by Gerard Colby
Bolivia was the unlucky beneficiary of some of the deadliest lessons learned by the CIA in Vietnam. William Colby’s Phoenix program had raised police surveillance, interrogations, assassination, and terror to a science in Vietnam’s countryside. These techniques were being brought back to Latin America on a more systematic and refined computerized level by the CIA through the Pentagon’s military aid program, AID’s Office of Public Safety, and, after its abolishment in 1974, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Stability for investments in the hemispheric “Dollar Zone,” promoted by David Rockefeller and other advocates of “free trade,” required security from revolts through the melding of the intelligence services of Latin America’s military regimes. With the CIA’s help, Banzer expanded the powers of his police state. Having barely escaped ruin when a military revolt briefly put him in prison, Banzer was grateful to the CIA for helping him regain power in a counter-coup. He was also grateful to SIL’s government liaison officer, David Farah, who visited him in prison to offer counsel, encouragement, and prayer. After Banzer’s restoration, Farah was useful in improving the dictatorship’s public image. Farah suggested that Banzer hold a presidential prayer breakfast modeled after Washington’s.9 It was this 1975 event that was monitored by SIL children at the Tumi Chucua jungle base.
SIL’s base continued to be one of Banzer’s favorite vacation haunts even after the CIA-funded Banzer “Plan for Action” against progressive church leaders became known to the public. The intimacy between SIL and Banzer quickly developed into a source of embarrassment when reports surfaced that the CIA used missionaries. Banzer’s censorship of the media would not be complete until 1976, when his totalitarian “New Order” took full effect, aided by Bolivia’s neo-fascist Falange party.
The implication of computerizing the dictatorships’ police investigations was not lost on the National Council of Churches (NCC). The NCC attended IBM’s 1975 annual meeting and voted 200,000 shares against sales of IBM computers to Latin American dictatorships that were violating human rights. “The question is not whether they would sell computers to Hitler,” said Rev. William Wipfler, “but whether they would sell gas chambers to Hitler. Either way you’re giving him weapons.” IBM’s director of information attempted to defend IBM’s sales. “If General Motors sells you a car, and you use it to kill someone, that doesn’t make General Motors responsible.” Unless, perhaps, General Motors knew you were a killer who used cars as a weapon. “When you know who Hitler is,” concluded Wipfler, “you can’t pretend you don’t know what he’s doing with your equipment.”10
SILers seldom mentioned how their work with AID in Vietnam’s Central Highlands might have contributed to the Agency’s collection of data on Montagnard tribesmen and the political profiles that were built up by the CIA’s Operation Phoenix. Nor did SIL’s Translation magazine reflect any pondering by SILers in Bolivia over the darker meaning of their organization’s subsequent involvement in a scheme to resettle the CIA’s Montagnard troops in Bolivia’s northern Beni region, where SIL’s Tumi Chucua jungle base was located.11
FROM LAOS TO BOLIVIA WITH LOVE
These Montagnards were the Hmong of Laos, the “Meo” tribes of international headlines. More than 40,000 survivors of missionary “Pop” Buel’s and the CIA’s secret war had ended their tragic retreat across Laos’s mountains by fleeing into neighboring Thailand. Packed into overcrowded refugee camps, they were prey for extortion by corrupt officials or further cross-border adventures against the communist Pathet Lao. Despite their service to the CIA, the only assistance to the Hmong came from U.S. Christian missions and relief agencies. These agencies were coordinated out of the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok of Nixon’s new ambassador to Thailand, William Kintner—former CIA officer, former aide to White House special assistant Nelson Rockefeller, former Pentagon official, advocate of using missionaries in counterinsurgency, and a friend of SIL’s Robert Schneider.
