by Gerard Colby
The Belks had access to both. They were a key force behind Charlotte’s courting of New York capital and the city’s bid to host the state’s first International Trade Fair.7
As in the Rockefeller family, one Belk son, Irwin, dwelled in the higher realm of finance. He shared with his oldest brother, John, responsibility as financial overseer of a retail empire of 300 stores stretching from Ohio to Texas.
Like the Rockefellers, the Belks had a Brothers Investment Corporation, of which Irwin was president. Irwin also sat on the boards of a bank (First Union National), local insurance and telephone companies, the family foundation, and nine textile mills.
Like the Rockefellers, the Belks took seriously their social and financial status. They recognized the importance of economically integrating the countryside into the national mainstream to carry out industrialization and the huge profits to be made from millions of better-paid consumers, including African Americans.
And like the Rockefellers, the Belks were not afraid to involve themselves in political intrigues.8 In December 1961 the Belks would host the two most prominent Cold Warriors of the Rockefeller camp, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, addressing the Chamber of Commerce, and Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller, speaking to the Republican State Executive Committee. Charlotte, it was clear to Sanz, was a city at the crossroads of power.
As JAARS’s presence symbolized, it was also a city at the crossroads of Fundamentalism. Charlotte retained its cultural insularity. Recent arrivals from the countryside used zoning much as they did throughout the South, allowing suburbs to resemble small towns and retaining a rural character. These people brought with them the rural culture of the South, including racial segregation and Protestant Fundamentalism, both practiced in the Charlotte area with zeal. In Charlotte, as in other southern cities, business looked to the white suburban church as a precious market; the growth of church memberships complemented the local government objectives of growth.9 It was no accident that a former Bible salesman named Luther Hodges could rise through textiles to become North Carolina’s governor. Or that former Bible salesman Billy Graham had preceded another ex-Bible salesman, William Cameron Townsend, in finding support for setting up operations in the Charlotte area. Or that both would be followed by Pat Robertson’s Christian Television Network and the more sensational scam of Jim and Tammy Bakker. Charlotte, the commercial hub of the Piedmont, seemed made for selling, with a characteristic lack of self-reflection—or self-consciousness—when goods and services were offered with a strong dose of local Christian culture. What was good for Charlotte was good not only for the United States, but also for the world.
Therefore, if Ambassador Sanz was in Charlotte to sell Colombia to North Carolinians, Cam Townsend was in Charlotte to sell SIL to Colombians. And as Cam laid out his wares, Sanz became intrigued. The missionary offered Sanz two things that Lleras Camargo badly needed: a tested bilingual education program that could help Colombia’s national economy integrate rural Indians who were susceptible to guerrilla insurgencies, and Helio Couriers, serviced by a Belk-sponsored JAARS base in the heart of Belk country.
PARTNERS OF THE ALLIANCE
The decidedly military overtone of federal blessing at the trade fair’s opening indicated the importance the Pentagon placed on North Carolina as a strategic home base for its counterinsurgency doctrine. Luther Hodges arrived, flanked by two deputy assistant secretaries of defense for installations and logistics, a deputy assistant secretary of the air force, a major general of the army’s Procurement and Distribution Division, a brigadier general of the army’s Signal Supply Agency, a rear admiral who served as a deputy with NATO, and an assistant secretary of the navy for installations and logistics.
As if to underscore the counterinsurgency buildup at Fort Bragg as a new growth industry for North Carolina, the fair was symbolically opened at the Raleigh-Durham Airport by President Kennedy while en route to Fort Bragg. Praising North Carolina’s “most vigorous” industrial and business development, Kennedy characterized his symbolic role as a “high honor” and the fair as a way “to show the world” what the United States had to offer. Then the president flew to Fort Bragg to watch the army demonstrate its prowess.
Surrounded by aides, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, army brass, and Latin American and South Vietnamese military officers, Kennedy was treated to a fiery, earth-shattering display of jet bombings, helicopters firing rockets, a 55–10 guided missile blasting tank targets, a giant howitzer shooting projectiles twenty miles, and a “Red Eye” shoulder missile exploding aircraft out of the sky. The demonstration “made me want to join the Army,”10 gushed McNamara.
