by Gerard Colby
Since Peru was being given top billing at SIL’s exhibit, Cerro de Pasco Corporation sent SIL’s Peruvian chapter a check for $8,500. Cerro de Pasco, which would later be nationalized in Peru, was then facing growing unrest by Quechua miners.12
The largest donation, $11,000, was from the Pew family of Sun Oil Company (Sunoco), which in the 1970s would drill for oil in the homelands of the Shapra-Candoshi Indians, Tariri’s tribe. Sam Milbank, whose foundation journal would publish the Vicos Project’s report on its AID-funded research on the Quechua Indians, gave $5,000. So did David Weyerhaeuser, whose family’s lumber company did a huge business in extracting tropical woods from South and Central America. Quaker Oats heir Henry Crowell provided $10,000.
More than $150,000 had been raised in pledges, and a Charlotte, North Carolina, bank had set up a line of credit for over twice that amount.13 But that was far from the $600,000 cost. Worse, Cam’s projections of gate receipts had proved to be unrealistic; they would not overtake the costs by the end of the season in October. The board was worried about SIL’s future fund-raising prospects.
Cam dismissed Wycliffe’s thirty-year-old policy against solicitations as a “man-made rule.” He invoked Henderson Belk’s name as a supporter of his demand, insisting that the board “protect our backers from loss.”
“It’s our God-given duty,” he thundered. “And a man-made rule is not going to stop me from protecting my friends from loss and the cause of Christ from shame and defeat.”
He pulled out his ace. He offered his resignation, but insisted that he was going ahead in his appeals since he was receiving wonderful responses.14
He was seizing the prerogative of a founder, riding over democratic norms. Then he hit the board at its Achilles’ heel: their own new building in California. “What appalls me is that the five of you didn’t hit upon the obvious solution for paying our present unfunded bills: a mortgage on our Santa Ana property. Debtors shouldn’t call themselves insolvent when they have unencumbered property.”15
There were casualties. Billy Graham, who had been a member of Wycliffe’s board since 1961, resigned. But an old friend came to the rescue.
Cam had kept in touch with Rev. William Criswell over the years, as Criswell’s First Baptist Church of Dallas grew to become the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the United States. On almost any Sunday, more than 1,000 people packed the pews, including oil billionaire H. L. Hunt and his son Nelson Bunker Hunt. Criswell’s enmity for John F. Kennedy predated Hunt’s, but by 1964 both were joined behind Barry Goldwater’s struggle against Nelson Rockefeller. Texans, often sensitive to what goes on south of the Rio Grande, had already been impressed enough by SIL’s work to donate a “Friendship of Texas” building for SIL’s compound in Mexico City. Now Criswell wanted to see the fabled Amazon. Cam was only too happy to oblige. Luckily for Cam, the trip almost cost Criswell his life.
Cam accompanied Criswell as far as the Limoncocha base in Ecuador, then returned to the Lomalinda base in Colombia. Criswell proceeded on to Peru and the Yarinacocha base. From there, on a clear September morning, he flew out with JAARS’s Floyd Lyon in a pontooned Helio Courier used by the Peruvian army,16 heading northwest at 6,500 feet over the jungle. Criswell had seen the bloodcurdling mural of Tariri at the World’s Fair and wanted to meet the Shapra headman personally.
Halfway there, the plane’s engine failed.
“Tighten your seat belt, doctor,” said Lyon. “We’re going down!”
This Helio had floats, not wheels. So Lyon had to head for a stream and hope that if the plane nosed over when he hit the shallow stream, it would not catch fire.
It did not. The plane landed with a thud, stalled, and was stopped on a sandbar. Criswell and Lyon broke into jubilant prayer. Then Criswell lifted his head and his eyes widened. Indians, surrounding the plane, were peering in through the windows.
“It’s okay, doctor,” Lyon said. “They’re friendly.”17
So friendly, in fact, that Criswell did not even have to get his shoes wet. The village leader carried the beefy preacher on his back to the riverbank, even though the water was only ankle-high.
