Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Cam’s effort to get Bible translators into the Muslim world through its back door, the Soviet Union’s southern republics, was no more successful. It was not for want of trying. He made eleven trips to the Soviet Union, mostly to the oil-rich Caucasus. But the charges that SIL had had links to the CIA in Vietnam and Latin America were having their effect, Pravda calling SIL a “nest of spies.”

  For Cam personally, the worst casualty was not the loss of Vietnam, or even possibly Brazil. The worst was Mexico. He did not have Lázaro Cárdenas behind him now. The former president had died in October 1970, worried to the end about U.S. dominance of the hemisphere. Cam had tried to develop a closer relationship with the Cárdenas family through a museum memorializing his friendship with the “Great Commoner” and Cam’s support of the president’s Indian policies and confrontation with Standard Oil. In 1977, he invited the president’s family—including his son, Senator Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solarzano, a rising leader in Mexican national politics—to North Carolina to attend the dedication of the Cárdenas Museum at the JAARS base.

  It was a Townsend public relations coup. The Belk fortune was amply represented in the program by scion John Belk, now the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. Lieutenant Governor James Green, U.S. Senator Carl Curtis, and Mexican Ambassador Hugo Márgain were also on hand to remind Americans of the importance that Cárdenas and Uncle Cam had for inter-American friendship. But the real stars were the Cárdenas family: the deceased president’s widow, who cut the ribbon, and the senator and his wife and two sons.

  The Mexican blessing, publicized in the United States and abroad, signaled that all was well again in the world of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. In Peru, Cam’s second oldest branch, the military regime deemed it timely to grant SIL a new contract. The process involved still another commission with a new set of recommendations and an offer to SIL of another twenty years. SIL wisely settled for ten. Social stability in Peru was tenuous, and the presence of Americans in sensitive positions could still arouse passions. For instance, teachers had recently gone on strike across the country except in the jungle, where most of SIL’s bilingual teachers did not miss a beat. SIL’s deference to those in power brought its rewards, first with the renewed contract and then with a medal for Cam from Fernando Belaúnde Terry, who took office again on the promise of Amazonian oil, more deforestation, and fifty new jungle cities.

  Similar recognition occurred in the South Pacific. The Philippine Ministry of Education gave SIL a medal for helping dictator Ferdinand Marcos build his “New Society.” In 1973, the regime had given SIL the Ramón Magsaysay Award, the prize that had its origins in Nelson Rockefeller’s collaboration with Magsaysay’s CIA mentor, Colonel Edward Lansdale, in Cold War propaganda. “We would like to erase the impression that there is a dictatorship,” Marcos’s ambassador had said upon arriving in Charlotte, North Carolina, for the award ceremonies.1

  Marcos’s “New Society” had slated dams and floods for the famous rice terraces of the tribes of Luzon to provide irrigation and electricity for coastal plantations. To build this Bicol River Basin Development Project, the Marcos regime had already received millions of dollars in loans from the Agency for International Development and Eximbank to finance studies. Although modeled after the Mekong River Basin and the Volta River Basin projects, the Bicol project was billed as the forerunner. AID argued that “once the project is found to be successful it would be replicated in other underdeveloped countries in the world, notably Southeast Asian and African countries.”2

  The selling of all these projects, like Cam’s pitches for SIL to Washington, was always couched in the context of their prophylactic benefits against communist insurgencies. Yet the real mobilization of peasants into rebellion, giving communists a local mass base, usually followed the development schemes and relocation plans and growing militarization in the countryside. This was certainly true in the Bicol project, which initiated AID fieldwork in 1972, with firefights between Marcos’s constabulary and the New People’s Army first recorded in the Camarines Sur in August 1973. Although the value of the projects as a substitute for agrarian reform was unquestionable, they were on the drawing boards before insurgency was serious. It was their implementation and threat of displacing 90,000 Igorot people that made the rebellion serious. The Cold War was a tried-and-true excuse for corporate planners to get money past congressional tightwads in foreign-aid hearings; once the projects were initiated and rebellion broke out, the self-fulfilling prophecy was perpetuated.

