by Gerard Colby
The new foundation would be called the Antunes Foundation. AIA’s balancing act was not over, however. Having lined up its Brazilian friends on one end, the Rockefeller team was still faced with hostility on the other end, from none other than foreign-aid officials in the Kennedy administration. The whole Planalto Survey could come crashing down in defeat at any moment because it did not have the full support of Kennedy’s AID administrators.
Kennedy’s first AID director, Fowler Hamilton, had been persuaded by a staff report that AID should not be pressured by U.S. corporations into guaranteeing their portfolio investments in foreign companies if the companies became slated for nationalization. This attitude reflected a certain leeriness toward the role of big business in directing U.S. aid policy, and it showed up in AID’s preference for giving immediate assistance to Brazil’s drought-ridden Northeast, rather than supporting the Rockefeller people’s emphasis on migration to Goiás and Mato Grosso.
AID was skeptical about AIA’s vast Planalto project, and provided enough money for only a small, preliminary survey of the region, as far west as 55 degrees longitude, just east of Nelson’s Bodoquena ranch—with strings attached to boot. The contract departed from the usual policy in that it ran “directly between AID and AIA,” AIA lawyer Philip Glick noted to AIA’s top administrator, John Camp, and was “cost reimbursable rather than at a fixed price.” The fixed price was set too low by AID, so AIA had to settle for doing the work almost at cost. Worse, this arrangement gave AID the right to audit AIA’s overhead expenditures.
AIA officials did not like the arrangement, which threatened to “put AIA at the mercy of AID and make it impossible for us to operate with any degree of autonomy.”26 Rockefeller’s organization did not appreciate being regulated by the Kennedy administration on a project that had taken almost two decades to break ground.
The only reason that AIA had gone ahead and accepted the contract was that the work had to be “initiated immediately or wait for a whole year.”27 Besides, AIA had hoped that the limited survey would lead to a much larger survey and colonization project in the future. But by March 1963, even after the exploratory survey, AID was not willing to commit to the larger survey.
The Planalto proposal was put on hold. Crawford was advised to look elsewhere than Brazil.
Crawford agreed. In the absence of a Brazilian foundation acting as a conduit (the Antunes Foundation had not as yet gotten off the ground), the problem would continue to be “the Brazilians.”28 Therefore, AIA found itself squeezed on both ends: by the Brazilian government, headed by Goulart, and by the U.S. government, headed by Kennedy. With Kennedy gone by December 1963, the problem of how U.S. aid would be administered began to clear up with the appointment of Thomas Mann as assistant secretary of state for Latin America. The “Brazilian problem” under Goulart, however, remained.
STALKING THE REFORMER
AIA’s Walter Crawford viewed Goulart’s new land-reform law as being “rather extreme.”29 Although it did emphasize individual ownership of family farm units, the means of achieving more equitable landownership set Goulart squarely against Brazilian and foreign land speculators; among the latter, some twenty U.S. firms had been counted by Rockefeller aides. Only family farms and some large, well-managed plantations were exempted from purchase by the government for redistribution to landless peasants.
Rockefeller’s AIA officials knew that most of the land in the Planalto was privately owned, the state governments having sold most of the “public” lands. Former Indian lands in Goiás that had been sold by the state for $5 per twelve acres only a few years before now sold for twelve times as much. In fact, “most of it is in rather large holdings … [and] held almost entirely for speculation purposes.” Rather than see the land broken up and distributed, thereby upsetting the status quo, AIA officials had intended to accommodate AID with private landowning interests, making “full use of private initiative” and confining its role to lending technical assistance to “individual owners, land developers and colonization companies,” as well as to “farm owned and controlled cooperatives.” Their idea had been to “colonize and develop the presently existing non-productive large land holdings” through a “special type of credit.” But ownership of the land would remain unchanged.30
The landowners, whether Brazilian or American, were not impressed by Brazilian government statistics showing how land reform would redress the unequal distribution of wealth. Nor did the landowners and speculators see how the concentration of income in the upper brackets would limit the growth of a broader consumer home market for business. Nor, finally, were they moved by moral arguments about responsibility for the poor or patriotic arguments about sharing the wealth of the nation to build it through wider participation in the economy. Instead, they thought that Goulart’s concentration of authority over Brazil’s agrarian reform agency was undermining their own traditional prerogatives and was therefore a step toward dictatorship.