In early 1975, as the Montagnard revolt spread in the Central Highlands and the Saigon army collapsed, Larry Ward, president of a private Christian relief agency called Food for the Hungry, abandoned his post as special adviser to the Saigon regime on rural minorities and fled to Thailand. Ward subsequently contacted SIL and arranged meetings between Hmong leaders and SIL in Bolivia. Ward’s contact in Washington was Cleo Shook, a zealous Fundamentalist and associate director of AID’s Office of Private and Voluntary Cooperation, the same office Cam had worked with. Shook’s access to more than $240 million in foreign-aid funds resulted in cash grants to many Christian missionary groups that were doing relief work abroad, including those in Thailand.12 Some of that money was targeted for the relocation of the Hmong to Bolivia, where SIL’s David Farah helped coordinate the project. Farah saw no problem with the fact that Indians already lived in the Beni region, where the Banzer regime designated more than 37,000 acres for the Hmong. From his point of view, the Hmong’s “facial characteristics would fit in very well with the American Indian of the Amazon basin.”13
Left unanswered was the question of health. The Hmong, a mountainous people, were suffering from climatic adjustments and malaria in the Thai lowlands; the Amazon would be even worse. What they would grow in the fragile Amazon soil also was not adequately addressed, especially for a people whose only cash crop for decades had been opium. Finally, there was the larger question of why the Banzer regime, which encouraged birth control among the Indians, who made up 70 percent of Bolivia’s population, was suddenly concerned about remedying Bolivia’s newfound “population deficit” with foreign refugees.
Part of the answer may have been the Hmong’s recent history as the CIA’s largest fighting army. Isolated in a strange land, the Hmong would be dependent on the Banzer regime for survival. They would be susceptible once again to manipulation as a counterinsurgency force against politically rebellious Indian miners or a guerrilla movement in Beni, which had been Che Guevara’s first choice for a guerrilla-training base. For much the same reason, Banzer was also considering another resettlement colony in Beni for Germans who were migrating from Southwest Africa (now Namibia).
There were already about 300,000 Bolivians of German descent, who often “adopted” Indian criadas (servants)—mostly girls—into the household to serve as virtual slaves. Slavery extended into the fields of estates as well.14 Labor costs were one factor that four South African businessmen considered when they visited Bolivia in 1976: Indian labor could replace African labor. As one South African Boer who was considering immigration put it after visiting Bolivia, “Obviously, we are not altogether happy with the racial situation over there [in Bolivia]. I do not foresee any real problems, however, because, like us, they practice discrimination. The whole economy is ruled by a small minority of white immigrants from Europe who keep the Spanish and the local Indians well and truly in their place. The only difference is that they do it quietly and without advertising it to the outside world. From their point of view, white South Africans will feel very much at home there.”15
THE BANZER PLAN FOR BOLIVIA’S OIL
A key reason for Banzer’s new immigration policy was the concern among Santa Cruz’s and La Paz’s upper classes that the lands east of the Andes should be occupied by Bolivia before Brazilian settlers made them a de facto part of their own homeland. Banzer’s regime emphasized Bolivia’s need for commercial farmers in the virgin lands to expand agricultural production and to reduce the cost of importing expensive food. This was the ostensible reason for the preparation of a new immigration law. Decreed in January 1976, it offered fifty acres, a house, loans, technical support, and citizenship to every immigrant who stayed in Bolivia on the land for only one year. Larger concessions of land and support were available to those who set up cattle ranches. But the biggest dreams were of the potential mineral riches.
And here, as throughout the entire Amazon basin, oil carried away the most expansive imaginations. Banzer’s German colony in Santa Cruz had seen what oil could buy. The city now hosted a new Holiday Inn for the
baseball-capped American oilmen. The hope was that the field south of Santa Cruz might extend north of it as well, into the Beni.
Already, geologists employed by Union Oil of California were prowling through the eastern jungles in search of oil. Those from Texaco and Getty Oil were there, too, exploring a 2.59-million acre concession.16 Banzer was finishing construction of a highway from La Paz through the jungles and pampean homelands of some 25,000 Movima and Mojo Indians to Trinidad, Beni’s largest town. Here in the Beni River Basin, cattle herds as large as 17,000 head grazed on the pampas, controlled by large landowners who used Banzer’s so-called agrarian reform to consolidate their holdings and hence to pauperize the Indians.17 In the name of protecting Indian land rights, SIL lobbied La Paz and Washington to launch “leadership training” courses for its Indian students with Banzer’s blessings and $100,000 from AID.
