by Gerard Colby
But no one had counted on the surprisingly strong showings of Vargas’s party, the PTB, and the Communist party. They captured a sizable congressional bloc, which could become larger by mobilizing popular resentment against Braden’s make-the-world-American policies. And Vargas was soon back in Rio as the newly elected senator from his home state.
Berle tried to push matters forward before it was too late. Brazil’s Ambassador Martins had been summoned to the White House after Welles’s blast appeared in the Washington Post and had reportedly told Truman that relations between Brazil and the United States had deteriorated ever since Berle arrived as ambassador. He urged Truman to recall Berle before the situation became “practically irreparable.”21
Berle, weary of the controversy, was thinking of quitting anyway. He dutifully prepared comprehensive memorandums on major economic issues confronting U.S.-Brazilian relations. They were premised on Berle’s belief that Brazil needed American capital and trade to develop and that he had better try to give Truman’s people some perspective on how to improve relations for the sake of the business interests of both countries. But they still read like a Christmas shopping list for the Fortune 500: the “amendment” of Vargas’s taxes on imports, the removal of certain taxes on the earnings of American subsidiaries, the elimination of licensing controls on imports of American machinery and other manufactured goods, the purchase of “a large share” of the government’s iron industry by “an American steel company,” the American takeover of the operation of the Victoria-Minas Railway, and the revocation of the Constitutional prohibition against foreign-owned banks and insurance companies from operating in Brazil.
The First National Bank of Boston, long the financial bulwark of United Fruit and Boston’s investors in Latin American sugar, coffee, and railroads, had already applied to the Linhares regime for permission to operate. Berle’s comments were telling: “The Embassy has been informed in strict confidence that this application is receiving favorable consideration and that it probably will be approved by the President before the interim Government leaves office.” Approval, he added, would “make it possible for any bank with head offices in the American republics, outside of Brazil, to operate in Brazil.”22
With American bankers in place, Berle believed, Brazil’s development had a glowing future, if only the Communists did not get in the way.
On February 6, 1946, Berle attended the opening session of the newly elected Brazilian Congress. Then he returned to his office to write his letter of resignation to Truman.
Six weeks after Berle’s resignation, Nelson Rockefeller introduced Berle to the Council on Foreign Relations as “someone whom I’m sure you all know.” The former ambassador had taken up Nelson’s offer and returned to the place that Nelson had “reserved” for him. It was an impressive place, indeed. The council was the most influential organization on U.S. foreign policy in the corporate world. It also reflected Rockefeller influence. Nelson’s father had bought the old mansion of Standard Oil Trust partner Charles Pratt and donated it to the council. Raymond Fosdick, president of the Rockefeller Foundation for the past ten years, had been one of its guiding lights, building its membership out of some of New York’s top bankers, lawyers, and executives. Now Berle would join their prestigious ranks as chairman of the Taussig family’s American Molasses Company, whose major creditor was the Rockefellers’ Chase National Bank.
Yet Berle, like Rockefeller, would never acknowledge this business role or that his political philosophy was in any way influenced by it. Before the year was out, on the first anniversary of the Brazilian coup, Berle’s assertion that he had been influenced by only the highest of motives would be challenged by an old nemesis. Vargas, breaking his silence, would blame Berle for inspiring his downfall and denying he had given Berle’s speech his prior approval; he had told Berle, in fact, that he disagreed with it. “Ridiculous,” Berle would respond,23 and he never changed his line.
But Berle was uncomfortable. Like Rockefeller, he realized that some balance had to be struck between the nationalism of a Vargas and the narrow concerns of American corporate investors now championed by the Truman administration. He identified with Nelson’s concern that U.S. foreign policy should not be seen as a crude, heavy-handed proponent of selfish business interests. A new theory of democracy would have to be worked out, one truly worthy of the United States’ new global responsibility as leader of “the Free World.”
