by Gerard Colby
This new role by the military, however, is not free from perils and dilemmas. There is always the risk that the authoritarian style will result in repression. The temptation to expand measures for security or discipline or efficiency to the point of curtailing individual liberties, beyond what is required for the restoration of order and social progress, is not easy to resist.
—NELSON ROCKEFELLER,
The Rockefeller Report on the Americas:
The Official Report of a United States
Presidential Mission for the Western Hemisphere (1969)
39
INVASION OF THE AMAZON
THE RISE OF GALO PLAZA
This was not the first time that the tall, distinguished, gray-haired man had been to the White House. During his forty years of public life, Ecuador’s Galo Plaza had often appeared in Washington as the representative of one of South America’s smaller countries, either as ambassador or as its visiting head of state. But never before had he been invited to a reception for a newly inaugurated U.S. president as representative of all Latin America, the secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS). And never with such influential friends as Nelson Rockefeller so close to the pinnacle of power in the hemisphere—or so it seemed in January 1969.
As the new head of the OAS, Galo Plaza had much to look forward to with the Nixon administration. Rockefeller’s top foreign policy aide, Henry Kissinger, was now in charge of the powerful National Security Council. At the urging of David Rockefeller, Charles Meyer of the Latin American division of Sears, Roebuck was now head of the State Department’s Latin American branch. Both men could be assumed to share many of the views of Nelson Rockefeller and, therefore, of Galo Plaza.
This was the happy end of a series of events that had started less than a year before, on April 23, 1968, when Galo Plaza had attended his first White House dinner for OAS delegates as their newly elected secretary general. That evening, neither he nor any of his fellow guests could have fathomed the reasons or surmised the lengths that Lyndon Johnson had gone to ensure a future for Latin American friends of Republican Nelson Rockefeller. When President Johnson had slipped out of the dinner hall that night, it was to meet secretly with the man who had done more than any other since World War II to shape U.S.–Latin American relations, and to urge him to run for president.
But no one could have missed the meaning of Johnsons parting speech to the OAS delegates that night. Johnson spoke of the Amazon basin as if another Mekong Basin Development Program were in the works. “Locked behind the high mountain ranges and rain forests … we find many unknown resources. The new frontiers of South America’s heartland beckon.”1 It seemed that the Amazon was at last at hand. And with Galo Plaza as the new head of the OAS, both Rockefeller and Johnson knew they had a dependable hand on the rudder of U.S.-Latin American diplomatic relations.
In 1967, the Johnson administration had learned of attempts by Latin Americans to take control of their organization or, more precisely, of its finances. Five American officers in the OAS Treasury suddenly found themselves scheduled for reassignment.2 The Johnson administration moved quickly to forestall this development. Its purported task was to breathe “new life” into the OAS. Internal power struggles had developed over Johnson’s use of the OAS as a thin cover for the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. And there was also the vexing problem of Cuba’s continuing defiance of U.S. power over the hemisphere’s economic future.
Galo Plaza seemed perfect for restoring the OAS’s internal stability and improving the organization’s image. Rockefeller circles likened him to an “international troubleshooter.” Loyal to his roots as a major Ecuadorian landowner, lawyer for the United Fruit Company, and former student at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Galo Plaza could be counted on to maintain order within the organization while ensuring OAS support for CIA subversion of leftist-minded governments, not only in Ecuador (where the Velasco and Arósemena governments had both fallen to CIA-backed coups), but throughout Latin America. He had also endorsed the efforts of Nelson’s brother, John 3rd, to introduce birth control among Ecuador’s Indians through the Agency for International Development, a major new policy initiative. In addition, Galo Plaza could ensure the hemispherewide transfer of rural development programs from Rockefeller’s American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) to the OAS. Most important, all this would give Rockefeller, through his influence on Galo Plaza, added weight not only in the OAS, but also in any White House deliberation over using the OAS.