The program’s community development projects included small-scale entrepreneurial pursuits like beekeeping and shopkeeping, the development of a client Protestant merchant class that would replace traditional tribal authority, and the building of airstrips and roads to hurry the passage of some 120,000 Amazonian Indians into Banzer’s glorious “national integration.” Funded by another $5 million from AID to Banzer’s regime, SIL doubled the number of bilingual teachers, putting forty-five out of fifty on government salaries. SIL leaders were appreciative. “Banzer is a moral man,” exclaimed Bolivia branch director Ronald D. Olson in 197618—only a few months after Banzer’s predecessor, former president Juan Torres, was assassinated in Argentina; Banzer’s fellow conspirator in the 1971 coup, Colonel Andrés Selich, who had helped hunt down Che Guevara, died during an “interrogation” by Banzer’s police; scores of Indian miners had been killed by Banzer’s army during a strike, hundreds more had been imprisoned, over 50 of those exiled by Banzer, joining some 5,000 others in exile; and the Ayoreo and other Indians, despite the protest of Catholic priests, were being recruited to work in the Beni region (where SIL’s Tumi Chucua base was located) on ranches and plantations that La Paz’s daily Excelsior would later describe as “slave camps.”19
But anthropologists were unhappy with SIL’s “occupation” of the tribes. By forbidding converts to smoke, drink, and participate in non-Protestant religious festivals, the missionaries were excluding Indians from “the civic life of their communities,” argued anthropologist Jürgen Riester. “Since their prohibition decreases their success among village Indians, the Protestants concentrate their main efforts on the conversion of native groups still living a traditional cultural life. Among these groups they generally implement a policy of isolation [working] … against the participation of the Indians in Bolivian society. Ideologically motivated, they produce in their converts a degree of alienation from the national society which is even more effective than a state of total isolation.”20
As news of the CIA’s use of missionaries reached the media in Latin America, SIL’s collaboration with rightist regimes and the favors it received from AID made it a natural target for suspicions of collaboration with the CIA, too. These charges lacked proof. Nevertheless, many of those who raised the charges earnestly believed that there was some link between SIL and U.S. counterinsurgency programs, and more cynical nationalists of both the Right and Left hoped that the rules of perception in politics would carry the day.
They almost did. The international storm over the possible trans-Atlantic migration of apartheid converged in Bolivia, casting a dark cloud over the trans-Pacific migration of a defeated CIA tribal army SIL’s involvement in the exodus from Thailand to Bolivia was used to claim that SIL was involved in the plans to settle supporters of apartheid from southern Africa in Bolivia as well. Repeated denials by SIL’s South Africa branch21 only seemed to confirm the charge, by affirming the all-white branch’s very existence in the heartland of apartheid. Was that not proof enough?
Clearly, it was not. But SIL was condemned by its very success. For a number of years, the Wycliffe Bible Translators had been the Protestant mission agency with the largest number of personnel (more than 2,500), although it was only seventh in reported income ($16 million). The difference was attributed to the low overhead of its translators’ expenses; another factor was the hardware it received from AID and other government agencies, which entered SIL’s books as undervalued discounted assets for the organization and JAARS, not income for its translators. U.S. government (AID) support was public record for those who took the time to look.