Nelson was excited by the challenge. But he typically viewed his role as more of a doer than of a thinker. With his access to vast financing, his contacts among the powerful, and his top CIAA personnel turned into his private staff, Nelson believed that he could provide concrete demonstrations of the capitalist theory of development for the Third World. The problem was to find a theory.
Thus began one of the most remarkable and secret collaborations of the Cold War—and one that would have devastating results for the Indians of the Amazon.
ADJUSTING THE VALVES OF DEVELOPMENT
One of the great challenges facing Nelson and Berle in the postwar years was the need to revive Western Europe, even at the expense of Latin America. Both men remained convinced that Latin America, too, needed an inoculation of capital to ward off creeping socialism, but they accepted the Truman administration’s emphasis on Europe. Nelson’s family, in fact, played a key role in shaping this policy.
As Europe swung to the left after the Nazi collapse, the opening of the giant Arabian oil fields took on political urgency. Most of Europe’s prewar industry used coal for fuel, and the coal miners’ unions were among the most powerful Communist-led unions in France and Britain. Soviet ties to Europe’s Communist parties could hamper industrial recovery under U.S. leadership; miners’ strikes could cripple Europe and create the conditions for social unrest and possibly even revolution. Saudi oil was nearer than Latin American oil and under unquestioned American control. The importance of gaining control over Europe’s energy supplies was foremost in the mind of the Rockefellers. As Nelson’s father explained to the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Maine’s Owen Brewster, “In the next ten years Europe may shift from a coal to an oil economy, and therefore whoever sits on the valve of Middle East oil may control the destiny of Europe.”24
If the Middle Eastern valve were to be opened, however, the Latin American valve would have to be closed. An oil glut would lower prices and profits and make the opening of the Middle Eastern fields commercially unfeasible. This required not only slowing down the production of oil in Latin America, but also controlling exploration for new fields.
The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), soon to become the National Security Council, had already found a solution: Oil deposits in South America should be secured through American oil companies as “petroleum reserves for [U.S.] government use,” ostensibly in case of another war. Washington’s auspices were needed to draw the Latin American governments into secret oil pacts as part of the inter-American military alliance. But there was an additional corporate goal. Involving Latin America’s governments would offer “a hidden benefit,” the SWNCC itself pointed out, of “diverting their attention from the general tendency to nationalizing their present petroleum industries.”25 Nelson’s brother, John D. Rockefeller III, was a senior navy staff member of SWNCC when this proposal was first bandied about by the Office of Naval Petroleum Reserves.
SWNCC was to establish, through American oil companies, petroleum reserves along the eastern edge of the Andes Mountains in South America. “The area under discussion lies along the fringe of the Amazon jungle and western Savanna of Venezuela and includes areas in Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela. It is believed to be one of the last underdeveloped petroleum fields in the Western Hemisphere.”26
Since Venezuela and Bolivia were politically unstable and Brazil’s nationalists were still holding General Dutra and the UDN at bay, it was not surprising that the navy plan gave special attention to the relatively unexplored Amazon of P
eru and Ecuador.
The Peruvian Amazon was particularly attractive because of its “oil seeps and other evidences of the presence of oil” for “several hundred miles along the Rio Ucayali.” Peru also had a “number of structures” suggesting oil “further north on the Rio Huallaga” and, of course, the “Agua Caliente oil field. It is estimated that this field alone, with further exploration, might be capable of producing approximately 30,000 bbls a day.”
The Agua Caliente oil field, better known by the name of the company that had drilled the first test well in 1937, Ganso Azul (Blue Goose), was located near the Ucayali River port of Pucallpa.27
There was no mention of the Indians who lived there. Nor of the American missionaries who were just arriving, under a contract funded by Rockefeller’s Inter-American Institute, to pacify them.
III
ARCHITECTS OF EMPIRE
Who will open Tibet, or claim the last acre of the Amazon, the hills of central India, the jungles of Borneo, the steppes of Siberia—the merchant or the missionary? When the war is over, let us take up the Sword of the Spirit and march.