Criswell returned to Yarinacocha in another JAARS plane that afternoon. Two days later, after phoning in a story to the Dallas Morning News on his crash and assuring SIL that “this experience will bring in a lot more money for our work here in the jungle,” he flew back to Dallas. Tariri would have to wait.
Hearing the news at Lomalinda, Cam was grateful to the Lord for good fortune delivered exactly when needed to beat back the Wycliffe board’s challenge to the World’s Fair pavilion.
Criswell, too, was so grateful to the Lord and JAARS that he opened his church’s doors to SIL for a fund-raiser that netted more than $7,500 after Criswell told his tale to his congregation.
A group of Dallas businessmen, including the Hunts, began to gather in SIL’s name, offering the promise of resources that far exceeded those of the Belks and Charlotte, North Carolina. In all this enthusiasm, Cam caught a glimpse of the future: a new international translation center in Dallas.
At the same time Cam was casting SIL’s seed over Dallas, Dale Kietzman, the former Brazil branch director who was now extension director, and Lawrence Routh, JAARS’s fund-raising dynamo from North Carolina, began to organize testimonial dinners in cities across the country, using them as fund-raisers by selling $100 shares in the World’s Fair pavilion. Called “Operation 2000” from Cam’s “2000 Tribes to Go” slogan, these dinners became the means for establishing the Committee of Friends of Wycliffe, a network of businessmen and retirees of whom many would someday help Ronald Reagan win the White House.
Major Donors to SIL/WBT (includes Jungle Aviation and Radio Service [JAARS])
Sources: WBT/SIL Records, Foundation Center reports, and U.S. government records.
Already, Cam could point to success for the pavilion that went beyond dollars: nationwide publicity. NBC’s Huntley and Brinkley news show had interviewed Cam and talked about the mural. In just this first year, Cam told his rebellious board, 40,000 people had gone through SIL’s main exhibit each week, and 20,000 had viewed the Tariri mural.18 By the end of the 1964 season, over 312,000 people had seen Tariri’s terrifying story.19
How many more could be attracted if Tariri were able to come to the United States? Tariri’s biography, now completed by Ethel Wallis, would be ready by then for sale at the fair. Tariri could be put on tour throughout the nation, but only if kept on a tight rein.
Cam turned to Don Burns, who in September had just been appointed chair of the committee on bilingual education for the Peruvian Andes. Burns could not speak to Tariri in Shapra, but American audiences could not understand Tariri’s words either. Besides, Burns was loyal to Cam and could be counted on to follow his orders explicitly. Could he come up with Tariri next summer?
Burns was only too happy to go as guerrilla war broke out that summer in the Andean highlands. The National Liberation Army led by Héctor Béjar was operating near his bilingual center in Ayacucho, and it was not a healthy time for an unarmed American working for the Belaúnde regime to be there. SIL’s programs could be misconstrued as gathering intelligence on the Indians, and it admittedly ran a jungle-aviation subsidiary of the regime’s air force.
In the lowlands to the east, Will Kindberg, SIL’s translator among the Campa Indians, also withdrew from his village post. U.S. military action was heating up on the Andes’ eastern slopes, the “eyebrows of the jungle.” Green Berets were seen in the area with Peruvian Rangers. Rumors, which turned out to be true, had it that the CIA, under AID cover, was setting up a secret training camp to drill a new elite battalion of Rangers in jungle warfare. The Peruvians called the camp Sinchi, or Crossed Spears; others in the CIA would call it a “miniature Fort Bragg.”20
PREPARING THE KILLING GROUND
In May 1965, as Peruvian intelligence chief General Armando Artola attended a meeting in Brazil of Latin America’s intelligence chiefs,21 the CIA s
tation in Lima began sending a series of concerned reports to National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. The Moviemiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), according to a CIA informant, was about to commence guerrilla operations in the Campa Indian area in the eastern Andes. More disturbing, however, were reports that among the guerrilla leaders was a man named Guevara.
Cuba’s Che Guevara had recently disappeared from public view. Was he in Peru?
The Peruvian economy, spurred on by exports and increased European and American investments, had enjoyed a 7 percent growth rate during Belaúnde’s first year in office. But these exports and investments, while benefiting the upper classes, also masked a continuing grim picture for the peasants. Everyone knew that the peasants’ patience eventually would run out. The only question was timing: Would that happen during a guerrilla war?