Galo Plaza’s recruitment had not come easily. He had been courted by Rockefeller, Lincoln Gordon (who had been rewarded for his ambassadorial performance in Brazil with appointment as assistant secretary of state), and U.S. Ambassador to Ecuador Wymberly Coerr. But the Ecuadorian was reluctant to sit in the hot seat of the hemisphere, acting as a foil for unilateral decisions by Washington. David Rockefeller’s friend, former Xerox Corporation chairman and current OAS Ambassador Sol Linowitz, had to phone Washington’s assurance “that we are eager to make the OAS one of the truly significant international organizations of our time.”
Flattered, Galo Plaza agreed to a lunch at which Linowitz assured him that Washington would not divulge their conversation to Galo Plaza’s OAS colleagues.3 Linowitz conferred again with Rockefeller, and when he met Galo Plaza later, he found the Ecuadorian more amenable. “He told me—and later repeated to Nelson Rockefeller,” Linowitz reported to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “that if he felt there is an opportunity for him to render important service he would not refuse it.”4
Galo Plaza was elected by OAS member states in February 1968 almost by acclamation; only Fernando Belaúnde Terry’s representative from Peru, Ecuador’s rival for Amazonian oil lands, abstained.
News of the election of this known Rockefeller friend roused cheers from an unexpected quarter. William Cameron Townsend immediately sent a letter of congratulations to the man who had welcomed the missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics into Ecuador’s Amazon jungle. Galo Plaza answered that “the Inter-American system is about to reach the most decisive moment in its history.”5 Only those who were privy to Townsend’s five decades of successful maneuvering within the outer orbit of Rockefeller power could have guessed why Ecuador’s former president provided common ground for the interests of Cam and Nelson Rockefeller to converge.
Binding them, like so many others, was that magical subterranean substance called oil.
Significant quantities of petroleum had been rediscovered in the very region of Ecuador, the Amazonian Oriente, where Galo Plaza had argued two decades earlier that there was no oil. The 1967 oil discovery at Lago Agrio had been aided by SIL’s presence in the jungle; Limoncocha’s airstrip was used by the oilmen and on at least one occasion JAARS ferried Texaco oil geologists in and out of the jungle. The pace of exploration was feverish because OPEC was becoming bolder in its arguments for higher prices for Middle East oil. Ecuador’s 6 percent royalty was eight times less than the lowest royalty received in the Middle East, and Arab-Israeli conflicts threatened to disrupt oil supplies. (Indeed, the Amazon discovery beat out the 1967 Arab-Israeli War by only two months.) In addition, Texaco-Gulf’s five-year exploration contract with Ecuador and its 1.65-million-hectare concession was due to expire in 1969. Accordingly, Ecuador’s Amazon jungle was now discovered to be awash with oil; of 78 test wells drilled by 1971, Texaco reported that 74 were productive.6 Oil crews drilled wells and built a pipeline through the lands of the Kofán, Siona, and Secoya Indians; other crews pushed into the jungles south of the Napo River, home of Rachel Saints feared “Auca,” the Huaorani Indians.
SIL’s missionaries took on the role of vanguard for the oil companies, flying ahead to warn the Huaorani away from oil crews advancing through the jungle and trying to persuade the Indians to surrender to the inevitability of Rachel Saint’s love. SIL’s tactics succeeded in avoiding confrontations, but through fear more than love
. Swooping down with loudspeakers mounted on wings, JAARS planes, though speaking Huao, terrified the Huaorani. The Indians kept burning their thatched houses and fleeing into the forest. The breakthrough for the Lord came in 1968, when SIL switched to air-dropping baskets containing hidden radio transmitters. Hearing a brother of a captured Huaorani demand an ax, a plane supplied the miracle from the sky. Exhausted, sick, and faced with an evidently greater power, ninety-two Huaorani delivered themselves to Rachel’s care at a specified village site near SIL’s jungle base, Limoncocha.
Ecuador’s Indians and SIL
Sources: Scott S. Robinson, “Numbers, Distribution and Present State of the Indigenous Groups of the Coastal and Amazonian Regions of Ecuador,” in Walter Dostal, ed., The Situation of the Indian in South America, p. 398; Angel Barriga B., Mapas de Grupos Indigenas (Quito: Instituto Ecuatoriano de Antropologia y Geografia, 1961); Wycliffe Bible Translators, Middle of the World: Wycliffe Bible Translators in Ecuador (Santa Ana, Calif.: Wycliffe Bible Translators, 1972).