—WILLIAM CAMERON TOWNSEND, 1942
14
AMERICAN WINGS OVER THE AMAZON
GOD’S BEACHHEAD
All his years of struggle against sin and pestilence had not prepared William Cameron Townsend for this. Like Heaven’s Gates, the solid wall of snowcapped mountains suddenly parted before his plane’s advance, revealing secret passes carpeted by clouds. Then the sharp peaks fell away into mist as he plunged into the miasma of a darker, primordial world. He was now on the eastern side of the Andes. For days the Amazon’s dank breath had pinned his plane to earth until, as if by command, the weather cleared on the Lord’s birthday, Christmas Day 1946. Buoyed, the small American plane climbed into the skies to resume its mission of redemption. At last the land flattened out into a luxuriant tropical green with gleaming lakes and rivers. But it was not a virgin forest Cam saw spreading out toward the horizon. He saw the realm of Satan, a Green Hell where the souls of lost tribes wandered hopeless and unseen beneath the jungle canopy.
Cam had been awed by the mere thought of his task when he arrived in Peru a year before. The Amazon, the greatest river on earth, stretched like a giant yellow-green boa across 3,600 miles of jungle and plains. And Cam was already staggered by the sight of just the western edge of it, in Peru. “No one organization, nor a single group of workers, no matter how concentrated, well supported and gifted they may be, can cope with the situation,”1 he had written. Yet he did not hesitate the very next day to offer up his young followers to the jungle, pledging their labors to pacify forty tribes as he signed a contract with Peru’s Prado government as head of “the Summer Institute of Linguistics Inc. of the University of the State of Oklahoma, USA.”2
The logistical obstacles to delivering on the contract’s terms would be enormous. But Cam rested his case on his faith in Jesus and his belief in his own divine calling. He interpreted the contract not as a burden, but as a solution: its promise to “service the government of Peru” and “all who want to help the Indians”3 would necessarily involve SIL in a close collaboration with government agencies whose resources were immensely superior to his. There would be duties beyond the call of Fundamentalism, such as flying Catholic monks and nuns, beyond even the call of linguistic science, such as flying the government’s political prisoners to jungle penal colonies or gathering data for the government on the jungle’s economic resources. But these duties were justified in the name of God and country. The seeds of a bilingual education program in the jungle, arranged in cooperation with the U.S. Embassy, were being planted for a rich harvest of souls in the future.
This relationship with the U.S. Embassy provided continuity with the work of the recent past. In fact, Cam’s new wife, Elaine, obtained her first job in Peru as a translator of primers for Indians through a program sponsored by an offshoot of Nelson Rockefeller’s CIAA, the Peruvian-American Committee on Cultural Cooperation.
Elaine. Years later, her name alone would suffice for a chapter title in Cam’s authorized biography, signifying the importance of this quiet-spoken woman in the missionary’s life. Elaine Mielke had been a devout supporter of Christian missions since a local Chicago newspaper had awarded her a trip around the world as the windy city’s “Outstanding Young Protestant.” She caught Cam’s eye soon after she arrived in Tetelcingo in 1943 to teach the children of SIL translators.
She was the opposite of Elvira. Whereas Elvira was frail, young Elaine radiated energy. She mastered Cam’s “psycho-phonetic” translation techniques as easily as she made friends. And she brought badly needed administrative skills to the SIL field mission, having been supervisor of special education for handicapped children in some 300 Chicago schools before joining Cam’s group. Few SILers were surprised when Cam and Elaine announced their engagement.
Nor were many surprised that Cam, ever watchful for every opportunity to advance his goals, turned their marriage into a diplomatic coup. He asked Lázaro Cárdenas to be his best man and Cárdenas’s wife, Amalia, to be Elaine’s matron of honor. Ever gracious, the Cárdenases had accepted. Holding the ceremony in Cárdenas’s home at Lake Pátzcuaro ensured a large turnout of prominent Mexican officials, including six generals and the head of the Inter-American Indian Institute, Manuel Gamio.