But what made the president lean forward in his chair were the Green Berets. The Green Berets passed in review in full battle gear, their young faces blackened in camouflage except for white eyes turned right and looking straight at him. Aircraft swooped overhead, dropping leaflets. Kennedy inspected one. It had a picture of him as he had arrived only a few hours before; the other side read: “You call the tune and we’ll play it … in any theater, cold or hot … to any audience, favorable or not.” It was psychological warfare in the best Lansdalean tradition. Kennedy, one reporter noted, “nodded and smiled when some of the men explained they were trained to speak two or more foreign languages.”11
Cam knew, as he flew from Charlotte to Washington with Ambassador Sanz after the fair’s opening, that SILers working in Vietnam under Green Beret protection were making great headway in unraveling the mysteries of Montagnard tribal dialects. Bilingual education of tribesmen had many applications, not the least of which was to inculcate in them political loyalty to SIL’s host government. Cam hoped he could extend SIL’s work into Colombia. Kennedy’s intervention in Lleras Camargo’s political and economic crisis would need an educational component in tribal areas like the Llanos, where oil had been found.
While in Washington, the ambassador took the missionary to lunch. Sanz gave Cam three letters. One was for President Lleras Camargo; the others were for the minister of education and the secretary of the archbishop.
Cam was holding the keys to the kingdom. He immediately flew south and met with Colombia’s director of Indian affairs, Gregorio Hernández de Alba. An anthropologist, Hernández de Alba was delighted to help. Lleras Camargo’s Liberal government wanted to parcel out the church’s mission lands to Indians with individual title-deeds, not unlike what misguided American reformers had done in the United States through the infamous Allotment Act of 1887.
In Colombia, this struggle against the church’s power was centered in the province of Putumayo, where the church’s Capuchin Mission had turned most of the Sibundoy Indians landless. It was also where Gulf Oil had joined New York–based Texaco in test drilling that would soon be announced as successful.12
Hernández de Alba took Cam to see Lleras Camargo. Nine years had passed since Cam had last seen the thin, frail president when Lleras Camargo was visiting Chicago’s Pan American Council as secretary general of the Organization of American States. Cam had lobbied futilely for SIL’s entry into Colombia. But now Lleras Camargo was in need of U.S. aid and some flexibility on tariffs from North Carolina’s textile magnates. “We’ll be glad to give you a contract,”13 he said after reading Sanz’s letter.
Then came Cam’s biggest test. It was not with the education minister or even the Roman Catholic archbishop, but with the apostolic vicar of the Caquetá region, ruler of all lands of Colombia’s Amazonian Indians.
The vicar was Father Eduardo Canyes, a refugee of the Spanish Civil War. As a priest in “red” Barcelona, Canyes had found his sympathy for General Francisco Franco’s uprising against the Spanish Republic unwelcome. Renaming himself Father Marceliano de Vilafranca, he prudently fled Spain with his brother, also a priest, and immigrated to more hospitable Colombia. Here, through the Capuchin Friars Mission, he rose to power as Father Marceliano Canyes. Appointed apostolic vicar of the Putumayo region, Canyes operated huge dairy farms on ancestral Sibundo
y Indian lands while the Indians, regarded traditionally as wards of the church, went undernourished. According to charges by anthropologist Victor Daniel Borilla, Canyes took the fertile lands and gave the Indians the Sibundoy swamp in exchange. He quickly sold the untitled lands to private interests, mostly important families from the interior.14
Territory Under Bishop Canyes’s Vicariate in Colombia
SIL’s closest ally in Colombia’s Catholic hierarchy, Bishop Marceliano Canyes, was the subject of criticism for his treatment of Indians in the Putumayo region. Later, he was given a vast territory (shaded on the map) as his vicariate, stretching south from the Caquetá River to Colombia’s only port on the Amazon, Leticia.
Source: Walter Dostal, ed., The Situation of the Indian in South America.
