by Gerard Colby
In Requeña, excitement grew when local authorities lost radio contact with the expedition. The first press reports in Lima reflected the hysteria generated by local government officials: The expedition, besides the guides, had suffered 2 wounded, then 4, then 11 out of 38 men.10 The Indians—numbered first at 8,000, then at 2,000, and then 50011—were armed with modern weapons; they fought like drilled units, they had radios, they intercepted radio transmissions from Requeña, they were led by whites.12
SIL missionaries inadvertently added fuel to the fire by assuring the press that the attackers were neither their “civilized” wards nor the Indians known to be currently living on the border.’13 Was this an incursion by Brazilians? Brazilian smugglers? Brazilian communists?14
What did Brazil have to say? The Brazilian ambassador in Lima kept his composure. No, he knew only what he read in the papers. No, he knew of no unusual activities on the Brazilian side of the border.15
It blew up into a national crisis with possible international repercussions. Belaúnde sent Requeña a wire of concern for the expedition. Peruvian air force units based at the U.S.-made airport in Iquitos were put on alert to repel any “new incursions.”16 The commander of Peru’s air force flew to Iquitos to direct the operations personally. European and American reporters arrived. A rescue force, equipped with special arms for jungle warfare, was quickly assembled in Requeña and sent in to break the Indian circle surrounding the expedition.
The Matses, meanwhile, tried one more attack. Encountering heavy resistance, they gave it up. When planes were heard overhead, they melted into the jungle, leaving the whites wide-eyed and feverish behind their guns.
Peruvians suspected foreigners of arming Mayoruna Indians who defended their lands in March 1964. Suspects included communist guerrillas, cocaine smugglers, and the Brazilian government. Fear of foreign designs on the Peruvian Amazon inspired Lima’s request for U.S. military assistance during the fighting, which the Johnson administration quickly granted.
Source: La Prensa (Lima), March 21, 1964.
Now came the bombs; shrapnel ripping through foliage; the rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire raking the forest; and a new weapon, the one Standard Oil’s local subsidiary reportedly had asked Washington for permission to produce for the Belaúnde regime of democracy—napalm17—making the tribe’s thatched long communal homes, exposed in clearings, explode in flames. But the bombs and bullets could not penetrate the living roof of forest canopy. Again and again the old U.S.-surplus B-26 bombers unloaded their bombs as if this were again the Ecuador war over the Amazon, and again the Indians were protected by nature* The Amazon jungle still had awesome powers.
For a reason that remained unexplained, Requeñas mayor had launched his expedition in the middle of the rainy season. If his purpose was to hunt down the Indians more easily, since they were more visible on the high ground, he got his wish. But the Amazon also extracted its own price: Its torrential rains kept the small Peruvian helicopters from rescuing the wounded members of his expedition. The Peruvian military blamed the weather and the difficulty of landing helicopters amid canopy jungle. Then, without blinking an eye, they announced a solution: not only larger helicopters, but the U.S. Marines.18
An enterprising newsman from Lima took photographs of the marines arming the choppers. The photographs were never printed. They show bubble-headed marine helicopters that looked more like fragile dragonflies than the monster aerial ambulances mentioned in Lima’s newspapers.19 They were not large, certainly not capable of carrying the twenty people promised by Lima’s press.20 But the U.S. “rescue operation” (which was actually accomplished by the Peruvian army’s relief column) served to lend “civic action” a humanitarian image to what would otherwise have been a questionable American presence for Peruvians—U.S. Marines in the Peruvian Amazon during a heated Standard Oil controversy.
The U.S. Southern Command could not afford it to be otherwise. A U.S. military presence in the Peruvian Amazon had to be secured for a reason other than humanitarian purposes: counterinsurgency. The CIA had information that arms were being smuggled from Manaus down the Amazon and across the Brazilian border to Peruvian leftists who were planning to launch a guerrilla war on the tropical eastern slopes of the Andes, along what Peruvians called “the eyebrows of the jungle.”
