Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Kahn’s scheme resurrected this earlier plan and went even further. When revealed in two Hudson Institute reports by Robert Panero, the “South American Great Lakes System” would have consisted of a series of five artificial lakes, the first and most important one linking Venezuela’s upper Orinoco River with Brazil’s Negro River along the Colombian border.

  Kahn’s “Great Lakes” system focused on commercial and industrial development of the Amazon basin, ignoring the potential ecological havoc of such an approach on a complex, vulnerable ecosystem. Indeed, the widening of the Amazon was not being proposed primarily to improve navigability, but to eliminate the swampy wetlands and rapids that impeded development of the higher, supposedly more fertile, plains and blocked access to newly discovered mineral resources.

  Thanks to the generals’ granting of subsoil rights to foreign companies through their new constitution, the mineral resources promised to provide the inflation-plagued regime with foreign currency through exports. Some of the dams used to create the lakes would generate enough electricity to run not only mines but processing plants, while the lakes themselves would allow ore-bearing deep-draft ships to link the mines and plants to foreign markets.

  Yet, it was precisely this promise of the exploitation of the Amazon that inspired Brazilian anger instead of praise. By ignoring questions of control and ownership, Kahn’s technical feasibility study inspired Brazilians to take these issues up.

  Between 1965 and 1967, the Brazilians learned for the first time that aerial surveys by the U.S. Air Force—previously suspended by President Vargas—had been resumed after the 1964 coup, under the auspices of the Inter-American Geodetic Survey. The overflights had been granted without approval by Brazil’s Congress,39 and they covered areas of suspected valuable mineral lodes. Under the original contract with Vargas’s government, all film negatives, after processing in the United States, were supposed to have been shipped back to Brazil and held in confidence. But by the end of 1967, leaks from the Brazilian military and, later, the staff of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee indicated that U.S. and Canadian corporations had used the photographic surveys to locate for themselves rich mineral outcroppings in Minas Gerais. After site investigations, these companies successfully applied to the military regime for concessions,40 long before the mineral deposits were acknowledged to Brazilians by their own government.

  News of the surveys, unauthorized flights, and clandestine airports caused a series of uproars in Brazil. Carlos Lacerda, previously an informant to Adolf Berle and a promoter of the demise of earlier nationalist governments, suddenly spoke out with his own version of nationalism, charging that the military regime had introduced the “politics of technocrats” that fostered “a neo-colonialist concept in Brazil,” that is, dependence on the United States.41 In 1966, he dropped a bombshell, revealing that U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon had said he was grateful that Goulart’s government had been overthrown so the United States did not have to intervene directly with its own military operations.42 Gordon denied the statement, but that did not stop Lacerda from making accusations to the press that the Johnson administration had been “indiscreet” in “interfering in Brazilian political affairs and unwise in business and aid relationships.” Then he proclaimed, as if he had recently discovered what he had secretly known all along: “I am convinced that the U.S. helped with the 1964 revolution.”43

  Now Lacerda was being indiscreet. But he was playing for high stakes: He hoped to lead a right-wing nationalist revolt in the scheduled coming elections that would unseat General Costa e Silva, President Castelo Branco’s chosen successor.

  Lacerda was banking on a growing conviction among many Brazilians that the regimes austerity measures hurt not only labor, but business. The regime’s tightening of credit and narrow lending policies were forcing Brazilian firms to sell their assets for as little as 40 percent of their value. As early as December 1966, Time magazine reported that 50 percent of Brazil’s industries had passed into foreign hands since the coup.44

  Wealthy Brazilians who were tied to such foreign interests, like the Antunes mining magnates, benefited through joint ventures with American and Canadian companies, including firms with ties to the Rockefellers. So it was ironic that Lacerda, a nationalist, traveled to New York in October 1968 to visit internationalists Nelson Rockefeller and Adolf Berle to solicit American neutrality, if not help, in his bid for power.45

  If the results of Lacerda’s campaign seemed preordained to men like Berle, they were not obvious to Brazilians. Most Brazilians assumed that the generals needed the support of conservative political leaders like Governor Lacerda and Governor Magalhães Pinto to rule. There was also strong nationalist sentiment in the military’s own ranks, particularly among its junior officers, to consider.

