by Gerard Colby
Cheney, visibly shaken by Rockefeller’s fury, turned white.
Nelson repeated it all to the president later when he announced that he would not go to Vail, Colorado, for the traditional postconvention party-unity meeting. “I told you almost a year and a half ago that there were people around you who didn’t want you to succeed, who didn’t want to see you nominated, and who don’t want to see you elected if you get nominated. I have got to tell you the truth, I have had it. These are the final insults tonight that have happened. I love you but I am finished.”
So was Ford.
In spite of it all, Nelson went to Vail and worked hard for the ticket. He took Dole across New York, although he was unable to control his habit of condescension and upstaging. In Binghamton, a Republican rally became the source of scandal when Nelson confronted demonstrators with lewd behavior. Leaning forward, with a gargoyle-like, ear-to-ear grin, he joyfully offered students of his state university the finger. Captured on film by a news photographer, Nelson answered mailed protests and praise in his own unique way: He sent out over a hundred autographed copies.
Ford lost not only New York, but every large state in the Northeast except Connecticut. Yet the paradox of the election was the returns from the Bible Belt. Despite the best efforts of Dallas’s Rev. William Criswell to hold his Fundamentalist flocks for the Republicans, social conservatives took up the banner of the self-proclaimed “born-again” Christian, Jimmy Carter. Little did they know it had been hoisted by David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, of which Carter had been a member for two years, using the commission’s Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington as his top foreign policy advisers.
On January 20, 1977, shortly after Jimmy Carter took the oath of office, Nelson Rockefeller and Gerald Ford boarded Air Force I and Air Force II for their last official rides home. The two giant planes lifted off Andrews Air Force Base and circled, observing Washington in the distance. Then each went its way, Ford heading west into political oblivion, Nelson flying north toward New York and an uncertain future filled with bitterness, haunting memories, and habitual political intrigue.
More than anything else, Nelson now wanted to put the Rockefeller house in order for the next generation. That meant saving his own financial empire, including the International Basic Economy Corporation in Latin America, for his two sons and two daughters by Tod and his two sons by Happy. To the press, he had given family affairs as his reason for withdrawing from the vice presidency, but he had not meant it. Now, despite his continued yearning for the White House, he had a foreboding that he should. His hair had turned silver, and he was feeling and looking his sixty-eight years.
But the Rockefeller business legacy was intensely political, involving the affairs of state, not just hearth. Unsure of Jimmy Carter’s ability to wage the Cold War or to control an oil-fired global inflation and revolutions in the “developing” Third World, he was equally worried about the New Right’s promotion of Ronald Reagan and what the new alliance with the growing Fundamentalist movement held for the Republican party and for the United States. Exiled from Washington, a postelection offer to serve Carter in some capacity never taken up, he did not trust the future. But then, he never had.
* There would be four other arrests of would-be assassins of Ford and Rockefeller in the next three months.
47
THE GREAT TRIBULATION
DIVINE INTERVENTIONS
There were signs of the coming Great Tribulation throughout the 1970s in Latin America, especially earthquakes in Peru, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.
Peru had suffered the first blow at the beginning of the decade, when a mountainside collapsed into a heavily populated Andean valley, killing more than 70,000 people. Resident translators of the Summer Institute of Linguistics thanked the Lord that none of them had been hurt and that they had been able to radio Yarinacocha’s tower with the first disaster call to the outside world. The Charismatic Renewal championed by SIL’s leading Pentecostalist, Jerry Elder, had already gained a foothold in Yarinacocha by then, but the symbolic swallowing of five branch members by the jungle on Christmas Eve, 1971, when a plane carrying ninety-five passengers disappeared, triggered a mass confession of mutual sins, followed by forgiveness and a calming love. The revival served as a vent and a balm for hysterics that were generated by pressure from Satan’s agents in the government of Juan Velasco Alvarado in Lima.
Now, the Lord’s anger had passed and Jesus had rewarded their patient suffering by bringing about President Velasco’s overthrow in an August 1975 coup led by General Francisco Morales Bermudez. But some of Velasco’s army allies were able to hold on to their government posts as the price the new president had to pay for army unity.