The CIA knew about this plan because it had an informer inside the Peruvian group that was planning the guerrilla war, the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), or Movement of the Revolutionary Left. This was the same name that young pro-Castro dissenters in Rómulo Betancourt’s party in Venezuela had adopted after being jailed and expelled. CIA analysts were convinced, not inaccurately, that they were confronting an international guerrilla alliance. Their only mistake, as in Vietnam, was overestimating its coordination and control by Moscow and China and underestimating each guerrilla group’s national origins and sense of patriotism as motives for its willingness to fight and die. But two things the CIA did not underestimate: the danger to U.S.-backed regimes in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia posed by unrest spreading along the Andes among 11 million Quechua Indians and the potential of disciplined guerrillas to spark the Andean tinderbox into a continentwide revolution.
WAITING FOR MIR
In the White House, alarm was growing. President Johnson had been briefed at a meeting with Peru’s ambassador that the unrest by Indian peasants in the Andes was “communist-inspired.”
“Communist subversive activity in Peru has been increasing,” Johnson learned, “particularly in communist-inspired peasant ‘invasions’ of land-holdings in the Siena, resulting in recent bloody clashes.” Assistant Secretary Thomas Mann had been impatient with Belaúnde’s coolheaded reaction. Now, however, he was getting a response more to his liking, thanks to press hysteria in Peru. Police claimed to have seized a cache of weapons in a raid in Miraflores, a suburb of Lima, in January. The raid caused a sensation, backing the governments charges that a “terrorist” plot was under way.21 In fact, the weapons had been “planted by police,” the U.S. Air Force attaché in Lima later cabled the Pentagon, “in order [to] help alert high government officials and the general public to [the] danger of communist subversive activities.”22
The ruse worked on both the American and Peruvian presidents. Belaúnde’s government had been “at first inclined to belittle the problem, but is now showing signs of taking more forceful action,” Johnson was told. “A number of Communist and Castroist leaders have been arrested, a large arms cache has been found in the Lima area, and constitutional guarantees have just been suspended in the Department of Cuzco where the land invasion problem is more serious.” Johnson was advised to “express our concern and sympathy over the problem of Castro-Communist subversion and violence, and to express satisfaction over the recent measures taken by the Government to cope with the problem.”23
But the State Department was, in fact, not satisfied with the pace of agrarian and educational reform. The CIA noted that Peru had maintained a “noteworthy record of financial stability” during the conservative regime of Manuel Prado, with balanced budgets, a favorable trade balance, a stable currency, and a growth in the gross national product of close to 6 percent per year. “However, the economic benefits have accrued to only a small minority of Peru’s 11 million inhabitants.” The CIA memo continued:
The sprawling slums of Lima are also a fertile breeding ground for violence and subversion. The continuous influx of Indians from the highlands has swollen the slum population to close to 500,000. Thus far, extremist elements have not had much success in exploiting the situation in the “barriadas”; the security police have been able to bring sporadic, unorganized riots under control. Given leadership and organization or a provocative enough incident, however, the potential does exist for systematic disorder in this key metropolitan area.24
The root of the crisis was the landed aristocracy in the highlands, “where many landlords and overseers are determined to keep the Indian population in a s
tate of peonage.” And, the CIA added ominously, “the MIR is only the most recent organization to seek to exploit these grievances.”
To the CIA, however, and to most officials of the Johnson administration, the MIR’s acceptance of aid from Cuba and China precluded its being an authentic Peruvian political phenomenon; it was instead looked upon as one more arm of the International Communist Conspiracy that Washington was fighting from the Berlin Wall to the rice paddies of Vietnam. Therefore, if Peru was to become a model for Mann’s new Alliance for Progress, its handling of the MIR would have to become an example to the rest of Latin America. The Alliance’s military would have to be able to defend itself against insurgences that, although appearing to be native, were actually directed from dark powers outside the hemisphere.
The MIR was no match for the determined military might arrayed against it. If anything, its opponents—the CIA, AID, and the Pentagon, allied with Belaúnde and the Peruvian military—were more truly an international alliance than was the MIR, whose ties to Cuba and China were much weaker politically and militarily in both kind and degree.