Convinced that Peru was in a state of “latent insurgency,” the military increased its civic action, employing students in a wide range of activities in the Andes.22 At the same time, with the help of the CIA and the U.S. Military Mission, it prepared to deal with insurgency the way Winston Churchill had recommended the Western powers should deal with the Russian Revolution: “Strangle the infant in its crib.”
The CIA’s “miniature Fort Bragg” in the Peruvian jungle grew during the first six months of 1965. Classrooms were erected beside barracks and mess halls, and Green Berets were soon putting Peruvians through exercises at parachute-jump towers and amphibious-landing facilities. The official U.S. military aid program, ostensibly overseen by the air force attaché but actually by the CIA, provided assault helicopters for treetop raid mobility. Helipads and a runway were installed. Arms and other equipment were flown in clandestinely.23
SIL’s James Wroughton later told author David Stoll that he thought JAARS had been called on by the Peruvian military to do a “bit of transport” and provide “some flights for the Army or Guardia Civil” during the 1965 operations against the MIR, a claim subsequently denied by another SIL official, Eugene Loos.24 But there could be no denying that JAARS’s Helios, after all, were part of the Peruvian air force and were available on command. JAARS pilots had been training Peruvian army pilots for years, and their use in the jungle was not new. The CIA was already leasing Helios in Peru at such a reasonable price that CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell was said to have complained to Helio Corporation president Lynn Bollinger about Helio leasing costs in Laos, which were four times higher. Helios provided a longer range than did helicopters, and their use in the jungle was not new. Just the previous May, the CIA had cooperated with the Helio Corporation to sell more planes to Belaúnde, assigning a Helio owned by one of its fronts, King Hurley Company, to Larry Montgomery and Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty for a sales visit to Lima.25
Recruitment of the special strike force was more of a problem for the CIA. The Peruvian generals were “uneasy” about the presence of the CIA and the Green Berets in Peruvian military operations in the vast, unprotected Amazon. They also worried about the loyalty of Quechua Indian draftees, even to the point of declining to assign troops for training. So the CIA began to hire its own troops. “The CIA had been required to recruit its fighting manpower from among the available local populace. By paying higher wages than the army (and offering fringe benefits, better training, and ‘esprit de corps’) the agency soon developed a relatively efficient fighting force.”26
The CIA’s task was eased by a fundamental flaw in the MIR’s planning. The MIR began working in the area only six months before it began its military operations, hardly enough time to develop ties to the local populace. The MIR’s desire to begin guerrilla warfare as soon as possible, although designed to preempt Belaúnde’s counterinsurgency operations, ironically dovetailed with the CIA’s timetable. An American journalist who traveled through the Campa area after the MIR was defeated analyzed the problem confronting Guillermo Lobatón, the MIR field commander of the Túpac Amaru Front. Lobatón, a cultured Peruvian of African descent who understood what discrimination practiced by Lima’s white elite felt like, “was apparently attempting to work with the warlike Campa the way General Vo Nguyen Giap worked with the mountain tribes of northeastern Vietnam during the Second World War. The difference, however, is that Giap worked politically with his tribesmen for two years before entering combat; the Peruvian guerrillas worked with the Campas for less than six months in a very desultory fashion.”27 Few of the Indians, despite sympathy for the MIR, joined the Túpac Amaru Front as either guerrillas or village cadre.
Tragically for the Indians, neither the CIA nor the Peruvian military made that distinction.
GODS OF WRATH
The moon is a god, the Campa Indians believe, a kindly god who gives the people their food, manioc, and takes in return their dead. Like many Amazonian tribes, the Campa place their dead in the river, to float downstream, where the Moon-God turns the body to stone and swallows it. When the face of the moon turns dark, it is because the god has choked on a body. When the moon shines its eerie silver over their river and thatched homes, the god is content. The people can look forward to the morning sun.
But in August 1965, it was different. The gods brought not warmth from the heavens, but roaring, fiery death.