  Despite counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines that were backed with U.S. helicopters, weapons, and Special Forces, the Kalinga and Bôntoc tribesmen of Luzon were holding their own. This situation worried the CIA station in Manila, especially the tribes’ willingness to form a bloc with communist-led guerrillas from the New Peoples Army, the Huks reincarnated. In the Muslim south, on Mindanao and the Sulu Islands, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) was doing the same with small farmers who were being pushed off their lands to make way for plantations that supplied bananas and pineapples to Del Monte (which had recently purchased United Fruit’s infamous banana plantations in Guatemala, as well). The Marcos regime put a special emphasis on the Muslim islands; it was here that 80 percent of his army was stationed, having earned the wrath of the local population in February 1974 by indiscriminate use of U.S.-supplied naval firepower against MNLF rebels, almost leveling the city of Jolo, the historical center of Muslim culture. It was here that Marcos sent Christian settlers from the north as part of an “agrarian reform” that applied only to lands on which rice and corn were cultivated, thereby exempting two-thirds of the lands used by exporters like Del Monte. And, it is not surprising, it was here that SIL established its Philippines headquarters in an attempt to occupy local Muslim tribes with the power of the Christian Lord. By 1981, SIL had more personnel in the Philippines (287) than in Peru (262), all working under contracts with Marcos’s Education and National Defense departments.

  But even in these victories for the Lord, there were portents of change, some of them unsettling. In SIL’s younger ranks, there was a growing recognition of the need for a less strident and more sensitive mission in that part of the world. These younger SILers also wanted to upscale SIL’s linguistic skills and to embrace new anthropological ones. To earn respect as competent genuine contributors to the science of linguistics, SILers tried to integrate into their work the more recent study of the connection between theories of knowledge and language that interpreted grammar as the conceptualization of experience, including culture. It was precisely this deeper cultural probe that gave linguistics an added attraction to the intelligence community, including the CIA. And it was precisely this nonjudgmental, relativistic equaling of cultural planes and its capacity for self-reflection on one’s own values that made it so challenging, even threatening, to those who believed they were the Chosen.

  Anthropologist Jon Landabaru charged that there was a lack of professionalism among SIL’s translators who, like most technicians, did not have the higher training needed to go beyond the same theory and method they had been learning almost by rote since the inception of SIL’s summer sessions. “Is it possible that this attitude has something to do with religious models?” he asked. “… Why don’t they carry out research aimed at a deeper understanding of the indigenous mentality? … In my opinion, the answer is obvious. SIL theory is that which is best adapted to its missionary practice.… The missionary tells the Indians ‘Give us the form [of your language] so that we can take care of the content.’”3

  A new voice rose in the debate, SIL’s biggest nightmare: Indian critics. In the past, SIL only rarely had to deal with them. In 1959 at the Inter-American Indian Institute’s conference in Guatemala, Cam and anthropologist Doris Stone (daughter of United Fruit’s chairman “Sam the Banana Man” Zemurray) had helped the U.S. delegation marginalize as “Communist” Guatemalan Indian dissent over the reversal of land reform since the CIA overthrew the elected gover
nment of President Jacobo Arbenz.4 In the past, conferences had been dominated by Anglos or ladinos who were delegates of governments; in some cases, Cam and other SILers actually spoke for the Indians as official delegates from Peru.

  Now the Indians spoke for themselves. At the second Barbados Conference in 1977, Indian representatives insisted that “the use of language … ought to be governed by the Indian people themselves within their own channels of creativity.”5 The following year, Campa Indians in Peru held their first convention that was free of influence by the government’s agrarian reform agency. They promptly affiliated with the besieged National Agrarian Confederation and discussed Lima’s unwillingness to grant titles to land that lumber interests and foreign oil and other companies coveted. After approving laws on behalf of elders, women, and children, they endorsed the calling of a national Indian congress.

  SIL’s record had already come under scrutiny for the failure of its Peru branch to push for land titles or to intervene against Cities Service in 1974 for turning an SIL airstrip into a supply depot, then trying to destroy fruit trees to lengthen the airstrip—all without permission from the local Amarakaeri Indians.