For six weeks, the village, now suddenly doubled in size to more than 200 Huaorani, tried to cope with hunger, malnutrition, and disease. Worried about exposing the newcomers to diseases they had no immunity against, Rachel halted JAARS landings and had supplies air-dropped. As resources dwindled and disputes deteriorated into threats of spearing, some of the newcomers tried to leave, only to be forced back by Rachel’s followers.7 Christian guilt grew over “illegitimate” babies, leaving one pregnant convert a suicide and babies near-victims of drowning.8 Meanwhile, the oil crews pressed on against the territory of the last Huaorani still in the jungle; helicopters arrived and, with them, ultimatums. In August 1969, one of the two remaining bands straggled into Rachel’s village seeking refuge. “How can they assume good will when we ferret them out so relentlessly,” SIL’s Catherine Peeke later asked in her diary, “approaching from the very sky, the sphere which they do not control? They are desperate to hide from forces which they do not understand—but how much more desperate they would be if they really did understand!”9
Ecuador Oil
Sources: International Petroleum Encyclopedia, 1983 (Tulsa, Okla.: PennWell Publishing Company, 1983), p. 111; New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 16, 1977; Wall Street Journal, February 25, 1969; Journal of Commerce, November 18, 1970; Oil and Gas Journal, November 30, 1970.
Enlightenment came in the form of a polio epidemic that struck two weeks after the latest band of Indians arrived. It hit so fast that by the time polio was diagnosed, scores of Indians were sick, and two had died. Missionary physicians prescribed immediate vaccination. But Rachel decided that the new arrivals might flee or mistake a male doctor’s puncturing their skins with needles for an attack, becoming violent and resorting to spears. She refused, waiting until both she and the Huaorani were too sick to resist. By that time, all the Huaorani were infected; sixteen deaths would be recorded, and another sixteen Indians were left crippled.
All this occurred in the land of Galo Plaza, the friend of Cam Townsend and Nelson Rockefeller, who brought SIL and Nelson’s International Basic Economy Corporation into Ecuador to prompt development in Indian lands. Now, as head of the OAS, he would further that goal to include Johnson’s new frontiers in the Amazon.
Galo Plaza was shrewd enough to call for a sharing of power over financing and planning. The OAS, he said, “in order to recover the confidence of Latin America as an instrument of relationships among the countries, should play a decisive role in the [economic] integration effort. The image of the Alliance will continue to be distorted if the fallacy that this is a bilateral action is allowed to persist. As a matter of dignity, the concept of donation must be destroyed and cast out from the hemisphere. Aid must be furnished with severity, as an investment in stability.” The alternative, “unilateral political intervention” by the United States, was “contrary to the very idea of the Organization.” Galo Plaza argued instead for “collective measures that will reflect the clear will of the peoples.”10 The concept really did not abandon economic sanctions or military interventions, such as those used against Cuba and the Dominican Republic; it merely shifted the auspices to the OAS. Galo Plaza preferred genuine inter-American actions to the United States’ use of the OAS as a fig leaf. If his approach was to succeed, however, the United States would have to restrain itself from the temptation of using its economic and military power unilaterally.
Adolf Berle echoed this theme more urgently as cochairman of the OAS Association, but placed more of the onus on Latin Americans. Speaking at a special “summit” luncheon of U.S. inter-American and foreign affairs leaders held by the association just before Richard Nixon’s inauguration, Berle urged public support for the OAS as the Western Hemisphere’s “substitute for empire.”
In attendance, Galo Plaza listened as Berle, in what became the swan song of his long career, issued a blunt ultimatum. He warned some eighty association guests that “unless the Organization of American States succeeds, I see no escape from empire.… This is a frightening statement but I think true. For the past generation, the U.S. has been doing its best to avoid becoming an empire.” The problem was “how we can avoid it.”
