by Gerard Colby
Rockefeller Jr. with business leaders during a fundraising drive for the Interchurch World Movement, 1920. Rockefeller Jr. was the major funder of the movement “to Christianize the world” as an antidote to revolutions like the recent one in Russia. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)
Bacone College for Indians. Its first building was Rockefeller Hall, donated by John D. Rockefeller, who began contributions after Rev. Almon A. Bacone provided information on Indian unrest in Oklahoma previous to Standard Oil’s entry into the territory. (Courtesy of University of Oklahoma Library, Western History Collection)
William Cameron Townsend (center), soon to become the Central American Mission’s greatest success story, with his missionary wife, Elvira (far left), and Guatemalan Indian schoolchildren, 1922-1923. Townsend, impressed by the achievements of Rockefeller-funded scientists in health, sanitation, and linguistics, adopted their methods as well as Indian dress. (Courtesy of Wycliffe Bible Translators)
In April 1946, a year and a half after Elvira died, widower Cam Townsend married Elaine Mielke, an educator and member of Chicago’s powerful Moody Memorial Church. Posing with the newlyweds are Lázaro Cárdenas, the former president of Mexico, and his wife, Amalia, at whose home the ceremony took place. Townsend had backed Cárdenas’s nationalization of Standard Oil’s properties in 1937. (Courtesy of Wycliffe Bible Translators)
The U.S. Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during World War II, Nelson Rockefeller (right) is seen here with his chief of finance and industry, Joseph Rovensky. Earlier, as vice president of Chase National Bank, Rovenksy steered Rockefeller toward his firt investment in Latin America, Standard Oil’s Creole Petroleum subsidiary in Venezuela. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
Swastika over South America. Rockefeller’s wartime propaganda featured South America under dire threat of a Nazi takeover. His small agency, the office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), soon grew to become one of Washington’s largest and most glamorous operations. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
The Coordinator, Nelson Rockefeller, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Eric Johnston (left), chair of the U.S. Committee of the Inter-American Development Commission, look over a map of South America showing human resources. Indian labor was vital for U.S. access to Latin America’s natural resources. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
Rockefeller and Nicaragua’s dictator, General Anastasio Somoza (right), who provided access to Miskito Indians as labor for taking rubber out of Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
Colorado Indian tapping rubber tree in Ecuador for export to the U.S. during wartime shortages. Rockefeller rebuffed the efforts of Charles Collier and his father, John Collier, the reform-minded U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to extend protections over Indian laborers to prevent abuse by rubber companies. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
CIAA launch Rockefeller, named after the head of its governmental sponsor, arrives at a jungle port in the Peruvian Amazon to carry out medical operations in support of the U.S. rubber collection program. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
Rockefeller meets Brazil’s nationalist president, Getúlio Vargas (left), 1942. Vargas opposed Rockefeller’s scheme for a U.S.-dominated Amazon Development Corporation, preferring Brazilian sovereignty over development beyond rubber extraction in its territory. Overthrown in 1945 and reelected in 1950, he set up Brazil’s national oil company, Petrobrás, to break the American monopoly over oil refining in Brazil. His suicide during a military revolt in 1954 saved Petrobrás from being dismantled. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
Peru’s president, Manuel Prado, on a visit to the United States, waves to a crowd as his son, Manuel Jr., looks on. Prado, a banker, was a friend of the Rockefellers and a classmate of Nelson’s brother David at the London School of Economics. His son worked for Nelson at the CIAA; after the war the son worked for David at the Chase bank. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