  Finally, there was the growing scandal of the Amazon. Foreign companies were moving in at an unprecedented rate. U.S. Steel’s entry into Pará, where geologists were said to have discovered “by accident” one of the world’s largest deposits of iron in the Carajás Mountains, aroused suspicions. Had the company gained access to secret aerial surveys? Not according to one version of the lucrative find: A company geologist had just happened to pick the mountain out of tens of thousands of acres of jungle because he had to make a forced helicopter landing and lucked upon a bald spot in the green jungle.46 After landing, he found that the reason the area lacked trees was that the ground consisted of high-grade iron ore, 18 billion tons of it, it turned out.

  U.S. Steel’s own report in the Engineering and Mining journal, on the other hand, admitted that the discovery was anything but an accident: “The discovery was made during a systematic exploration program in the southern part of Pará State, between the Xingu and Tocantins Rivers.”47 How did the American companies know where to look? Expensive explorations “using boats, single-engine aircraft and helicopters” would not have been launched without reasonable expectations. The search had begun in early 1967, a year after a similar Union Carbide survey came back with manganese from a location only forty-three miles away. U.S. Steel, like Union Carbide, employed experienced geologists. By August, U.S. Steel had struck pay dirt in the same region.

  The fact that the Carajás mountain range was also the home of the Xikrín Indians, a Kayapó tribe marked by SIL as “potentially hostile,” did not diminish U.S. Steel’s enthusiasm for staking its claim. Nor did the presence of three other tribes, the Mudjetíre, the Parakanân, and the mysterious Kréen-Akaróre, all of whom should have enjoyed land rights under Brazil’s constitution.

  RANCHING WITH KINGS

  Whatever doubts existed that the military regime in Brasília was beginning to abandon its stated reliance on small-farmer colonists to develop the Amazon ended when the Superintendency for the Development of the Amazon (SUDAM) announced tax incentives in late 1966 to encourage larger corporate firms. Any company set up by 1974 and judged to have a regional economic impact would be granted a ten-year exemption from all taxes; parent companies of the Amazonian subsidiaries would be given a 50 percent cut in the corporate income tax; and imported farm machinery would be free of all duties. To back up the financing of investments, the regime established the Bank of the Amazon.

  The Klebergs of Texas, allies of Standard Oil of New Jersey and the Rockefellers for more than thirty years, were among the first Americans to take advantage of the military regime’s new law. In 1968, the Klebergs’ King Ranch joined Swift-Armour Company of Brazil in winning Brasília’s approval for a 180,000-acre ranch in Pará state. Located near Paragominas, the ranch was supposed to realize the dream of transplanting to South America’s vast Amazonian interior the cattle-breeding and grazing techniques perfected in the dry grasslands of Texas and New Zealand.48

  Equally promising, the land in Pará was immediately south of where Rio Tinto Zinc, the British mining company, was staking claims for what would turn out to be a 1.1-billion-ton reserve of bauxite, three times what the government estimated.49 It was not surpri
sing that the well-drained land was the ancestral home of two Indian tribes, the Tembé and the Urubús-Kaapor. The tribes had been pacified by the Service for the Protection of the Indian (SPI), and the Urubus had subsequently been “occupied” by SIL missionaries. The government of Pará had even recognized the tribes’ title to these lands as part of a projected reserve for the Indians.

  In 1968, however, SPI’s successor, FUNAI (the Portuguese acronym for the National Indian Foundation) issued King Ranch and Swift a certificate declaring that the 180,000 acres wanted by the companies were not occupied by Indians. This certificate was a necessary legal prerequisite for the companies to begin operations in the area with investment tax credits from SUDAM. According to various reports, King/Swift then petitioned Pará to annul the Indians’ land tenure titles altogether. The Pará government resisted, as did FUNAI,50 but Interior Minister General Costa Cavalcante and the federal government’s mining company, Cia. Vale do Rio Doce, intervened on the side of Rio Tinto as a minority shareholder in a new joint venture with the British company, forcing FUNAI into an accord that would begin the systematic dismembering of the Indians’ reserve.