SIL officials’ emphasis on the support given by local churches to its translators only heightened suspicions that SIL had something to hide. SIL’s ownership of surplus U.S. military hardware was obvious to investigators, and SIL’s effort to downplay the role of Caesar to broadcast the role of God spread the contagion of cynicism over the genuine motives of most of SIL’s missionaries. An SIL official who called AID’s gift of seven Hiller H-23 helicopters and the Pentagon’s gift of matching spare parts a “miracle” appeared incredible to those who were not familiar with the simple political backgrounds of most of SIL’s recruits.22
Cleo Shook resented and denied the accusation of SIL’s collaboration with the CIA. The charges had been “trumped up from the opposition,” he insisted. The major culprits were “anthropological scholars who say ‘Don’t disturb the natives.’ There is a professional quarrel among those circles.” Food for the Hungry’s Larry Ward was equally indignant. SIL’s Bolivia branch official David Farah only offered advice and “opened doors,” he said.23
Farah himself had earlier gone so far as to denounce the CIA’s efforts to recruit Bible translators. In January 1976, while serving as SIL’s government liaison officer in Washington, D.C., he inadvertently admitted that SIL’s top officials had been contacted by the CIA, but he denied any cooperation by SIL, at least with respect to recruiting linguists. “We have always refused to assist when CIA agents have been sent to our training camp at the various universities where we have training centers, especially at Norman, Oklahoma,” he said.24
Some Bolivians were not convinced. After Food for the Hungry’s bus was stoned in Bolivia, Ward had second thoughts about expanding the resettlement of the Hmong in Bolivia beyond the 550 who were initially scheduled to be brought over. “We’re certainly ready to move on and help the Indians. If there’s a place on the face of the earth better than Bolivia, then we’ll go there.”25
Because of revelations about the CIA’s covert operations, it was becoming difficult for past CIA collaborators to go anywhere. The global scope of such activities, with their potential for counterinsurgency applications, invited charges against SIL, whose very success in expanding abroad with U.S. and local government (and often military) grants and contracts made its conservative missionaries targets of criticism from every political direction. In Peru alone, in a single four-week period in 1975, SIL was the subject of forty-four critical editorials and articles.26
KISSINGER’S STATE DEPARTMENT TO THE RESCUE
Back in Waxhaw, North Carolina, at JAARS’s growing base, SIL’s retired general director, Cam Townsend, watched with dismay as the accusations seemed to snowball from one country to the next. In Washington, where SIL’s office maintained liaison with government officials, the Kissinger State Department kept a wary eye on the anti-SIL campaigns, too.
In Colombia, criticism of SIL was particularly harsh, with charges ranging from the extreme (drug smuggling and uranium mining) to the serious (kidnapping Indian children and elders for extended fund-raising tours in the United States) to an approximation of reality (destroying the Indians’ cultural values, creating religious divisions within Indian communities, deceiving the government about its evangelical goals, and indoctrinating Indians with loyalty to the United States).
In June 1975, an official report on the government’s investigation of the charges was published. Although no evidence was found to support the more serious charges, linguists and anthropologists across Colombia called for the termination of SIL’s contract, which
was up for renewal. President Alfonso López Michelsen decided to preempt an investigation of SIL by the Colombian Congress. His strategy was the same as that of the Ford administration, which had tried to preempt a U.S. congressional investigation of the CIA by appointing the Rockefeller Commission. López Michelsen, whose party, the Revolutionary Liberal Movement, was supported by the CIA’s Bogotá station,27 took control of SIL’s fate with a brilliant tactic: Rather than wait for the results of a commission’s investigation, he pledged outright nationalization of SIL’s bilingual programs.
López Michelsen’s co-optative tactic was admired by Kissinger’s new ambassador, Viron Vaky. The appointment of Vaky, a top State Department expert on Latin America, to the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá indicated the importance that Kissinger placed on Colombia in his Latin American strategy. Vaky had helped oversee the American counterinsurgency buildup in Alberto Lleras Camargo’s Colombia and in Guatemala during the 1960s. As Kissinger’s top aide on Latin America in the National Security Council, Vaky had been involved in Kissinger’s 1970 effort to stop Chile’s President-elect Allende from taking office, acting, according to Nixon aide Charles Colson, as Kissinger’s liaison to ITT chairman Harold Geneen when Geneen was “bragging about all the money he had given to the Agency.”28 Vaky arrived in Bogotá in 1974. López Michelsen’s party, the Revolutionary Liberal Movement, which was backed by the Bogotá CIA station,29 had taken over just as the SIL controversy was heating up over the Guajibo Indian scandal, and Vaky was impressed with how López was preventing it from becoming a major political crisis.
“The Lopez approach,” Vaky cabled Kissinger, “gives the appearance of a unilateral, GOC [Government of Colombia] decision, while in effect implementing the basic terms of the long-standing proposal for a new government agreement with the SIL. The President’s action will, we believe, eventually prove an effective way of removing the troublesome SIL question from the public eye.”30