The MIR was composed, for the most part, of young APRA intellectuals. Inspired by the Cuban revolution against the Batista dictatorship and the sweeping social and agrarian reforms that followed, they had challenged Haya de la Torre’s increasingly conservative dominion over APRA and had been expelled. After the military abruptly canceled APRA’s hairbreadth victory over Belaúnde in the 1962 elections, the MIR decided to follow the path of the guerrilla.
CIA officer Philip Agee’s March 1963 interrogation of Enrique Amaya Quintana, a MIR deserter, confirmed that the MIR had sent several hundred men to Cuba for three months of intensive training in guerrilla warfare. Amaya’s desertion was the key to the MIR’s destruction.
“He really is a case of nerves,” Agee recorded in his diary. “What he wants is financial assistance to get his wife and child out of Peru and to resettle in some other country. He says he became disillusioned during the training in Cuba, but my guess is that he’s lost his nerve now that he’s almost on the battlefield.” In return for his safety, Amaya provided addresses throughout Latin America and the key to a code system for communications with Havana. But Agee was not satisfied. He wanted an agent in place. “I finally got him to agree to spending at least a short period in Peru with his former friends.”25
Amaya, at the heart of MIR’s communications, provided the CIA with secret intelligence. By November 1963, Clark Simmons, deputy chief of the CIA station in Lima, was able to report to Agee that Amaya’s information was “pure gold”:
He has pinpointed about ten base camps and caching sites plus identification of much of the urban infrastructure with full details of each phase of their training and planning. The Lima station has a notebook with maps, names and addresses, photographs and everything else of importance on the MIR, which the station considered to be the most important insurgency threat in Peru. The notebook is in Spanish and is constantly updated so that just at the right moment it can be turned over to the Peruvian military.”26
Was this the right moment? Peasant unrest in the Andes had reached new heights in 1962 and 1963. In the valleys of Cuzco department, a spontaneous Quechua movement of peasant leagues and trade unions had been politicized by a young anti-Stalinist intellectual named Hugo Blanco.
The son of a peasant mother and a lawyer, Blanco had joined the Revolutionary Workers party after returning from college in Argentina. This was a Marxist party that accepted the analysis of Russia’s Leon Trotsky. Lenin’s former lieutenant, Trotsky had led the Left Opposition against Stalin and had been expelled and then murdered in Mexico in 1940 by Stalin’s henchmen. Blanco, like many intellectuals, had been greatly influenced by the Mexican, Russian, and Cuban revolutions, as well as by the corruption of the Russian revolution by Stalin and antidemocratic elements in the Soviet Communist party. This last lesson cost Blanco the support of the Peruvian Communists, who isolated him and the peasant movement he had organized with Cuban financial support. That did not stop the Indians from seizing estates and setting up their own local governments or the CIA authorities from denouncing him as a Communist. By November 1962, after a clash with police, Blanco had became a fugitive; the self-defense zone in the Valley of La Convención proved unable to resist military repression; land seizures were brutually repressed.
In May 1963, following the shooting near the Bolivian border of Peruvian intellectuals (including one of the country’s foremost young poets, Javier Heraud) returning from Cuba, the military junta charged that there were ties between the would-be guerrillas and Blanco’s movement. It conducted mass arrests of leftists throughout Peru. Blanco was finally captured on May 29, tried, and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Blanco’s imprisonment and the repression of the peasant movement did not stop the MIR, but they did deprive the organization of its only indigenous leader of highland peasants when it began guerrilla operations.
By early February 1964, peasant unrest was again mounting in the valleys of Cuzco. The CIA had information that MIR operations were imminent. Campesinos had attacked and surrounded a police post in Huarocondo and stoned the police. Belaúnde had been prompted to order the military to fly in hundreds of assault police.27
A week later, the CIA learned that the MIR was gearing up for revolutionary action and would be receiving arms through Brazil’s Amazon.28 The Brazilian connection was seen as ominous; indeed, “Brazil is the most serious problem for us in Latin America,” said the CIA.29 Another source of arms, a gunrunner in Bolivia named Klaus Altmann, was less worrisome. Altmann was a CIA asset whose real name was Klaus Barbie, a Nazi fugitive. After helping U.S. intelligence during the postwar occupation of Germany, he was allowed to escape to Argentina, the old haunt of a former Nazi fugitive investigator from U.S. army intelligence and subsequent chief of the CIA’s clandestine operations in Latin America, Colonel J. C. King. Barbie was loyal to his new masters. After his intermediary delivered the Mausers that MIR had purchased, MIR found that the firing pins were defective and the wrong kind of ammunition had been supplied. MIR’s leaders shrugged it off, preferring to believe they could obtain arms from captured soldiers.30 They did not see Barbie’s defective shipment as an ominous sign, any more than they did the arrival of a U.S. general in Lima.