  In Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas, the site of recently located oil deposits, journalists investigating U.S. missions in Chiapas began focusing on SIL’s jungle training camp. Beleaguered by calls for protectionism, the government of José López Portillo distanced itself from SIL. Officials of the National Indian Institute launched investigations into SIL’s practices and record of compliance with its contract with them.

  As foreigners and opponents of many of the Indians’ religious traditions, SILers were easy scapegoats. The smoke from SIL’s sacrifice served as a screen for López Portillo’s sale of oil and natural gas to the United States. Two weeks after the unpopular natural-gas negotiations with the Carter administration culminated in a deal, Mexico’s Education Department announced that its contract with SIL was over. SIL members would no longer be able to receive student visas, a privilege enjoyed since the 1930s. Half the branch was obliged to retreat back to SIL’s new International Linguistics Center in Dallas; SIL’s fabled jungle training camp in Chiapas was closed. For SIL, the era of Cárdenas was over.

  It had been over for the Mexican people for some forty years. South of the United States, environmental and labor conditions had deteriorated for Mexicans who were working in vegetable plantations of firms like Del Monte serving the U.S. winter market and in factories of American companies that had abandoned the American worker in search of low-wage labor. Out of this poverty amid foreign-dominated development, the name Cárdenas again emerged as a symbol of resistance. His family had watched the investigations around SIL. Persuaded by mounting charges of improprieties, they, too, began to distance themselves. For Cam, this was a hard blow.

  The worst came in November 1980, when the Inter-American Indian Institute (III) sponsored the next Inter-American Indian conference in Mérida, Mexico, the country of its birth. Cam led SIL’s traditional delegation. But for the first time in its history, the conference included many Indian representatives of governments. Cam listened, disbelieving, as delegate after delegate denounced his life’s work. SIL was “an ideological and political institution,”6 he heard, its scientific name concealing not only a religious agenda, but a worldview that was alien to Indian traditions and a U.S. political force that undermined national sovereignty. SIL’s allies—notably the delegations from the military regimes of Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Honduras—fought back, but now they were a minority. The majority of the conference’s delegates passed a resolution calling on member governments to scrutinize SIL’s activities and, if necessary, to banish the organization.

  To give their target a human face, the delegates focused on the man among them who most symbolized SIL: its founder, William Cameron Townsend. It was a chance for the Inter-American Indian Institute Conference to salvage its credibility and authenticity and to rescue the name of Cárdenas from gringo usurpers. For Cam, it may have been the worst day of his life.

  A resolution was introduced to strip him of the title “Benefactor of the Linguistically Isolated Population of America,” an honor given him at the previous conference in Brazil in 1972. The delegates rose and gave the resolution a standing ovation. When the applause finally ended, Cam left, never to return.

  It was the culmination of a rise of national Indian organizations throughout the Western Hemisphere. In Brazil, Indian resistance had grown since progressive Catholic clerics, acting as the Indigenist Missionary Council, had sponsored Indian leadership conferences. In 1980, Indian leaders assembled at Campo Grande in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, and formed the Union of Indian Nations (UNI), Brazil’s first national Indian organization. One of the leaders of the Xavante tribe, Mário Juruna, was then denied his right to attend the Fourth Russell Tribunal on Human Rights in Rotterdam. FUNAI argued before the Brazilian court that Juruna was legally their ward and as a minor, he could not leave the country without FUNAI’s permission; FUNAI lost. Juruna not only attended, but chaired some of the tribunal’s sessions and went on to become the first Amazonian Indian elected to the Brazilian Congress. Under the watchful eye of the international press, bigots now had to suffer the challenges of an Indian fellow congressman.

  Cam should have seen it coming. In 1976, when SIL was preparing to enter the Uaupés jungle in northwestern Brazil at the request of the military regime and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, the BIA’s strongest Indian opponent, the American Indian Movement (AIM), was already moving into the international arena. SIL translators had seen them at the hearings in Geneva of the United Nations’ international Human Rights Commission. After a dramatic entry beating drums, AIM leaders presented the cases of the seizure of the Sioux’s Black Hills for gold and now uranium, of strip-mining in Colorado and Wyoming on Indian reservations, of the deaths of Navajo uranium miners in New Mexico, and on and on, joining the Indian chorus from other countries where charges ranged from theft and repression to systematic ethnocide and, in the case of the Aché of Paraguay, genocide.