Albert Lleras Camargo (left), Colombia’s ambassador to the United States during the war and foreign minister when this photograph was taken in 1945, became one of the Rockefeller’s closest allies among Latin America’s elite. Later, as Colombia’s president, he was given a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan by Governor Rockefeller and eventually served as trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
Galo Plaza (right) was a close friend and Nelson Rockefeller’s parliamentary whip during the United Nation’s San Francisco conference in 1945. In 1952, as president of Ecuador, he invited Rockefeller’s IBECC and Townsend’s SIL missionaries into the Ecuadorian Amazon. In 1967, when the Ecuadorian Amazon was confirmed to be awash with oil, Galo Plaza, at Rockefeller’s urging, accepted election as secretary-general of the OAS. (Courtesy of the U.S. Department of State and the Harry S. Truman Library)
World War II gave Nelson Rockefeller his first opportunity to meet Brazil’s most powerful businessmen. In this picture, he is barely visible at the head table in the top right, being hosted by Rio de Janeiro’s chamber of commerce in September 1942. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
During his 1942 visit to Braazil, Rockefeller also developed a relationship with Brazil’s military high command. He is pictured here reviewing a map of Brazil with General Pedro Góes Monteiro (left) and General Eurico Gaspar Dutra. To the far right is a senior U.S. military attaché. Three years later, the generals overthrew President Vargas. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery (left), an opponent of Rockefeller’s Amazon development plans, failed to keep Rockefeller from visiting Brazil. Then he tried to disrupt the guest of honor’s speech by loudly calling for cigarettes, only to be embarrassed by five minutes of Rockefeller’s withering praise. A startled Oswaldo Aranha, Vargas’s pro-U.S. foreign minister, sits between the two feuding American officials. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
Nelson Rockefeller, after being sowrn in as assistant secretary of state in December 1945, had Ambassador Caffery moved to Paris, replacing him with Adolf Berle, Rockefeller’s predecessor. Berle had been removed as assistant secretary by Roosevelt after showing unwillingness to cooperate in the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
Rockefeller lands at Mexico City with his first wife, Mary “Tod” (foreground), and a planeload of Latin American ambassadors and aides to attend the historic Chapultepec Inter-American Conference in February 1945. Rockefeller pushed through a regional military treaty that became the legal basis for the Organization of American States (OAS). (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
The new U.S. ambassador to Brazil, Adolf Berle, and his wife, Beatrice, arrive in Rio de Janeiro, January 1945. Before the year was out, Berle had interfered with Brazil’s internal politics, convincing many that he had encouraged the military to overthrow President Vargas in the first postwar coup of the Cold War in Latin America. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
Brazil’s new president, General Dutra, who along with General Góes Monteiro was the chief conspirator against Vargas, enjoyed a lighter moment trying out a gun during a previous visit to the United States. (Courtesy of U.S. National Archives)
William Cameron Townsend regales recruits of Wycliffe Bible Translators at jungle training camp in Chiapas, Mexico, near the Guatemalan border. (Courtesy of Magnum Photos; photo by Cornell Capa)
The payoff. Nelson Rockefeller is sworn in as President Eisenhower’s special assistant in charge of Cold War strategy and psychological warfare, December 1954. Rockefeller chaired the supersecret Special Group, which oversaw all CIA covert operations, including mind-control experiments funded through the Department of Health, Education and Welfare when Rockefeller was first undersecretary. (Courtesy of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library)
Indian boys watch missionaries land their Helio Courier on jungle airstrip, Ecuadorian Amazon, 1961. (Courtesy of Magnum Photos; photo by Cornell Capa)