Air Force General Robert W. Breitweiser had been the Pentagon’s director of intelligence. In 1963, however, he accepted a politically loaded field assignment, the kind that makes or breaks military careers. He was moved out of the Joint Chiefs office and assigned to Panama as commander of all U.S. air forces in Latin America. This command included the aviation mission to Peru commanded by Clark Simmons, a U.S. Air Force attaché (and CIA operative); Simmons’s mission worked with Peruvian army pilots who were being trained by SIL’s JAARS in the use of Helios for jungle flying.
On March 4, 1964, Breitweiser arrived in Lima. He conferred with several of his counterparts in the Peruvian air force, with members of the U.S. aviation mission to Peru, and undoubtedly with Ambassador James Wesley Jones and the top men in the CIA station, including Clark Simmons. When Breitweiser arrived back in Panama, it was normal procedure for him to report to his superior, the commander in chief of the Southern Command, General Andrew O’Meara, who was then reviewing contingency plans for a possible U.S. military intervention against Brazil. Tensions were high among intelligence officials over the Amazon-basin countries.
When word came from Peru’s air force commander of the Matses’ attack on the road-surveying expedition, Breitweiser and O’Meara did not hesitate.
Two transport planes carrying U.S. Marines and two H-43 assault helicopters were rushed to Iquitos. Weather prevented them from rescuing the wounded before the relief column reached them. But the helicopters remained in Iquitos, fully armed. They were waiting for the MIR.
On March 21, one day after the marines surveyed the Matses area by chopper, using new helipads erected in Requeña and Curuga, Belaúndes governm
ent announced that it would study the possibility of establishing “military colonies” along the Blanco and Tapiche rivers near the Brazilian border.31
INTERNAL WARS AND “OCCUPIED” INDIANS
While they waited for the MIR, U.S. counterinsurgency experts were not idle. The CIA built one of its largest stations in Latin America at this time, in Pucallpa, buying information, loyalty, assets, and ultimately agents with distributor franchises for American companies like Coca-Cola. The CIA station kept lists of agents and assets, who were given preferential treatment when AID officers in the embassy were asked by American companies for recommendations on local representatives. The same applied to AID credit itself.32
At the same time, the “Mayoruna attack” provided the perfect cover for intervening in neighboring Bolivia. The CIA sent air shipments of small arms through Iquitos, across the Peruvian Amazon, and down to Cuzco and Lake Titicaca to the south. These arms were bound for the Bolivian military, which was planning to overthrow the civilian government of President Victor Paz Estenssoro.33 The objective was to prevent the coming to power of the Indian miners’ candidate, former Vice President Juan Lechín.
In November, the CIA station in La Paz worked closely with U.S. Air Force Attaché Colonel Edward Fox to install Bolivia’s air force chief, General René Barrientos as the new president.
The coup had a profound impact on the future of Bolivia’s Indians. Paz had allowed the traditional army, smashed by the Aymará Indian miners’ revolution in 1952, to be rebuilt quietly by the U.S. military aid program; by 1964, 1,200 soldiers had been trained in the Panama Canal Zone or the United States.34 Now it was the bedrock of the Barrientos dictatorship.
By the end of 1964, it was obvious that Brazil’s military coup had been the bellwether for an end to civilian democracy in much of Latin America. Just as the Bolivian coup came in the wake of the Brazilian coup, so did the launching of a ferocious military offensive against the “red” peasant republics in the Andes of southern Colombia.