In 1951, the Vatican split his vicariate. Losing Cauca and the Putumayo, Bishop Canyes had to settle for the southeastern half, a vast tropical territory running from the Caquetá River region down to the Amazon River itself. Canyes placed the seat of his bishopric at strategic Leticia, Colombia’s only port on the Amazon, and continued to rule in the manner that already had earned him the name “Fray Manga,” Brother Strongman.
Facing the fierce, bearded Canyes, Cam tried to strike a common chord: “I remember in 1937 your brother and I both had articles in the same linguistic magazine in Mexico. He was well known in linguistic circles.”
“Yes,” said Canyes, “he always wanted to help the Indians.” Canyes’s brother, Marcelino, had also been a sympathizer of Franco when both fled Barcelona and came to Colombia. Marcelino turned a blind eye toward his brother’s dispossession of the Sibundoy, occupying his mind instead with an insatiable scientific curiosity about Amazonian flora and Indian languages, as if both were already relics. But unlike the bishop, Marcelino showed a genuine, if patronizing, regard for Indian culture, and many inhabitants of the Sibundoy valley responded to this unusual white man by loving him as a living saint. When Marcelino died in 1953, Bishop Canyes insisted that the government pay for the upkeep of his brother’s botanical laboratory and large scientific archives. When the government refused, Canyes placed the papers under lock and key, forbidding anyone to use them.
“I have his manuscripts and books in my residence,” Canyes told Cam, “but they’ve never been put in order.”
Cam explained that SIL’s translations were available to Catholics and evangelicals alike. Canyes’s face dropped into a frown. “This is a Catholic state,” he said, “although Protestant missionaries are allowed in the Spanish speaking areas. But the Church has an agreement with the government forbidding the Protestants to propagate their sects in the Indian territories.” Cam offered help, favors, and even planes “at a moderate price.”
That seemed to do the trick. “Well, perhaps we can work together,” said Canyes.15
“I’ll take it from here,” Hernández de Alba told Cam. Returning to Yarinacocha in Peru, Cam wrote SILers, warning that the organization needed to be ready to enter Colombia within six months. He also laid down the law on sectarianism. “Don’t apply unless you are willing to go an extra mile in serving the monks and nuns.”16 He almost sounded like a liberal.
To get the Kennedy White House further involved in SIL’s cause, Cam would have to enlist SIL in the holy war against Castroism. That meant meeting with Kennedy’s new assistant secretary of state for Latin America, Robert Forbes Woodward. Cam brought with him two men who were skilled in public relations with high-ranking government leaders. One was Dr. Torrey Johnson, Billy Graham’s aging former leader of Youth for Christ and an original member of the JAARS board. The other was Robert Schneider, his top government liaison official over the years. Schneider had negotiated Sills advance into the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon, making them SIL’s first beachheads in the Amazon basin. Now he was concentrating on Cam’s planned advances into western Africa and Colombia.
Woodward was sympathetic. Cam’s bilingual educators and JAARS’s Helio Couriers were just what the State Department needed. SIL could help the United States respond to Cuba’s much-heralded literacy campaign by integrating the hemisphere’s guerrilla-prone rural areas into a cultural and political, if not economic, “American solidarity.”
Cam was ready for more than words, however. The meeting at the State Department inspired him to a much broader proposal, “An Idea for Inter-American Friendship” that embraced Christ and literacy as instruments of psychological warfare.
The CIA’s William Kintner, who had been Nelson Rockefeller’s top assistant during his Special Group assignment, was a friend of Schneider. So Cam and Schneider turned to him.
To SILers and Kintner, Indians’ political allegiances were worrisome. “These groups, often living in isolated areas, are special targets of communism,” warned Schneider. This project would discourage communism by equipping the people to read and write and by supplying literature of the Free World.17
Kintner passed the proposal on to Arthur Schlesinger, the White House’s link between the liberal intelligentsia and the CIA’s covert operations.
Schlesinger listened to SIL’s case and subsequently got Kennedy to endorse JAARS’s new Helio Courier for Brazil, the Spirit of Philadelphia, at a dedication ceremony hosted by Mayor Richardson Dilworth, cousin of Rockefeller aide J. Richardson Dilworth. Once again, Cam’s instinct was right. SIL, like the Helio Courier, could make a name for itself as an indispensable component of the Cold War.