His solution was even more startling: He called upon the OAS to discuss Nelson’s suggestion regarding “huge deposits of oil and other resources under the high seas of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Governor Rockefeller has proposed that under common agreement these resources be exploited for the benefit of the capital-hungry American states. Here is a task par excellence for the OAS.”11
Some of the revenues paid by oil companies, mostly U.S. firms, would be passed on to the OAS to finance its policing and other tasks in the hemisphere. Another chunk of oil royalties would be passed on to banks, again mostly U.S. banks, to help pay for debt service. By then, foreign debts consumed 65 percent of Latin America’s foreign income and left OAS member countries in arrears averaging 10 percent.
Such “extranational” financing of the OAS would also take financial pressure off member states to adopt protectionism in inter-American trade. Banks with heavy loan performance in Latin America, including David Rockefeller’s Chase, would have little to gain by currency restrictions or tariffs that stemmed the flow of capital or direct-investment earnings from Latin America back to the United States. Free trade, it was argued, was the way to avoid tariff wars, declining trade, world economic depression, and world wars.
Now, at the White House for his first meeting with President Nixon, Galo Plaza pressed the matter. When Nixon asked him what should be done first to develop policy for Latin America, Galo Plaza seized the moment:
“Send Nelson Rockefeller to Latin America. His name is magic.”12
That’s what Galo Plaza thought. And so, obviously, did Nelson. There was little reason to think otherwise, especially in Brazil.
AN AMERICAN BONANZA: RANCHING IN BRAZIL
Of all Nelson’s friends in Brazil, no one had been more helpful than Walther Moreira Salles, former Brazilian ambassador to the United States. Salles’s connections to Brazilian banking and ranching interests had achieved for Nelson a bonanza of opportunities in his efforts to conquer the prairies and forests of Brazil’s frontiers.
Back in the mid-1950s, during the euphoria following the fall of Getúlio Vargas, Nelson, David, and IBEC had joined Moreira Salles in investing in the million-acre Bodoquena cattle ranch in Mato Grosso. Besides cattle raising and possibly mining, Nelson was interested in developing a coffee plantation on the slopes of the Bodoquena mountains. Moreira Salles helped Nelson explore the possibilities of both cattle ranching and coffee growing by making available a large tract of his 5 million coffee-tree Fazendas Paulistas to IBEC Research, Inc. (IRI). IRI was headed by a former president of Standard Oil of New Jersey’s research division and a top-notch staff of ex-employees of the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. Working with the OAS’s Inter-American Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Costa Rica, it was among the best agricultural research g
roups in Latin America.
Using Moreira Salles’s plantation and land offered by other large ranchers in the states of São Paulo, Goiás, Minas Gerais, and Paraná,13 IRI experimented with chemical pesticides and defoliants (Dow’s Dalapón and Shell Chemical’s Dieldren were favorites) nitrogen-rich legumes to increase the fertility of pasturelands (and therefore pounds of beef per acre), irrigation techniques for coffee trees, chemical stimulation of coffee flowering for uniform harvesting times, standardized measuring techniques for coffee beans, the regulation of temperatures for bean drying, and the application of more processing and storage techniques. Large non-Brazilian meat processors like Armour Packing, Wilson Packing, and Anglo Frigorifico consulted IRI to benefit from its research, as did Fazenda Cambuhy, the large cattle ranch that controlled Fazendas Paulistas and was 40 percent owned by Moreira Salles.
Nelson was kept abreast of how IRI’s experiments were going and how well the new techniques were being accepted by Brazilian ranchers. In just one IRI test area in 1956, some 150 ranchers visited to observe the experiments of the Rockefeller men; 22 of them adopted IRI-recommended chemical defoliants to remove native brush from 20,000 acres.14 American chemical companies reciprocated with donations to IRI. Olin Mathieson, which had Laurance Rockefeller as a director, gave IRI $10,000.15 American Export Potash Associates contributed $3,000.16 Pfizer, which sold a hormone used to fatten cattle, gave also, as did Anderson Clayton (cotton), Stauffer Chemical, the Sulphur Institute, and Standard Oil’s Brazilian Esso subsidiary. Point IV officials from the U.S. Embassy spent days at IRI’s labs and pastures and came away impressed. But the Rockefeller men did, not simply wait for Muhammed to come to the mountain; they brought mountains of research to the Brazilian ranchers through talks before groups of farmers and ranchers and through courses at Brazilian agricultural institutes.
