by Gerard Colby
Special thanks are due also to the O’Connors and Beverly Jacobson for their helpful suggestions after reading portions of the manuscript, to Cynthia Merman for a superb job in paring it down to a manageable size, to Trent Duffy for his careful final review of the entire manuscript and its graphics, to Stephanie Gunning for her coordination of the book’s production, and to attorneys Jenie Gavenchak and Sara Pearl for their meticulous legal review.
For the actual creation of many of the book’s maps and charts, we would like to express our appreciation to Carol Keller for her artistry and patience, and to Ted Keller for his always resourceful advice and assistance.
For the powerful art and design of the book’s jacket, and for the book’s interior design, we are indebted to Michael Lebrón.
Our appreciation also goes to the following people for their kind efforts to assist our research: Scott S. Robinson of Mexico City, Professor Robert Wasserstrom and Jan Rus in Mexico, anthropologist Richard Chase Smith in Peru, James and Marge Goff of Latin America Press in Lima, Nemesio Rodrigues of the Centra Antropologico de Documentacion (CEDAL) in Mexico City, Robert Fink of Washington, D.C., and the staffs of the Washington Office on Latin America and the Bolivian Action Coalition of Vancouver, Canada.
For keeping us updated on the conditions of indigenous peoples and violations (including massacres) of their human rights during the writing of this book, we thank Erik Van Lanep of Arctic to Amazonia (Stafford, Vermont), Stephen Corry of Survival International (London), John Friede of Amanakáa (New York), and Betty Mindlin of the Instituto de Antropologia e Meio Ambiente (Sao Paulo).
We wish to acknowledge our debt to the works of scholars who wrote what can only be described as great books: David Stoll, author of Fishers of Men or Builders of Empire?: The Wycliffe Bible Translators in Latin America (1982); Shelton Davis, author of Victims of the Miracle (1977); Jan Knippers Black, author of United States Penetration of Brazil (1977); and David Horowitz and Peter Collier, authors of The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976).
Our thanks also to the veteran journalist Norman Lewis, for permission to quote from his 1969 article in The Sunday Times of London, “Genocide,” and for insights gained from his subsequent investigative reporting on violations of Indian human rights in Paraguay and Bolivia; to the courageous anthropologists and human rights defenders who contributed to the World Council of Churches’ The Situation of the Indian in South America (1972) and Genocide in Paraguay (Richard Arens, ed.); and to Lucien Bodard for the rare poetic power of his Green Hell (1971).
None of the above people, however, are responsible for the opinions and conclusions expressed in this book by the authors.
The Rockefeller aspect of this story developed five years after the research for this book began. Nelson Rockefeller was not originally a character in this book. How we came to Rockefeller’s extraordinary role in shaping much of what happens in this book must be the subject of another story. Suffice it to say that our discovery of Rockefeller’s involvement during World War II in an “Amazon development plan” that the Brazilian government had already rejected occurred only after following a long trail of leads. Most important were the papers of Adolf Berle at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and the National Archives’ declassified holdings of Rockefeller’s papers when he was the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. * After examining these extensive collections, we took up our next research task at the Rockefeller Archive Center. When we began our research there in 1984, Nelson Rockefeller’s personal papers were still not open, but those of his private aid agency in Latin America, the American International Association for Economic and Social Development, were.
We visited the Rockefeller Archive Center many times over the years. Each time we found the center’s archivists professionally dedicated, courteous, and helpful. Their ability to aid researchers was limited, however, by the Rockefeller family. After Nelson Rockefeller’s death in 1979, all his papers, including those he had made available to researchers, who quoted from them in books, were withdrawn by the family and sent to the Center for processing. For much of the next decade, they remained closed to the public; as of this writing, despite the processing and release of a substantial amount of Rockefeller’s documents, many of his private and government papers still remain closed, as are records of his brother Winthrop’s involvement in Nelson’s and David Rockefeller’s million-acre ranch in Brazil’s western frontier, Fazenda Bodoquena, a subject of undoubted future interest.
We spent many days trying the patience of staffs at presidential libraries, archives, museums, newspaper morgues, and university and other libraries in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and southern Africa. We owe much to the professionalism of the archivists and librarians of the following institutions: the Rockefeller Archive Center (particularly Harold Oakhill and Tom Rosenbaum), the Townsend Archives (particularly Cal Hibbard), the National Archives (particularly John Taylor), the Washington Federal Records Center, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Harry S. Truman Library, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, the John F. Kennedy Library, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, the Nixon Presidential Materials Project at the National Archives, the Gerald R. Ford Library (particularly Helmi Rasska), the Inter-American Indian Institute in Mexico City, the New York Public Library (particularly David Beasley of the Economics Division), the Boston Public Library, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Peru, the National Library of Ecuador, the National Library of Colombia, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s research office in New York, the Zurich municipal library, the British Museum, the Chicago Historical Library, the corporate records divisions of the Departments of State of the states of New York, Massachusetts, Florida, and Missouri, the North American Congress on Latin America, NACLA-West, the University of Vermont’s Bailey Howe Library, Yale University, Yale Divinity School, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, the University of Texas at Austin, Trinity College (Connecticut), the University of California at Irvine, the University of Oklahoma at Norman, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Florida at Tampa, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Summer Institute of Linguistics at Yarinacocha (Peru), La Prensa (Lima, Peru), Alternativa (Bogotá, Colombia), the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Charlotte News Observer, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, and the Johannesburg Star.
