Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Nelson was angry about Cuba. The island had long held Rockefeller investments, not the least of which were Standard Oil of New Jersey’s refinery and Chase’s holding of Batista’s notes. Castro had given no assurances to the United States that his government would honor the proprietary rights of either, and Chase was not about to write off Batista’s profitable bonds. Nelson’s brother, David, was also on the board of Punta Alegre Sugar, the second largest sugar company in Cuba.

  Sugar had dominated and unbalanced Cuba’s economic development, creating unequal landownership and inefficient idleness in a hungry country. Castro’s plans to distribute the sugar estates in whole to cooperatives or in sixty-six-acre “vital minimum” plots to family farmers was not what David or other Chase bankers had in mind when they thought of Cuba’s development or Punta Alegre’s annual report. Now the company, along with all the other great sugar plantations, was threatened with nationalization by Castro’s proposed agrarian reform. Nationalization could affect the price of sugar imported into the United States as well, especially if the supply from Cuba was disrupted or made otherwise unreliable for American refiners. And one of the largest refiners on the East Coast was SuCrest. SuCrest’s chairman was Adolf Berle.

  The Cuban revolution represented what Nelson had always feared about Latin America since he had first articulated his worry about “losing our property” twenty years earlier to Standard Oil’s directors. He had spent most of his political life working to avoid a Cuba. Since leaving Washington, he had addressed the problem of development with a sense of urgency atypical of American businessmen and politicians. His activities in the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC) and the American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) reflected that urgency.

  The Cuban revolution, building an army that was capable of toppling a U.S.-backed military dictator against all odds by seizing plantations and distributing the land to their farmworkers and peasants, stirred the imaginations of much of Latin America’s educated youths. Brazil, approaching a presidential election, was no exception.

  Four months after Castro’s campesino army marched into Havana, Governor Nelson Rockefeller received an important message from IBEC’s Berent Friele, Room 5600’s top aide for Latin America. Friele was worried about political rumblings in his native land. Brazil’s Vice President João Goulart had announced ten days before that he would campaign against “North American trusts which are exploiting Brazil’s wealth.”13

  This was disturbing news. Nelson had underestimated Goulart. He had met him in May 1956, when President Juscelino Kubitschek, anxious for American capital, had sent him to the United States to reassure American businessmen and politicians. Nelson invited Goulart to lunch and asked Berle to join them. “I am watching Jango [João Goulart’s nickname] with some interest,” Berle wrote afterward. “He is a young man and can go far but I don’t know how heavily committed he is to other interests.” By “other interests,” Berle meant Brazil’s Communist party.14 He was suspicious, but it was hard to discern if Goulart was just a Brazilian patriot who favored the rights of labor or if he was willing to go so far as to challenge American business interests, in which case he would have to be judged a tool of the Kremlin.

  To the State Department, however, Goulart was simply “a complete opportunist” who had “neither ideology nor ideals” and was instead “possessed by consuming personal ambition.”15 They knew how to deal with his type; there was no reason for his presence in Brazil’s cabinet to become an obstacle to American participation in Kubitschek’s development plans for the Amazon.

  Now it looked like everyone had miscalculated. Goulart, Berent Friele reported, “wants ‘a fundamental change in the social, economic and political structure of Brazil to liberate ourselves from the exploitation of international economic groups.’ This opening gun by the labor leader is disturbing, especially as discontent is spreading with the increased cost of living and the failure of government to come to grips with the inflation.” Friele dreaded Goulart’s succeeding the very man whose policies were responsible for the inflation, President Kubitschek. Kubitschek’s vast borrowing and spending programs, without a commensurate growth in revenues from exports, had worsened the inflation that the military’s overthrow of his predecessor, President Getúlio Vargas, was supposed to arrest. But Friele saw Kubitschek as an asset for both the United States and the Rockefellers.