Satan made a last effort to inspire doubt when Education Minister Ramón Miranda Ampuero announced that SIL had a December 1976 deadline for finishing its work among the tribes. But Miranda’s move came too late. The debts incurred by Velasco’s construction of the trans-Andean pipeline to Amazonian oil had fatally weakened the government’s strength to resist conservative forces in Lima and Washington. Former AID administrator Donald Lindholm, now director of the Yarinacocha jungle base, ignored the government’s request to keep its decision to cancel SIL’s contract confidential and leaked the news to the Lima daily newspaper, El Comercio. This newspaper had been owned by the family of former Education Minister Francisco Miró Quesada. In those days, SIL was given favorable review. This situation was reversed when the Velasco government expropriated Lima’s dailies and appointed editors sympathetic to its goals. But now that Velasco had fallen, the editors had been replaced, and the pendulum had swung back in SIL’s favor. The newspaper made the contract’s cancellation front-page news on April 12, surprising even branch director Lambert Anderson, who relayed his worries to the U.S. Embassy about a government backlash. But Ambassador Robert Dean, trusted veteran of the Brazilian coup, was confident. He undertook a series of actions that would end all doubts about the Lord’s Will.
Dean wired Henry Kissinger, stoking the secretary of state’s Cold War suspicions by emphasizing that Miranda’s announcement about SIL had been made during an interview at Lima’s airport before Miranda had explained the purposes of an official visit to Cuba. Dean grimly noted that his Cuban counterpart on Lima’s embassy row “was at Miranda’s side during the interview,” as if Cuba were behind the termination of SIL’s contract. In contrast to this international communist conspiracy were SIL’s God-fearing uniformed friends. “With possibility of postponing or reversing that policy, friends of SIL are continuing with plans to release more names of prominent Peruvians supporting SIL’s retention, and several favorable press articles have been generated.”1 The absence of linguists from the two petitions’ 119 names could have been an embarrassment had military power not compensated: 35 percent of the signers were senior officers, including 12 admirals and 21 generals.2 Among the signatories were General Armando Artola, the hunter of MIR guerrillas in 1965, and Comandante Fernando Melgar Escute, the air force officer who in 1962 had been involved in discussions with SIL’s Jerry Elder, with Cam’s knowledge, on the possibility of SIL’s doing espionage along the Peru-Ecuador border.3 There were also five former ministers of education with close ties to SIL, including former President Manuel Odría’s General Juan Mendoza and Fernando Belaúnde Terry’s Francisco Miró Quesada.
The Cold War was hitched to SIL’s wagon to pull it into the political limelight. Dean informed Kissinger of the signatories’ concern: “A key SIL supporter [Miró Quesada] has warned [President] Morales Bermudez of the political danger of terminating SIL activities only to allow a leftist campesino organization to extend its operation among jungle Indians.”4
Within months, SIL was treated to another seemingly divine intervention. Another military coup purged the last holdovers from the Velasco era, including Prime Minister Jorge Maldonado, whose political career had been fatally weakened by the failure to find enough Amazonian oil to pay for the pipeline he had c
onstructed as Velasco’s minister of energy. President Morales Bermudez installed a new rightist junta and closed down opposition newspapers. Austerity measures that had been demanded by Chase and other bank creditors, and resisted by Maldonado’s ministers, were put into effect and backed by a curfew and troops in the streets. In this political cliimate, SIL’s contract was extended for at least five more years. The Cabinet that had ordered SIL’s expulsion was overthrown.
Despite the insistence of SIL’s government liaison in Peru that it had maintained “no contact with the U.S. embassy,” branch leader Lambert Anderson admitted a year later in a letter to President Jimmy Carter that “Ambassador Dean’s professional correctness and precision, coupled with a warm personal interest and private words of support, without doubt contributed greatly to the happy outcome.”5
Dean had known that the dispute would further undermine Prime Minister Maldonado’s government, which, he had wired Kissinger on March 10, was trying “to avoid another political controversy.” Rallying the generals, SIL would prevail. When it did, Dean conveyed the good news to Kissinger with military flair: “Mission Accomplished.”6
SIL’s version of its reprieve was more inspired: “God intervened.”7
William Cameron Townsend arrived to confirm the Lord’s Will in a celebratory visit the following year.