  THE RESURRECTION OF RONALD REAGAN–AND HOLOCAUST

  In the face of such growing resistance and his own humiliation at the Inter-American Indian Conference, Cam consoled himself by knowing the Will of the Lord and seeing it expressed in the victory that month of Ronald Reagan. He had made himself part of Reagan’s will to conquer the Rockefeller liberals of his party, the Lord’s Will to let it happen, Americans’ will to see that it did.

  In 1979, after Nelson Rockefeller had passed from living humanity into history, Cam had gathered with other members of Christian Fundamentalism to form the Religious Roundtable. The choice of the name was not accidental.

  The Business Roundtable, which had been formed earlier in the decade by corporate luminaries, had been at the heart of corporate reaction to the environmental, labor, and foreign policy reforms urged by the grass-roots consumer and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Disenchantment with Carter by social conservatives and born-again Christians convinced a sales executive from one corporate member, Colgate-Palmolive, that the time was ripe to organize Fundamentalism with corporate organizational techniques and money into a new political movement in the United States. The targets were politicians who did not pass the test of biblical purity. Such tests had first been used during the 1976 elections, when candidates in the primaries in Texas were confronted with a thirty-five-page questionnaire prepared by Fundamentalists; the primary winners were those who had been judged most biblically “correct.”7 By 1979, Virginia preacher Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was targeting liberals like Frank Church, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, for political oblivion. Falwell’s goal was a Fundamentalist president and a Fundamentalist Congress ruling a Christian America. He had reason to hope for success. Pollsters estimated that more than 45 million Protestants considered themselves evangelicals, and although they did not vote as a bloc, most were conservative, white, and suburban and d
eeply upset by the social reform and protest movements. Like their rural forebears from small towns, they blamed cities for the sins of women’s liberation, the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, drugs, and wayward children.

  Criminals, homosexuals, and socialists were grouped together in the litany of the damned, with liberals, biological scientists, and “secular humanists” a close second in the race to hell. Satan’s commission was winning, they feared, and Carter’s defense policy had left the South, the home of many of the nation’s military bases, yearning for defense contracts on the scale of the prosperous war years. Ironically, the Vietnam War had left many Americans with a general decline of faith in science and rationality. Some, because it was fought at all, others, because they believed it was not fought hard enough. In both camps of dissenters, the blame was put on liberal policymakers. Millions of Americans felt frightened and were easy prey to apocalyptic visions.

  Ronald Reagan appeared to share those visions and sought to appeal as a savior to those who held them. There were profound political differences within the evangelical movement, but all evangelicals had one common characteristic: They tended to be more conservative than their peers in every demographic group and were at least a large minority of each.8 Carter’s people, too, understood the importance of these voters. “We’re working as if born-again were the crucial factor in this election,” said an aide.9 But it was Reagan who stole the show, helped by Jerry Falwell and his Texas-based colleague, Jim Robinson. “I’ll do anything I can to see that Carter is not re-elected,” Robinson said.10

  Yet, of all the principles building the Religious Right into a cohesive political force, the most important was perhaps the least known. Edward McAteer was the Colgate-Palmolive salesman who was the real organizing force behind the politicized Fundamentalist movement. McAteer had the glib tongue of his profession, substituting Christ for soap in his market analysis. He was more than a friend of Cam Townsend; he was a major figure on the board of Wycliffe Associates, which was now a powerhouse of resources for SIL, providing it and JAARS with construction skills, money, promotion, and overnight stays for furloughed translators on fund-raising tours. In return, testimonies from returned translators, films, books, and slide shows parlayed surrogate travels around the world for suburban believers. Special trips to the jungle bases allowed the more affluent faithful actually to partake in adventure for God. The sheer human energy amassed by Wycliffe Associates was impressive, but the financial core was fueled by reliable wealthy SIL backers like North Carolina’s James A. Jones, one of the largest contractors for military bases in Vietnam, and oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt of Texas. “Bunker Hunt had helped me considerably,” McAteer freely offered.