  “At no time in recent history has Brazil had a president and a government so friendly toward the United States,” Friele reminded Nelson.16

  Kubitschek had broken the embarrassing silence in Latin America that followed the stoning of Vice President Richard M. Nixon in Venezuela in 1958, writing President Dwight D. Eisenhower of his concern and making the improvement of relations between the United States and the rest of the hemisphere—“Operation Pan American”—the cornerstone of his foreign policy. He wanted the United States to broaden its economic assistance to Latin America. This foreign policy initiative, however, only followed his domestic economic policy of trying to lure American capital to help in the development of Brazil, particularly the Amazon.

  THE EYE OF THE COMING STORM

  Kubitschek had hoped to raise $200 million for Amazonian development from the United States by 1957. Instead, Eisenhower authorized $400 million by 1958, when Kubitschek hosted an international investment conference at his old haunt, Belo Horizonte.

  The centerpiece of Kubitschek’s economic strategy was his campaign to humble the mighty Amazon jungle. To dramatize his government’s willingness to commit the Brazilian people to this conquest, he flew to the edge of the wilderness in the state of Goiás and began construction of the long-planned new national capital. He called it Brasília, in honor of his dream of the Brazil of the future, and recruited architect Oscar Niemeyer, the man who had helped Rockefeller aide Wally Harrison design the United Nations headquarters in New York and had built Kubitschek’s last frontier capital, Belo Horizonte. Shining white buildings of marble and glass soon rose on a dusty red plain; so did prices, since Brasília’s buildings began passing through feverish hands many times. Pushing south from Belém, swarms of road crews buzzed their way through hundreds of miles of rain forest. Behind them, a long brown highway snaked through the jungle. Its name augured the soulless, deadly efficiency to come: BR-010. Contrary to past Amazonian road failures, the serpent’s progress toward Brasília was remarkably swift, fed with fat World Bank loans and shielded from the jungle’s malarial counterattacks by mosquito control programs and scientists from the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Belém Virus Laboratory.

  Only a dozen years before, the mighty Xavante and other less formidable Indian tribes had called these lands between the Xingu and Tocantins rivers their own. But in 1946, the Brazilian Service for the Protection of the Indian (SPI) pacified the Xavante, the largest tribe.17 Now the highway was arriving, bringing the first of the 1 million people who would settle along the road in the next decade. Nelson’s IBEC Research Institute had already provided evidence that this scrub-brush area could be turned into productive pastureland. Trees would fall, land would be cleared, and the number of cattle in the area would grow to over 5 million head, accelerating the westward migration of the cattle-ranching frontier into the Mato Grosso. The Rockefeller brothers’ large landholdings in Mato Grosso could only increase in value as a result. Unfortunately, another consequence would be soil erosion, with some areas, according to the Brazilian Institute of Forestry Development, “turning into desert.”

  Nothing like this was anticipated by either Nelson or Adolf Berle when they championed the cause of Amazonian development. Convinced of the might of the marketplace and American technology, they were more concerned with removing obstacles to that development. “Misguided” nationalists and recalcitrant Indian warriors were greater obstacles than the Amazon’s environment.

  In 1956, after Nelson’s visit to Brazil and his meeting with Goulart that spring, Berle had followed up with his own tri
p to Brasília to get some idea of Kubitschek’s development plans and the prospects for stability. Goulart, Kubitschek told him, “would stay in line.” Heartened, Berle accepted the Brazilian army’s offer of a plane trip to Goiás, then aflame with speculation sparked by Brasília’s construction. “The country is so blazingly rich in internal resources and is growing so fast that they may be able to overcome inflation by sheer growth. The fascinating part is the growth of the west. All the way from Amapá to the border of Paraguay, you see new cities rising.”18

  Berle’s last visit to the Amazon had been when he was ambassador in 1945. Flying over the jungle at that time, he had thought “it would be the last region to be tamed by man; the forest is unmaliciously impregnable.… What is inside of it no one yet knows.”19

  Now he knew. Like the Rockefellers, he had invested in land both in Mato Grosso and in Goiás.20 He did not worry about the Indians of the frontier. SPI was doing a fine job, and he had no hesitation joining the chorus of human rights advocates who nominated SPI’s dying founder, Colonel Rondon, for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957, just as SPI was entering its terminal stage of corruption.