God was more tentative in other lands. National sovereignty, once the cry of Indian miners and leftists against foreign imperialism, was now taken up by their military dictatorships and used as a rallying cry to consolidate a popular base by expelling unnecessary foreigners.
In Ecuador, local resentments against the “Queen of the Auca,” Rachel Saint, forced the SIL branch to order her evacuation from “her” Huaorani. Packed off to SIL’s apartment house in Quito, Rachel would wait in vain for SIL’s permission to reenter her beloved tribe, many of whom had discovered the sins of material goods from oil companies and tourists.
Nowhere was the sting of nationalism felt more painfully and with greater potential repercussions for SIL than in Brazil. The vaunted “Brazilian Miracle” had been brought to hard ground by oil debts. Standard Oil of New Jersey and its other Six Sisters had simply passed along the price increase imposed by sheik and shah to consumers, including Third World nations like Brazil.
The political rumblings began in 1976, two years after the Brazilian Miracle ended. Amazonian Indians, helped by Catholic priests of the Missionary Indigenist Council (CIMI), held national conferences on Indian rights. FUNAI struck back with a ban on CIMI in Indian reserves and then on all foreign anthropologists in “border” areas where most isolated tribes lived. The tribes were not so much the regime’s concern as the ground beneath them. SIL, given the green light to enter the northwest, kept its traditional silence, eager to occupy the tribes scheduled to encounter the Northern Perimeter Highway, the northern loop of the trans-Amazon highway system, soon.8
On Brazil’s border with Venezuela were uranium deposits that the regime had targeted for the development of nuclear energy and, some feared, nuclear bombs. The problem was that the uranium was in the traditional lands of the Yanomami Indians, the largest unacculturated tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. These Indians, numbering between 10,000 and 15,000 people, had been made infamous as “the fierce people” by Pennsylvania State University anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon,9 who studied the tribe under a research grant from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.10 SIL’s Fundamentalist ally, the New Tribes Mission, was among the Yanomami in Venezuela and was studying the languages of the region with SIL translators at SIL’s Pôrto Velho base in Brazil in preparation for working with the Yanomami on the Brazilian side of the border. The Evangelical Mission Society of Amazonia and the Unevangelized Field Mission (the UFM having provided Chagnon with his initial data on Yanomami infanticide) were already there. SIL had been invited by the Brazilian government and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs11 to occupy the Yanomami tribe’s southwestern neighbors, the Wasiana and Taríana of the Uaupés River just east of Colombia (on the Colombian side, the river is called the Vaupés, and uranium prospectors were there, too). Anthropologists and ecologists had been trying to get relief for the tribes of northwest Brazil, particularly the Yanomami, from the growing contagion of river blindness, which was spread by the tiny black flies breeding in stagnant pools along the Northern Perimeter Highway.* The scientists’ relief efforts were not appreciated by the region’s military governor, who had complained in March 1975 about outside pressures to reform Brazil’s Indian policy. “I am of the opinion,” he told reporters, “that an area as rich as this—with gold, diamonds, and uranium—cannot afford the luxury of conserving half a dozen Indian tribes who are holding back the development of Brazil.”12 As rumors spread of the discovery also of cassiterite, the same ore for tin production that threatened to doom the Cintas Largas, the head of FUNAI, General Ismarth de Araújo Oliveira, explained that the medicine used to control river blindness was very expensive and that it killed the Indians because they lacked sufficient physical resistance.13
That November, ICOMI, Augusto Antunes’s joint venture with Bethlehem Steel, began surveying. In 1976, the cassiterite discovery on Yanomami land was revealed in the Brazilian press, which reported that the governor gave Mineração Além-Equador an exclusive exploration concession.14 That year the Brazilian military regime expelled all foreign anthropologists from Yanomami lands for “national security” reasons. The reason given was recent violence among shotgun-armed Yanomami bands and attacks by Indians on prospectors. The scenario was identical to claims against the Cintas Largas in Rondônia. There, the federal government had taken matters into its own hands to end the Indians’ isolation and allow São Paulo companies access to mineral riches. As FUNAI’s sheriff in Pôrto Velho explained to the authors in October 1976, “FUNAI’s main philosophy is to integrate the Indians into civilization, so that someday there will be no Indians.”15
Having entered the Cintas Largas territory in 1972, SIL was in agreement with FUNAI’s philosophy—however, it posed the choice for Indians in more stark terms. “You have a choice,” SIL’s Dr. Ursula Wiesemann told thirty-five Kaingáng Indians taken unaware by the military government in 1972 and sent to a bilingual training center that she ran. “You can choose between your own way of life or the life of the civilizado; each has a price and a recompense. For your way, the price is lack of progress, hunger and death.”
