled the border of both countries. It had roots in the landing of Columbus and the subsequent European invasion that fostered an “American dream”—and a Rockefeller “shining dream”—that had become the Indians’ nightmare. They called on the world to support them.

  And if the citizens of the industrialized nations, though knowing, still did nothing, and the murders and ethnocide continued—in Mexico, in Guatemala, in the Amazon, in tribal areas throughout the world—they could be sure that history would one day ask: Was this, too, simply God’s Will?

  Or thy will?

  *IBEC had already sold its coffee interests in Guatemala, but Basic Resources International, which was based in Luxembourg and the Bahamas, offered greater returns. Besides the one at Rubelsanto, Basic Resources and its French partner, Elf Aquitaine, also found oil fields at Caribe and at West Chinaja.

  *Susan Jewett’s comment was similar to what SIL’s Thomas Weisman told the authors in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1978 about the conversions won during the Biafra Civil War in Nigeria: “As the old systems cracked, people were open for new spiritual values,” he explained. “It was similar to Vietnam.” Interview with Thomas Weisman, Zurich, Switzerland, February 5, 1978.

  *SIL’s Colombia branch leader Alvaro Wheeler could publicly deny any relationship between SIL and the CIA, insisting that the CIA was prohibited from querying missionaries. But U.S. Consul-General Richard Morefield reported secretly to Washington on March 12, 1979, that he knew of no such ban. William Colby’s 1976 rulings apparently had never been taken seriously. Morefield also confided that SIL “would have no alternative but to provide the information requested” of it by Colombian authorities. “Failure to cooperate would only lead to great difficulty.” Quoted in David Stoll, Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America (London: Zed Press, 1982), p. 84.

  APPENDIX A

  THE ROCKEFELLER MISSION TO THE AMERICAS (1969)

  Rockefeller’s entourage was huge. It included “special advisers” from IBEC (such as Richard Aldrich and Berent Friele) and AIA (such as John Camp and Jerome Levinson); a staff of thirty, which included AIA’s Flor Brennan, Nelson’s confidential secretary Ann Whitman, and aides Hugh Morrow and Nancy Maginnes; and an “advance group” of seventeen, which included Joseph Persico and Joseph Canzeri. The official list of “advisory members” of the mission actually totaled thirty-four people, including IBM chairman Arthur K. Watson; bankers William F. Butler (Chase) and George Woods (First Boston Corporation); and top officials of Rockefeller institutions, such as Robert Goldwater (Museum of Primitive Art), Clifton Wharton (Agricultural Development Council), Emil M. Mrak (former chancellor of the University of California at Davis and director of IBEC Research Institute, and current director of Universal Foods, Nestlé Foundation and Lilly, McNeal Libby), and Detlev W. Bronk (trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and past president of Rockefeller University).

 
; Many had substantial expertise in Brazilian affairs. Among them:

  ▪ Dr. Harold B. Gotaas, Nelson’s CIAA public health head and chief adviser on sanitation in the Amazon during the Rubber Development Corporation’s World War heyday. Gotaas was now dean of Northwestern University’s Technological Institute.

  ▪ Andrew McLellan, labor adviser. As AFL-CIO Inter-American representative, he had traveled to Brazil shortly after the 1964 military coup to offer, through U.S. Military Attaché Colonel Vernon Walters, revised labor regulations for the Castelo Branco purge of labor leaders.