  São Paulo financial syndicates were as anxious as North Americans to take advantage of the inflation in land values caused by the influx of settlers from the destitute northeastern states. This inflation was spurred to new heights after 1957, when Kubitschek allowed Chase Manhattan-backed Bethlehem Steel and Rockefeller ally Augusto Antunes to begin mining the huge manganese deposits in the state of Amapá, north of the mouth of the Amazon. The governor of Amapá, who had helped Bethlehem Steel gain its concession, now Kubitschek’s president of Petrobrás, brought the oil refinery at Manaus fully on line that year, feeding the rumors of an impending oil boom that had been started by an oil strike on the Madeira River south of Manaus in 1955. Kubitschek made the Amazon River an international waterway to create the Free Trade Zone of Manaus. Thousands of foreign tourists and businessmen flooded into the Amazon, causing prices for consumer goods to skyrocket. Following the establishment of the “free trade” route from the Amazon River’s mouth to the great jungle capital of Manaus, smuggling, black-market rackets, and political corruption erupted on a mammoth scale.

  The SPI was one of the first victims of Brazil’s runaway development. SPI had been originally set up not as a bureau of Indian affairs, but as a pacifier and protector of the Indians from encroachment. For years SPI’s unarmed agents were billed as the world’s lone example of how Europeans could have growth through capitalism without resorting to genocide. In the frontier state of Goiás, lands inhabited since time immemorial were gently conquered by SPI’s policy of love: “Die if need be. Never kill.” Most SPI agents practiced what they preached, and the besieged Indians, impressed by such quiet moral courage and disdain for violence, surrendered to what they thought might be their last chance: a modus vivendi with the encroaching whites.

  In the process, however, SPI was overwhelmed by the developmental forces its success had unleashed on the frontier. Governor Ludovico of Goiás, an old crony of Vargas, oversaw the corruption of SPI in his state. In 1941, claiming to succumb to entreaties from “Indian-lovers,” he set up a safe haven for the state’s Indians. Restricted to a small zone of seventy-six square miles, the Indians found their haven turned into their prison. “Ludovico had buried the Indians alive,” wrote French author Lucien Bodard, who interviewed the governor. “He had handled them in such a way that they died on their own, like sick animals, without assassins. This was the so-called policy of ‘mildness,’ in other words, the policy of hidden violence. In 1941 he had started, with the experts of the SPI, his generous policy which wiped out the problem of the Indians at the same time as it did the Indians. No more than a few remnants were left. Success.”21

  In Mato Grosso, where Nelson dreamed of immigrants working his land for him, land speculators cheated settlers out of their land titles. The speculators were often local politicians, a phenomenon not unknown in the United States. Once the settlers improved the land, the politicians used corrupted SPI agents to assert Indian land rights and then to move Indians onto remote parts of the land. The Indians, ironically, were the only people in Brazil who had constitutional first rights to untitled land they occupied.22 Once the Indians were “discovered,” the settlers were promptly denounced as “stealers” of Indian land and fleeced of their titles. Then the SPI removed the Indians to “safer” reserves and gave the titles to friends.

  This use of the “Indian trick,” as it became known, reached its height in 1958. In a sudden gush of enthusiasm for justice for the Indians, Mato Grosso’s legislators passed a law returning hundreds of thousands of acres to the Indians.

  There was one problem: No one knew about the law’s terms of compensation to settlers and landowners except the legislators. Only two copies of the text were published, one sent to the eventual oblivion of SPI’s archives, the other to the town of Campo Grande, where the federal Office for the Repatriation of Land was located. By the time word leaked out to the general public, the money allocated for land buy-backs was gone. The legislators had laid claim to it in their own names and those of their relatives.23

  Such were the hallmarks of progress in the Amazon. But for the Indians of Mato Grosso, corruption was preferable to what was to come. Pressure was building on them from the Northeast, where low wages paid to European and African workers had produced economic growth for exporting corporations but not for a home market of consumers. The mass poverty and growing radicalism of the Northeast’s population prompted the government to plan migrations into the Amazonian interior to turn “unproductive” and “surplus” populations into cheap-wage “production” workers and agricultural tenant farmers for export-oriented agribusiness processors and ranchers. This policy only further entrenched the export sector and deepened Brazil’s dependence on exports for an economic growth that never reached the huge and growing population of average Brazilians. The Indians who still occupied the Amazonian interior lost their lands, susceptible to the spread of European diseases.