The recompense was supposedly being spared the pain of change. The alternative, according to Wiesemann, was full of promise. “For the civilizado way, the price is work and maintaining what you’ve achieved. Your recompense is that you will have more.”16
In 1973, however, the Trans-Amazon Highway’s expense caused cuts in the bilingual training program. In 1976, with the highway scheduled to reach the northwestern tribes, SIL was again given the nod. SIL was enthusiastic. “We work very closely with FUNAI,” the business manager of SIL’s Pôrto Velho base told the authors.17 The paid work included pacification of tribes resisting incursions. “We have a few people trying to contact a wild Indian tribe, but that’s purely a pacification contract.” And what of the moral obligation to expose Brazilian abuses of Indian human rights? “Brazil is very conscious of articles of that sort. We knew someone else who planned to go home and tell some of the seamier side of it and we told him that the best way to help the Indians was to come back. He wrote articles and didn’t get a visa to get back.”18 SILers would not make the same mistake.
The following year, however, Brazil’s contract with West German companies to provide uranium in exchange for nuclear technology and nuclear power plants would help trigger President Jimmy Carter’s new foreign policy initiative to limit nuclear proliferation and protect human rights in the Third World. General Médici’s successor as president, the former intelligence chief General Ernesto Geisel, would be so bothered by Carter’s new direction he would turn on SIL, ordering its missionaries expelled from the tribes by December 1977. But Cam would know who the
enemy really was. He would blame SIL’s declining fortunes in Brazil on the general political atmosphere stirred by anthropologists in other lands.19
GENOCIDE IN PARAGUAY
No event in 1976 proved more ominous for SIL and closely allied American groups like the New Tribes Mission than news about what Fundamentalist missionaries were doing in neighboring Paraguay. That year, anthropologists, human rights advocates, and social scientists contributed essays to Genocide in Paraguay. The book, which created an immediate sensation, was the response by the anthropological community to the repression of colleagues in Paraguay.
It appeared five years after Professor Miguel Chase Sardi revealed at the Barbados Conference the atrocities against the Aché and Ayoreo Indians and the policy of Pennsylvania’s Mennonite Central Committee to make all economic aid to Indians of the Chaco conditional on their agreeing to practice birth control through submission of the women to fittings for intrauterine devices.20 In 1976, he and his staff were arrested at an Indian self-help organization and imprisoned, and the police were said to have used torture. In May 1976, six Catholic priests, including the secretary of the Missions Department of the Paraguayan Bishops’ Conference, were arrested and deported, and six Protestant missionaries were also seized. U.S. Senators James Abourezk and Thomas Eagleton voiced their concern, while the president of the Senate, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, remained mute. Despite growing protests in Congress over the arrests and deportations, silence reigned supreme in the Kissinger State Department.
The State Department’s official line had always been that the Aché were victims of only “harsh individual acts” by “isolated ranchers” and ranch hands “said to have been drunk.” Jack B. Kubisch, Kissinger’s assistant secretary for Inter-American Affairs, assured Congress in 1974 that “this situation has now changed with the appointment of a new and more suitable administration,” New Tribes.