  Meanwhile, by July 1969, King and Swift were boasting to Fortune magazine not only that they had gotten title to the 180,000 acres, but that they had negotiated with Pará for another 120,000 acres.51 By then, the Swifts and the Klebergs had new partners: the Rockefellers. Deltec International had swallowed up International Packers, Ltd., Swift’s holding company for its herds and global meatpacking operations, in a single gulp.52

  That the “New Brazil” under the generals should become the meeting ground for the Rockefellers, Klebergs, and Swifts was no historical accident. Harold Swift had been a friend of Nelson years before, when the Swifts and the Armours were already the beef kings of the American West. In 1957, the Rockefellers had sent cousin Richard Aldrich to inspect the Swift-Armour property in Brazil, which attracted them because its water rights were valuable for ranching during Brazil’s dry winter season.53 The Klebergs’ ties to Nelson, on the other hand, went back to the early 1930s, when Nelson, Uncle Winthrop Aldrich, and officials of the Chase bank visited King Ranch, site of newly found oil by Standard Oil of New Jersey’s Texas subsidiary, Esso. It was these oil revenues, in fact, that had given King Ranch the means to expand abroad. Now, in Brazil, a new “West” had brought these same families together for similar economic conquest. As if to underscore the importance of their financial alliance, International Packers chairman A. Thomas Taylor, husband of Geraldine Swift, was made chairman of Deltec International.

  Deltec, once the major competitor of IBEC’s investment bank, Crescinco, had become a Rockefeller financial powerhouse. The Rockefellers had summoned to Deltec’s side powerful financial furies from the past: David’s Chase Manhattan; Irving Trust; J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation; and First National Bank of Chicago, the favorite bank of Standard Oil of Indiana, parent of Nelson’s first and only oil directorship, Creole Petroleum of Venezuela.54 Deltec’s board reflected this financial clout, with Nelson represented by his major partner in Brazil, Walther Moreira Salles, a director of IBEC.

  CHAMPIONING THE UNTOUCHABLES

  In the heat of Brazilian expectations for developing the Amazon, a strange transformation took place among the country’s right-wing nationalists. The same people who had shown no concern for the inhabitants of the lands they ravaged now spoke out for those they previously regarded only as obstacles to human greed. The Indians of the jungle, the Untouchables of Brazil, suddenly found an unexpected champion. It was a shameless metamorphosis, but for those, like the Villas Boas brothers, who feared worse horrors, an embraceable one.

  It came about just as the celebrated SPI bubble burst, exploding the myth of a society protecting its Indians. The issue that precipitated SPI’s crisis was a 1966 article in an international anthropological journal about the 1963 massacre of a village of Cintas Largas Indians. The author, Georg Grünberg, had the audacity to brand the massacre as genocide.55 His timing was fortunate, for now political conditions were ripe for exposure.

  The article reported what was happening in that part of northwest Mato Grosso where American Caterpillar bulldozers were plowing through the jungle to construct a link of the trans-Amazonian highway system from Cuiabá, Mato Grosso’s capital, to Pôrto Velho, capital of Rondônia. Fourteen bridges were built along the 900-mile route with $52.6 million in AID loans. The U.S. Army donated another $1 million worth of heavy equipment. The Brazilian army did the actual work. Clearly, here was a project involving a national security issue for both the Brazilian and American governments.

  A new source of wealth had been discovered in the area: cassiterite, the essential ore in the production of tin. It was this rare mineral that had inspired Arruda and Junqueira Company to launch an expedition in the Cintas Largas territory in 1963 that resulted in mass murder.

  The expedition had “cleared” people like trees. Using one of the many airstrips cut out of the jungle since World War II, a Cessna flew in, armed with two weapons: sugar, to lure the Indians out of hiding and to calm their fears, and then dynamite. Aerial reconnaissance found the few survivors of the village bombed, and they were killed, too.