Nelson’s top lieutenants at Room 5600, for their part, had been pleased with Brazil’s progress before Goulart and his land-reform schemes got in the way. They had only to look at Nelson’s Brazilian mutual fund, Crescinco, for proof that investors were helping Brazil build its own industries to substitute for imports. Crescinco’s fabulous success in attracting money from urban upper- and middle-income families that concentrated Brazil’s wealth had allowed Nelson’s firm to invest in more than 100 Brazilian companies, encouraging the growth of Brazil’s stock exchange.
When this success was arrested by currency depletion and inflation in 1962–1963, the Rockefellers blamed Goulart’s policies, which they regarded as so spendthrift that investors’ confidence had collapsed.
In fact, Goulart’s policies were no more extravagant than were those of his predecessors. Inflation during his administration was caused not so much by demand, as by rising costs. Since Quadros’s fall, Washington had demanded more “fiscal responsibility” in exchange for U.S. loans for industrialization and debt service. Goulart was forced to devalue the Brazilian cruzeiro, causing prices to soar and making capital the most expensive item for businessmen next to labor costs. If private profits were to be taken, little room was left over for compromise with the wage demands of Goulart’s labor constituency, who suffered most from this new form of inflation. Adding pressure was the fact that the capital-intensive investments involved in the heavy industrialization of chemicals, durable goods, and machinery were incapable of employing the 1 million new workers who arrived in cities every year from the rural areas. Caught between the industrialists and the workers, Goulart’s administration vacillated, trying to placate one and then the other, until neither side could be satisfied. Goulart’s grip on the wheels of state weakened. His enemies moved in with ever-louder calls for cuts in services and wages for his working-class constituency and its only real bastion of defense: the organized labor movement.
Beneath these claims for fiscal prudence, however, was a distinct distaste for the shifts in power that Goulart’s officials were initiating, shifts that gave more economic power to Goulart’s labor and peasant constituencies and thereby greater political power to the officials who implemented the policies. It did not take long for these officials to be branded as communists, first, by Governor Lacerda, and then, by the CIA station in the U.S. Embassy.
In 1963, the CIA generated three reports on Brazilian politics that argued that communists were steering Goulart toward dictatorship. One of the reports sounded a familiar theme for U.S. intervention: saving a country from an international communist conspiracy. If some in Washington argued that Brazil’s economic woes really had more to do with relations with Washington and New York than with Moscow, it no longer mattered. For President João Goulart, the die was cast.31
Pentagon ties to the Brazilian military already had an obvious intelligence focal point in the U.S. Embassy’s military attaché, Vernon Walters, future assistant director of the CIA. Quieter forces, capable of manipulating Brazilian public opinion
, were also at play. And as they worked, Goulart was not the only one caught between the military and their opponents: so also was a group of American Fundamentalist missionaries led by William Cameron Townsend.
THE AMAZON CONNECTION: “PULLING THE WHOLE THING TOGETHER”
By 1963, the destruction of the Amazonian Indians had grown in direct proportion to the military’s increasing control over a corrupted Service for the Protection of the Indian (SPI). The organization, founded to ensure the Indians’ survival, had become the instrument of their death.
“In principle the Service for the Protection of the Indian is supposed to provide for their security and facilitate [the Indians’] integration into modern Brazil,” wrote French anthropologist Alfred Métraux. “In fact the [SPI] ‘postos’ are not only centers of demoralization and exploitation, but veritable traps. Once caught in them, the Indians are condemned to rapid extinction.”32
Darcy Ribeiro was more blunt about the militarized condition of the SPI with which he had worked.