Now, as the newlyweds ventured into Peru, they found their mission tailor-made to the needs of U.S. policymakers. Peru possessed large copper, zinc, and oil resources, as well as the hemisphere’s longest frontier with the Brazilian Amazon. American missionaries had always accompanied American businesses abroad, but the political climate in postwar Latin America gave Townsend’s new crop of missionary translators and educators a special appeal to U.S. ambassadors who were charged with securing markets and resources for the American economy. If the drift toward the nationalization of resources in Latin America was to be arrested, economic development through a massive infusion of U.S. capital, accompanied by the expansion of American aid and cultural influences such as that represented by SIL, was vital.
So was the integration of the Peruvian armed forces within the U.S. Southern Command, based in the Panama Canal Zone. William Pawley had earned worldwide acclaim during the war for helping to create the “Flying Tigers” squadron that hunted down Japanese pilots in China. Now, as ambassador, Pawley backed the War Department’s efforts to enlarge the U.S. military mission in Peru,* establishing a close relationship between the mission and Colonel Manuel Odría.
Odría was to have a major influence on Cam’s success in Peru. He had been the hero of Peru’s triumphant war with Ecuador in 1942 over the oil-rich borderlands of the Amazon. Odría was now a general and director of Lima’s elite Superior War College, the training ground of scores of student officers from other Latin American countries that were tied to the Pentagon’s wartime hemispheric defense network. Assisting General Odría in aviation training were U.S. Army advisers, which meant the further integration of Peru’s land-based air force into the supply network of the U.S. Army Air Force, thereby assisting the standardization of Latin America’s military equipment promoted by the Pentagon and American armaments contractors. Out of this enlarged U.S. military mission would emerge SIL’s first director of aviation.
THE LIEUTENANT FINDS HIS MISSION
Over all this, with a presence unseen but felt, loomed the promise of the Amazon. Aviation was to the Amazon what railroads were to the American West in the 1800s.
In the summer of 1946, Cam had received a phone call in Lima from Lieutenant Lawrence Montgomery, a member of the new U.S. Army Air Corps Mission.
“Would SIL be interested in purchasing a Duck for three thousand dollars?”4
The U.S. Embassy was offering a Grumman Duck, a single-propeller amphibian biplane used by the navy. Cam fired off three telegrams to the United States. Herbert Rankin, bow-tied fishing companion of citrus king–evangelist Charles Fuller, had been so grateful to the Lord for prevent
ing a threatened strike by employees of his Santa Ana department store that he sent Cam $3,000 he had reserved to fight the strike.
An airplane meant expenses above and beyond the purchase price. If SIL was to have an ongoing jungle aviation service, a network of two-way radios would be needed, along with money for maintenance and the construction of a hangar and a runway. Full-time pilots and mechanics would also be necessary.
Montgomery agreed to become SIL’s first full-time aviator. The airman and his wife were Christians who shared Cam’s vision of conquering the Amazon for Jesus, but it would be a while before he could leave the U.S. Air Mission. To fill the gap, Cam prevailed upon the Missionary Aviation Fellowship to lend one of its best pilots, former Women’s Air Corps pilot Betty Greene.
The Peruvian government provided the balance. The occasion that resulted in this happy circumstance was unusual for Fundamentalist missionaries—a cocktail party honoring Peru’s reputedly “communist” minister of education, Luis Valcarel. Cam’s offer of the plane’s services to the government inspired the ministers of health and education to reciprocate with a quarter of the plane’s cost.
The U.S. Embassy was the linchpin holding together SIL’s shaky success in these early years in Peru. It provided a jeep and a radio transmitter from Panama. It helped Elaine get a translation job with the Peruvian-American Committee on Cultural Cooperation. Montgomery acquired a surplus engine for the Duck for a mere $380. And the new U.S. ambassador, Prentice Cooper, even helped negotiate the purchase of the Duck from the U.S. Marines.