  In 1957, as Nelson Rockefeller took possession of Fazenda Bodoquena and moved his technicians onto the former lands of the Terêna Indians, another American organization arrived to work among the Terêna. Dale Kietzman, the future director of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) in Brazil, led the first SIL teams invited by SPI to begin field operations in Brazil; he assigned one team to the Terêna Indians that year and another translator in 1959 and would himself author SIL’s first linguistic study of the Terêna language in 1961.24 No American would have more influence over the conquest of the Amazon than would Nelson Rockefeller. No American missionary would have more influence on the Brazilian tribes affected by that conquest than would Kietzman as SIL’s first Brazil branch director. Ironically, both Rockefeller and Kietzman started their operations in the Brazilian Indian frontier in the same year, and in the same location, the land of the Terêna Indians.

  Anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro thought he had found in William Cameron Townsend’s missionaries an alternative to SPI’s growing corruption and militarization by the Brazilian army. He had met SIL linguist Kenneth Pike at the Rio Conference of Americanists shortly after Vargas’s death. Coached by Cam, Pike had offered SIL’s assistance in a survey of the estimated 186 tribes that Ribeiro was preparing to do for SPI. SIL’s missionary-linguists seemed sincere and eager to work under difficult circumstances. And, Ribeiro reckoned, time was running out for Brazil’s Indians. More than 70 tribes had perished since 1900.

  Ribeiro looked at the projected Amazonian highway system, the export-oriented mining companies it inspired, the settlers used as rain-forest burners and ultimately cheap laborers, and the European diseases and violence and concluded that he had no choice. The first SIL translators, Dale and Harriet Kietzman, had arrived in 1956 and spent a year in Rio de Janeiro. In 1957, two teams were sent into western Brazil, one to the SPI post among the Terêna,25 the other to a center near an SPI post among the Kaiwá, a
tribe of some 3,000 Indians directly south of the Bodoquena mountains. The next year another SIL team “occupied” the Terênas’ former rulers on the other side of the Bodoquena mountains, the Kadiwéu.

  By January 1959, Cam had placed eleven SIL teams in the Brazilian Amazon, all working closely with SPI, some even living at SPI’s Indian posts. This collaboration apparently won the confidence of Kubitschek’s officials, who that year approved a contract between SIL and the University of Brazil’s National Museum, an institution associated with Cam’s new friend, Darcy Ribeiro.

  Cam discovered 106 tribes spread over an area two-thirds the size of the United States. SIL’s teams in western Brazil formed a crescent from Paraná in the south, curving northwest into Mato Grosso, where most of the teams were concentrated, then turning northeast through Xavante country west of Brasília, and finally into the Karajá tribe north of the capital. SIL’s second focus was on two tribes to the north, the Apinayé and the Guajajara. SIL’s third eye was on two remaining tribes southeast and northeast of the Manaus Free Trade Zone, the Sataré and the Hixkaryána.

  Linking all this together was left to the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service. That year, Guatemala’s new president, General Ydígoras, provided the opportunity for Cam to make an important U.S. government contact for JAARS in Brazil. Ydígoras was known for his cruelty and had been charged by Rev. Samuel Guy Inman of the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America with having on at least one occasion ordered the rape of Indian women and the capture of their children.26 Nevertheless, he was asked to host the Fourth Inter-American Indian Congress by Manuel Gamio, Mexico’s famed anthropologist and director of the Inter-American Indian Institute. SIL sent a large delegation, led by Cam. To the dictator’s dismay, Guatemalan Indians also showed up as official observers of the Guatemalan Ministry of Education, petitioning the conference for help in relieving the oppression they had suffered since Arbenz’s overthrow.27