The last four years of military administrations … led the Service for the Protection of the Indian to the lowest point of its history, bringing it down in certain regions to the degrading condition of an agent and prop of the despoilers and murderers of the Indians. The work of assistance, on the other hand, is most definitely concerned with the specific needs of the Indians. Nevertheless, the SPI frequently failed even in the domain of aid and protection. Pacification carried out at the cost of many lives, of heroic endeavor to lead more tribes to peace, brought nothing but frustration to those involved when they realized that their victory ultimately meant the defeat of their ideas, that not even the possession of the land was assured to the Indians, for whom peaceful coexistence was to mean hunger, disease and disillusion.33
Similar reports were made of the Kayapó in southwest Pará,34 the Ticúna in Amazonas, and the Tapirapé and Terêna in Mato Grosso.35 This last region, rapidly being developed by cattle companies and colonization identical to what the Rockefellers and Berle urged, was overwhelmed by measles, smallpox, influenza, and tuberculosis, which were deliberately introduced among the Indians by land speculators, according to Brazilian government files.36 Only in the Xingu National Park, northwest of Brasília, the sole legacy of Quadros’s short reign, were the epidemics brought under control. In fact, the Indian population there rose.37
Conditions were also perilous for the Apalaí in Amapá, north of the Amazon delta, which contained some of the largest manganese and bauxite deposits in the world. The bauxite may not have been known of during the Goulart era, but the manganese had been mined since 1957 by Bethlehem Steel and Augusto Antunes’s CAEMI.
With pressures on the Indians of Mato Grosso and the northern Amazon basin increasing, it is not surprising that Darcy Ribeiro should have sought a way to counterbalance the influence on SPI of the Brazilian military and land speculators. Outside the Xingu Park, where the Villas Boas brothers held sway as protectionists, the only serious alternative was the American Bible translators of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL).
SIL’s linguists were more educated than most Protestant missionaries from the United States, and Cam and his people had shown an unusual sensitivity toward Indian language as an integral part of Indian culture. Townsend’s missionaries had lived among the tribes since 1957, a year after Ribeiro brought them in to the country, but their work had been limited by SPI’s protocols. Now, with Goulart appointing him the rector of the new University of Brasília, Ribeiro saw his chance to use SIL to set up a new structure of linguistically trained field anthropologists to augment, if not replace, the corrupted SPI.
What Ribeiro did not know was that SIL had ties to the American right wing. Nor could he have known of SIL’s history of moving within a course set by even more powerful forces: the Rockefellers, U.S. intelligence agencies, and, ironically, the U.S. military. At the very time Ribeiro was looking to the missionaries as innocent protectors of Brazil’s embattled tribes, SIL was reinforcing its ties with these more powerful forces in the Amazon region of Brazil’s western neighbor, Ecuador.
At its expanding Ecuadorian jungle base in Limoncocha, SIL played host to a party of Rockefeller Foundation officials in the spring of 1962. These men sought SIL’s assistance in tropical agricultural experiments for colonizing the Amazon. They wanted to move in a group of technicians to study the area’s suitability for the classic first stages of colonization: raising cattle and planting seeds, both of which, if successful, would accelerate the razing of the rain forest. It was the beginning of SIL’s active collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation at Limoncocha, a collaboration that continued up to the base’s abandonment in 1982.
Whether coincidence or not, both the Rockefeller team and the Ecuadorian army were especially interested in the Pioneer 530, a powerful short-wave-radio communications system developed by the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS).
The Rockefeller team had barely departed when Limoncocha hosted a Green Beret counterinsurgency team, consisting of five men, who called themselves the Civic Action Team. The men were led by Colonel Joseph A. McChristian.