The Special Group-C.I. (counterinsurgency) meanwhile made plans for its own secret mission in Brazil. Green Berets would shortly be sent to assist elite Brazilian military units in honing their skills for jungle warfare against insurgents.
Plans were also made to send Green Berets to help the Ecuadorian military beef up its counterinsurgency units.18 The Ecuadorian generals, prompted by false CIA reports of a mounting Cuban-trained guerrilla insurgency in the Ecuadorian Andes,19 were already plotting their own coup.
But the highest priority was given to Colombia. There, insurgency had been a reality for over a decade, complete with a self-administered rebel territory liberated from the old dictatorship of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. The military was also growing restless. On October 11, army units linked to Rojas Pinilla revolted. Other units who were loyal to President Lleras Camargo crushed the rebellion. Lleras Camargo insisted that elections would take place as scheduled in 1962. He also muffled the opposition by banning rallies and censoring the news.
Lleras Camargo had survived these confrontations with the U.S.-armed military because he was no Quadros of Brazil or Velasco Ibarra of Ecuador; he was a loyal friend of Washington and New York’s power brokers, including Nelson Rockefeller. Green Berets would be sent down, not to back coup plotters but to shore up his relationship with the military by assisting the generals’ war against the “Red republics.”
To demonstrate U.S. commitment to Lleras Camargo and his new Ten-Year Plan for Colombia as a pilot project for the Alliance for Progress, the Green Berets soon would appear in rural Colombia—but only after their commander in chief, President Kennedy, had laid the psychological-warfare groundwork with a personal visit.
THE YARBOROUGH REPORT: A POLICE STATE FOR DEMOCRACY
Arriving in Bogotá on December 17, 1961, the glamorous first couple of the United States were the perfect touch for inaugurating the Alliance for Progress in Colombia. Greeted by President Lleras Camargo and Ambassador Sanz de Santamaría, the Kennedy party traveled under surprisingly little security in a nation living under a declared state of siege. A coup attempt by right-wing generals had just been thwarted, but Lleras Camargo, in the spirit of openness, insisted that the elections should take place as scheduled the next year. This announcement would please the visiting American president.
Kennedy was loved in Latin America. His motorcade passed by cheering throngs of more than 500,000 Colombians. “Do you know why those workers and campesinos are cheering you like that?” Lleras Camargo asked Kennedy. “It’s because they believe you are on their
side.”20
To encourage that belief, Kennedy gave a speech at the laying of a cornerstone for a new housing project, and Jacqueline visited a children’s hospital.
That night, at the San Carlos Palace, Kennedy impressed Colombians with a humility that was rare in American presidents. “We in the United States have made many mistakes in our relations with Latin America,” he said. “We have not always understood the magnitude of your problems, or accepted our share of responsibility for the welfare of the hemisphere. But we are committed in the United States—our will and our energy—to an untiring pursuit of that welfare and I have come to this country to reaffirm that dedication.”
He then went further to solidarize himself with the workers and campesinos than many in Colombia and the State Department would have liked. He apologized for the United States’ traditional allies. “The leaders of Latin America, the industrialists and the landowners, are, I am sure, also ready to admit past mistakes and accept new responsibilities.”21 It was a brave moment, and to some in Colombia and in the United States, rash.
But it was Mrs. Kennedy who stole the show. Her speech was short, less visionary, and less inspired, but it had a single, powerful sign of respect: it was in Spanish.
Kennedy returned to Washington in triumph.
Colombian rightists among the military and the landowners, however, remained unconvinced that fundamental reforms were necessary. They were fixated on a military solution: removing the peasant republics that offered too fundamental an alternative to what Kennedy had called the “ancient institutions which perpetuate privilege.”22 They viewed Washington’s concern over a continental spreading of the Cuban revolution as their opportunity for encouraging U.S. intervention; the intervention would be on behalf of their civil war against the left wing of the Liberal party that the assassinated Jorge Gaitán had once led.