Peruvian air force pilots, following the winding Sonomoro River that drained the lower Andes, looked down upon the Campa village of Bustamente. Twenty years before, it would have been impossible to know which village was which. But now, with the help of the American flying missionaries, the maps were more accurate.
The Indians did not understand what the approaching planes meant. They did not know that some of their brethren had been seized a few days before by troops searching for leftist guerrillas. They knew only that the soldiers were angry with the bearded white men who had begun showing up in their villages six months before. The bearded ones were armed and had called themselves revolutionaries, using the old Inca name Túpac Amaru, the leader of the last great Inca revolt against the Spaniards. They had camped among the people and spoke of their willingness to help the Campa resist the land grabbers who came from across the mountains. And the Indians listened, impressed by the fact that no whites had ever spoken this way before.
Even when columns of army Rangers appeared, demanding answers, the quiet words of the Túpac Amaru group, not the soldiers’ threats, lingered in the Indians’ ears. Later, the Peruvian War Ministry argued that the Campa seldom cooperated with the troops. But the Indians never expected what came next.
Bombs exploded all around them, dismembering men, women, and children alike. Houses and people erupted in flames. Orange walls of fire rolled over the people, leaving behind flaming jelly that clung to their skin. Napalm, reportedly made for the Peruvian air force by Standard Oil’s International Petroleum Company,28 had come to the Amazon, courtesy of the Pentagon and some of the same Peruvian air force generals Larry Montgomery had once taught to fly. Hell had arrived on the wings of an angel, and to the Campa majority holding onto the old ways, both hell and the angel were Christian.
The MIR guerrillas were equally surprised at the ferocity of the aerial attacks. They had begun military operations two months earlier, in June, shortly after their leaders had gathered downstream from the Inca ruins of Machu-Picchu. There, they had drawn up a “Revolutionary Proclamation to the Peruvian People,” emphasizing the need for “genuine agrarian reform,” “recovery of full national sovereignty,” a “living wage for the family,” urban reform through homeownership, and “immediate recovery of Peru’s oil.”29
The issues were out, and the lines were drawn. After a few weeks of sacking estates and mines in the hills west of the Campa territory, the MIR guerrillas were hit by the CIA’s new strike force. Green Beret-advised Rangers rushed east in trucks as far as the roads went, taking positions at the northern and southern perimeters of the combat zone. Naval units plowed up the Ucayali River from Iquitos, sweeping past Pucallpa into the Ucayali’s local tributaries to seal off the area. After encountering guerrilla r
esistance, the northern column wheeled south in a classic pincer strategy to converge with the southern column at the town of Pucutá, which had been occupied by MIR and was being bombed with napalm and machine-gunned by the Peruvian air force. The combined army forces then moved north again and found that the MIR had withdrawn deeper into the eastern rain forest.
Fresh Ranger units were flown in for an attack on the Campa town of Satipo, in the north, where massacres of Indians took place. The Green Berets then marched troops south, setting up a command headquarters near Mazanari and seizing the village of Kubanti. Another column marched north to reinforce them for the final assault on the Campa village of Bustamente, Lobatón’s headquarters. Again they bombed and machine-gunned, only to find that the guerrillas had moved east again, even deeper into the rain forest.
A month passed with no contact. The CIA tried to tighten its hold on the Campa villages with both civic action and interrogations. Then, in September, the Andes erupted. Quechua Indians rebelled near Don Burns’s new bilingual school. MIR’s allies, Héctor Béjar’s National Liberation Army, gave armed support.
The army attack on MIR resumed, killing and wounding guerrillas, driving Lobatón north again toward the Green Berets’ headquarters at Mazanari.
Hundreds of Campa were killed. Some Campa charged that JAARS pilots had flown Helios overhead with loudspeakers, urging them to cooperate in the army’s campaign,30 an aerial technique that SIL would soon use in its pacification efforts with the Mayoruna and the Auca in Ecuador. Some Americans reviewing the Campa charges would later question how the Indians could distinguish SIL’s planes from others, although many SIL planes bear the distinctive SIL emblem, an Incan Indian within a triangle, and Helios have unparalleled wingspans. Finally, all SIL’s planes, thanks to Cam’s public relations, were officially part of the Peruvian air force and subject to its commands.