McChristian was a true believer, and not only about the Cold War. He believed in the Bible. As special assistant to the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group in Greece from 1949 to 1950 at the end of the Greek civil war, he had Protestant Bibles distributed to every Greek soldier. He was also one of the army’s top intelligence officers, a man who earned his spurs in postwar Germany and would turn them in after service in Vietnam.38 McChristian understood the value of religious war in Cold War strategy. Acting for God, he believed, lent confidence to acting for one’s country.
By April 1962, McChristian’s rank of colonel at Limoncocha was also a cover; he was actually a major general, working in army intelligence as chief of the Western Hemisphere Division. His counterpart in the CIA was Colonel J. C. King. McChristian was only forty-seven years old when he visited Limoncocha, but there was no mistaking his mastery of counterinsurgency command. Moreover, he was well connected to conservative networks, being the son-in-law of General James A. Van Fleet, who had recently violated military law by publicly challenging President Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs.39 Van Fleet was then a top counterinsurgency consultant to Kennedy’s army secretary on guerrilla warfare. His son-in-law did him proud. McChristian was persuasive on the guerrilla threat, helped by doctored interrogation reports to the Ecuadorian military that falsely linked the Ecuadorian Communist party to a group of young intellectuals who were arrested while training to defend the government of President Carlos Julio Arósemena from a rebellion by the CIA-advised Cuenca garrison.40 Arósemena, forced to break relations with Cuba, would soon announce that Ecuador was launching the first civic action program of its kind in Latin America, combining $1.5 million in U.S. military assistance with another $500,000 in AID funds for public works projects. Collaborating with McChristian’s local mission officer, an army major who trained the tank crews for the Bay of Pigs, would be the CIA.41
McChristian clearly understood the soft-spoken clandestine side of persuasion. “He was one of the most impressive officers that I have ever met,” SIL’s Donald Johnson said of McChristian. “If all of our top commanders and diplomats were of his caliber, we could be proud and there would not be any ‘ugly Americans.’”42 McChristian’s team used JAARS’s Helio Couriers to survey the entire Ecuadorian Amazon.43 The Green Berets stayed in Ecuador for three months while McChristian continued his tour of Amazon-basin countries. He was probably the colorful “general” referred to by General Lansdale’s boss, Undersecretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric, when he recalled, years later, that “we had this general who was of rather broad gauge; he sensed all the psychological, political and other than military aspects of the thing and really got around Latin America much more than any other men had done. Through this Southern Command we began to pull the whole thing together and get some priorities instead of having it done on sort of a country by country basis and
just between top military establishments.… I remember Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil particularly.”44
This transnational approach to counterinsurgency in “remote areas” was uniquely reflected in the missionary realm by the activities of SIL, then the only truly transnational presence in almost all the Amazon-basin countries. From Peru, SIL’s Jerry Elder sent Cam a clipping from Lima’s La Prensa that reported on a conference between Ecuadorian and Peruvian army commanders on the border. “The high point was the fact that they should unite to fight the common enemy, Communism,” wrote Elder. “I think this is particularly significant in light of the fact that one of the reasons that Commander Melger went out there was to give a report to the military on the possibility of our doing espionage along the border.”45
According to Elder, Melger was going to show him his report to the military before giving a fuller report to the minister of education. SIL’s willingness to collaborate extended beyond the primers for the Ministry of Education; apparently, espionage also might come under the missionary rubric.
SIL’s traditional support of Washington’s counterinsurgency doctrine by deferring to regimes that were allied with Washington had been successful in some countries. But it would prove counterproductive in Brazil. There the Goulart government had been targeted by Washington not for stability, but for destabilization.
Cam Townsend, overlooking this difference, failed to recognize how SIL could be trapped by his eagerness to seize the opportunity offered by his most important Brazilian contact, Darcy Ribeiro. Appointed to steer the new University of Brasília to safe haven, Ribeiro was himself lost in these turbulent political seas. The ceremony in Brasília in May 1963 for the Spirit of Philadelphia demonstrated the conflicting currents.