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Two rivals for the 1964 presidential election. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s Special Studies Reports, overseen by Henry Kissinger, had a major impact on the 1960 Kennedy campaign and the early administration. Many of the reports’ authors went on to serve in keys posts in the Kennedy administration, including the cabinet and the Pentagon᾿s counterinsurgency command. Later, Rockefeller opposed Kennedy᾿s policies, especially in Latin America. (Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library)
Rockefeller (center) continued influencing defense policies during the Kennedy years as chairman of the Governors’ Civil Defense Committee, advocating “winnable nuclear war” and a massive fallout shelter program. (Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library)
General William P. Yarborough greets President Kennedy during Fort Bragg visit, 1961. A few months later, Yarborough made a counterinsurgency survey in Colombia, returning with recommendations to set up a police state in rural areas where insurgents were active, including the registration, fingerprinting, and photographing of every man, woman, and child over the age of twelve and the use of drugs during interrogations. Later, Yarborough oversaw U.S. Army illegal surveillance of American civilians active in civil rights and antiwar movements. (Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library)
Aerial view of counterinsurgency forces arrayed for President Kennedy’s visit to Fort Bragg, 1961. (Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library)
colombia President Kennedy lays brick for a housing project in Bogotá, while Jacqueline Kennedy and Colombia’s President Alberto Lleras Camargo, friend of Nelson Rockefeller, look on. Within two months, as Yarborough’s Green Berets arrived, Lleras Camargo had authorized SIL’s entry into Colombia’s tribes. (Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library)
As in other countries, SIL’s airplanes, airstrips, and communications tower (pictured here) at Lomalinda jungle base in Colombia were pledged to serve local government needs when called upon. Land for Lomalinda base was donated by a Colombian air force general. (Author photo)
Green Berets lead Peruvian commandos into battle against leftist guerrillas and Campa Indians in the Peruvian Amazon, 1965. The commandos were trained at a “miniature Fort Bragg” set up by the CIA in the jungle. Hundreds of Campa Indians were killed by napalm dropped by the Peruvian air force. Some Campa Indians charged SIL with collaborating with the military in the attack. (Courtesy of the U.S. State Department)
John F. Kennedy hosts Brazil’s President Joāo Goulart at the White House, April 1962. Goulart᾿s defense of Petrobrás, nationalization of Hanna Mining properties, and Brazilian control of Amazonian development was costly: After Kennedy’s assassination, he was overthrown by the Johnson administration. (Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library)
Senator Robert F. Kennedy visited Amazonian Indians in Brazil during a 1965 tour of Latin America that caused consternation in the Johnson administration, particularly the State Department under Secretary Dean Rusk, former Rockefeller Foundation president. Kennedy refused to accept State’s argument that the interests of the United States and Standard Oil in Peru were synonymous. (Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library)
Vice President Nelson Rockefeller shares a light moment with his longtime friend, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Rockefeller’s foreign policy adviser since 1955 when the Harvard professor attended White House Special Assistant Rockefeller’s top-secret Cold War strategy meetings at the Quantico Marine Corps base. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center).
INDEX
ABCAR. See Associação Brasileiras de Crédito e Assistência Rural
Abourezk, James, 775
Academy of Education Development, 746
ACAR. See Associaçao de Crédito e Assistência Rural
Accelerated Rural Development, Thailand, 556, 557
Actión Democrática party, Venezuela, 90, 218, 219
Act of Chapultepec, 170–72, 175, 177, 230, 233, 349
Adams, Edward F., 219
Addict Treatment Act, New York, 541
Advanced Research Projects Agency, 568, 871n42
Advisory Committee on Government Organization, 255–56
Aerovias Sud Americana (ASA), 520–21
Afghanistan, 783, 798
AFL-CIO, 441, 831, 833