During our research we met some extraordinary individuals who took risks to get additional information. Most have requested confidentiality. Some are included in the list of interviews, most of which took place between 1976 and 1980. For insight into the Bolivia of the Banzer dictatorship, however, we would like to acknowledge particularly Father Roy Bourgeois, who paid dearly for his criticism of the CIA’s compromising and undermining of missionary work in Bolivia and for his efforts among Indians in the hills above La Paz: he was imprisoned, tortured, and, fortunately, through the intervention of church leaders, deported. Father Bourgeois’s arrest came after he challenged the presence of a CIA officer, the embassy’s labor attaché, at a meeting between Maryknoll missionaries and the U.S. ambassador that took place before our interviews with him. Since returning to the United States, Father Bourgeois has been imprisoned for showing his opposition to military aid to the government of El Salvador by protesting before visiting Latin American military officers at the Special Warfare Training Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Trying to persuade others of crimes against humanity is not an easy task, especially when these crimes occur in distant lands and powerful names at home are raised.
In Brazil, documents that might have been useful in naming those who were responsible for high crimes against Indian peoples perished in a mysterious fire at the archives of the government’s Service for the Protection of the Indian. Fortunately, reports by anthropologists and unusual political circumstances prompted Brazil’s attorney general to conduct his own investigation.
But the conquest of the Amazon is not only about
the Brazilian Amazon. The Amazon River basin, including the mighty river’s tributaries, also spans much of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and part of Venezuela, an area the size of the United States. Nor is conquest just about atrocities. Reports by anthropologists and government officials often described genocide and ethnocide as an unnecessarily cruel process of frontier development. By the end of our investigation, we had discovered that this process bore striking similarities to the conquest of the American West and involved some of the same powerful North American economic and political forces.
In the Amazon basin countries, the conquest followed the general trend of exploring for oil, rubber, and minerals, building roads and airstrips, backing surveys for colonization, expanding cash agriculture (to the detriment of indigenous subsistence agriculture), razing the rain forests, and U.S. competition with other big powers over geopolitical spheres of influence. All this was assisted by a foreign aid system which was gradually crafted over thirty years by Nelson Rockefeller, beginning as Roosevelt’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs during World War II and as Truman’s foreign aid architect.
The missionaries came in on the cultural, social, and political side of the conquest, their leader influenced by Rockefeller philanthropies and a counterinsurgency network shaped by Nelson Rockefeller’s development goals. Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) was hired by military dictatorships and civilian governments, often headed by Nelson’s allies, to pacify the tribes and integrate them into national economies increasingly being brought into the North American market. SIL used the Bible to teach indigenous people to “obey the government, for all authority comes from God.”
In our research we found that those who challenged this assumption and the legacy left behind by Rockefeller and Townsend often paid the price of rejection through criticism, denial, or, worse, deafening silence. We remember particularly the late Michael Lambert, a former ethnobotany graduate student at Harvard University who did field research in the Amazon; he will be remembered for his quiet determination to bring the genocide of Amazonian Indians to the attention of his Harvard colleagues. He described his experience as painful.
No one, however, has suffered more pain than indigenous people. Unlocking the secrets took too many years, for us, but ultimately for them. If this book makes future inquiries easier and wiser, then it will have served its purpose.
January 1995
*A note of style seems appropriate here. We have elected to use CIAA, the acronym that was employed by Nelson Rockefeller’s wartime colleagues and his biographer Joe Alex Morris, for the office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, which he headed from 1940 to 1945. Subsequent to Rockefeller’s elevation to assistant secretary of state in 1945, the title of the agency was changed to the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), the name subsequently adopted by the National Archives as the title for the agency’s entire collection of records. Given that the CIAA years covered four out of five years in the collection, we elected to retain the original acronym.
About the Authors
Gerard Colby is a writer, investigative journalist, and educator. He has written for the North American Newspaper Alliance, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, In These Times, and TowardFreedom.com. Colby has taught the history of the political economy of Central America at Burlington College and political science and international economics at Johnson State College in Vermont, and is currently studying for a master’s degree in American history at the University of Vermont.
Colby is a cofounder of the Henry Demarest Lloyd Investigative Fund and former president of the National Writers Union. He is the author of DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, coauthor with Charlotte Dennett of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, and a contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, edited by Kristina Borjesson.
Charlotte Dennett is an investigative journalist, author, and attorney. Her journalism career started in Beirut, Lebanon, at the weekly English language feature magazine, The Middle East Sketch, and at the Beirut Daily Star, where she was a reporter. Her journalistic work took her throughout the Middle East and later, while researching Thy Will Be Done, Latin America. Dennett is also the author of The People v. Bush: One Lawyer’s Campaign to Bring the President to Justice. Her articles have appeared in the Huffington Post, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1995 by Gerard Colby with by Charlotte Dennett
Cover design by Mimi Bark
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4839-2
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