  This massacre would never have come to light had not one of the murderers, Ataide Pereira, told his Catholic confessor about the attack. Father Edgar Smith persuaded the man to repeat his story on tape, which the priest then delivered to the SPI. The involvement of the Catholic Church and the fact that Pereirá’s account of the murders was so graphic, ensured that the attacks would not be ignored. “It is not the first time that the firm of Arruda and Junqueira has committed crimes against the Indians,” Father Valdemar Veber told a police investigator. “This firm acts as a cover for other undertakings who are interested in acquiring land, or who plan to exploit the rich mineral deposits existing in the area.” Cassiterite was just the latest craze.56 But there were rumors that powerful American companies were interested in Rondônia’s potential as a source for tin. No one knew how many Cintas Largas had been killed so far, and how many more stood in the way. Later, some 3,000 to 5,000 Indians were found in villages scattered between the headwaters of the Aripuanã and Jipapana rivers, north of SIL’s new base at Vilhena and along the very river first explored in 1913 by former president Theodore Roosevelt and General Cândido Rondon.

  Three years later, after being passed through four reluctant prosecutors, the case of the Cintas Largas massacre was still languishing in the provincial court system. There had been no formal charges, and no trial, and at least four of the defendants were absent. Two had drowned “while on fishing trips.” The pilot of the plane used to dynamite the Indians’ village was reportedly dead also, the victim of a plane crash. The leader of the expedition died at the hands of revolting rubber tappers. Father Smith, a critical witness, disappeared; later, it was discovered that he had been killed in an auto accident.

  Grünberg’s article recounted the attempted genocide not only of the Cintas Largas, but of their neighbors, the Beiço-de-Pau Indians. The article set the stage for the nationalist interior minister, General Albuquerque Lima, to take up the case when it was referred to Attorney General Jader Figueiredo in September 1967. Albuquerque Lima launched a full investigation not only of the Cintas Largas incident, but of what SPI was doing to protect all the tribes entrusted to its care.

  The attorney general’s investigators traveled 10,000 miles and visited some 130 SPI posts around the country. When they were through, they had amassed twenty volumes of evidence of crimes, ranging from embezzlement to murder. In March 1968, Albuquerque Lima released the attorney general’s official 5,115-page report. In a calm, understated tone, the report cited case after case of atrocities that had been committed against Indians with the collaboration of the SPI that could be described only as systematic: clothing infected with smallpox, food supplies poisoned, children forced into slavery, and women forced into prostitution. Yes, the SPI suffered from cutbacks in funding and h
ad to contend with “the disastrous impact of missionary activity.” But the SPI itself had relegated to missionaries, many of them American Fundamentalists with little sympathy for native religion, responsibilities for pacification and services that were actually its duty. This situation could no longer be tolerated. SPI had to be abolished, the interior minister decreed, and 134 of its 700 functionaries would face formal judicial inquiries for crimes that, when published in the press, took up a full newspaper page in small print.

  Major Luis Neves, the head of the SPI, alone was accused of forty-two crimes, including the embezzlement of $300,000, the illegal sale of Indian lands, and complicity in a series of murders.

  Attorney General Figueiredo offered terrifying details to reporters. Since 1958, when the military took over the SPI and Kubitschek began the construction of Brasília in earnest, some $62 million worth of Indian property had been stolen. But that was the least of it. “It is not only the embezzlement of funds, but by the admission of sexual perversions, murders and all other crimes listed in the penal code against Indians and their property, that one can see that the Indian Protection Service was for years a den of corruption and indiscriminate killings.”57

  The Guaranís, of southern Mato Grosso, western Paraná, and northwestern Rio Grande do Sul, had been numbered at 3,000 to 4,000 by Darcy Ribeiro in 1957;58 now there were only 300 left.59 The Borôros had many of their cattle illegally sold off by SPI agents at Teresa Cristina, the reserve in southern Mato Grosso given to them supposedly in perpetuity to honor of the memory of SPI’s compassionate founder, General Cândido Rondon, whose mother was part Borôro.