African-American Institute, 339, 851n33, 879n16
Agee, Philip, 424, 442, 444, 469
Agency for International Development (AID): and AIA, 429, 613, 663; and CIA, 4, 375, 398, 447, 743, 879n16; in Far East, 549, 556, 560, 567, 743, 799–800; in Latin America, 422, 424, 500, 602, 632, 743, 746; and Rockefellers, 474, 613, 777; and SIL, 438, 743–44; and torture, 690
Agnew, Spiro, 708, 716
Agrarian reform, undermining of, 319–20, 458, 750
Agrarian Reform Law, Venezuela, 685
Agricultural Development Council, 475, 477, 555
Agricultural Research Service, 511
AIA. See American International Association for Economic and Social Development
AID. See Agency for International Development
AIM. See American Indian Movement
Air America, 548, 737, 757, 879n16
Air Asia, 384
Air Congo, 340
Air Transport Service, 343
Airborne Instruments Laboratory, 294, 339, 392
Alarcón, Sandoval, 817
Albízu Campos, Pedro, 225
Albuquerque Lima, Gen., 4, 622–29
ALCAN. See Aluminum Company of Canada
Alch, Gerald, 732
ALCOA. See Aluminum Company of America
Aldrich, Nelson, 32, 276, 844n30
Aldrich, Richard: and Alliance for Progress, 362; and CIA, 380–81; and IBEC, 380, 452, 610, 611, 740; and Japanese labor, 308; on Latin American tour, 831
Aldrich, Winthrop, 75–76, 77, 212, 230, 231
Alegos, Roberto, 412
Alemán, José, 405
Alexander, Robert, 356n
Allen, George E., 279
Allen, Richard, 595, 881n13
Allen Memorial Institute, 265, 284
Allende, Salvador, 662, 663, 695, 703, 733
Alliance for Progress, 356, 361–62, 375–77, 382, 402, 474
Altman, Klaus. See Barbie, Klaus
Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), 440, 450, 655, 693, 886n24
Aluminum Company of Canada (ALCAN), 655, 693
Alvarez Cabral, Pedro, 609
Amaya Quintana, Enrique, 460–70
Amazon basin: colonization of, 138, 232; development of, 152, 315, 316, 450, 475, 482, 517, 669; resources of, 133, 140–42, 633, 652, 655, 669–70. See also Bolivia; Brazil; Colombia; Ecuador; Peru; names of specific commodities
Amazon Development Corporation, 139, 147, 616n
Amazon Natural Drug Company (ANDCO), 497–98, 505, 509, 511, 514–15, 521–22, 738
Amazon/Orinoco link, 138, 154–55, 615–16, 633–34. See also “Great Lakes” proposal
Amazon Pact, 823
Amazon rain forest, 133, 134–35, 140, 152, 247, 822, 825–26
Amazon Rosewood and Commerce Company, 519
Amazon Valley Corporation, 138, 139, 140, 149
America Indígena magazine, 101, 153
American Advisory Council for Thailand, 559
American Agricultural Chemical Company, 21
American and Foreign Power Company, 425
American Anthropological Association, 557, 743
American Baptist Education Society, 20
American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 24
American Baptist Home Mission Society, 15, 24
American Bible Society, 49, 121, 124, 881n13
American Coffee Corporation, 135, 181, 258
American Council of Learned Societies, 126, 842n9
American Farm Bureau Federation, 166
American Friends of Vietnam, 568
American Independent Party, 590
American Indian Defense Association, 12, 99
American Indian Movement (AIM): in U.S., 719, 740, 763; in Brazil, 803
American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), 441, 442, 444, 879n16
American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA): AIA/AID conflict, 429, 613; as antirevolutionary, 313, 729; in Brazil, 216, 251–58, 295, 297–98, 301, 424, 613; CIAA and, 848n4; in Colombia, 380; and colonization of Amazon, 232, 613–14; founded, 212; in Paraguay, 777; in Venezuela, 218–19
American Light and Power, 444, 447, 452
American Linguistic Society, 73
American Linseed Company, 21
American Molasses Company, 191, 538n
American Moravian Church, 783
American Oil Company. See AMOCO
American Overseas Investing Company, 306, 862n17
American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), 703, 783
American Universities Research Program, 555
American University, 479, 558
Americas Society, 824
AM/LASH. See Cubela, Rolando
AMOCO, 514, 522. See also Standard Oil of Indiana
Amnesty International, 818
Anaconda Copper, 703, 719, 821. See also Atlantic Richfield Company
Anderson, Lambert, 771
Anderson, Robert B., 328, 422, 538–39, 851n21, 880n6
Anderson, Robert O., 789, 821
Anderson Clayton Company, 608
Andrada e Silva, José Bonifácio de, 698
Andrade, Victor, 174, 302, 694, 729
Andrianoff, Rev. T.J., 552
Anelex Corporation, 863n17
Angleton, James, 734, 758
Anglo Frigorífico, 608
Anglo Meat Processing, 298