by Gerard Colby
In Alta Verapaz, home of the Kekchí Indians, more than 1,000 of the 2,500 communities in the province were abandoned or destroyed. Those communities that remained were decimated by losses. In one municipality, Santa Cristobal Verapaz, up to 10,000 of the 28,000 residents were believed by local authorities to have died.51
Some Catholic clerics had already stood by the Indians and shared their martyrdom. The diocese in Quiché was closed in July, and priests were withdrawn after the murder of priests and two attempts on the life of Bishop Juan Gerardi. Ten priests had already been murdered in two years, one man was kidnapped and killed, and sixty-four other clerics were forced to leave after being marked for death. Rectories were bombed, parish radio stations were destroyed, and parochial schools and twelve religious training centers and Christian leadership teaching centers were closed.
The traditionally conservative Catholic Bishops Conference, like bishops had done in Brazil a decade earlier, denounced the government’s policy as “genocide.”52 In December, an investigating commission of the U.S. National Council of Churches confirmed the Mayan holocaust was taking place, but, after meeting Ríos Montt in Honduras later that month, President Reagan insisted that the regime was “getting a bad deal”53 from the accusations of massacres and deserved renewed military aid from the United States (which he granted the following month). Had not the White House received a flood of letters calling for renewed arms sales to Guatemala after Pat Robertson appealed on his 700 Club television show for prayers and money for the regime? SIL’s Ray Elliot, for his part, privately wrote leaders of the Church of the Word of his concern about the atrocities against the Indians, but the elders believed it was all the work of the Indian guerrillas; most Fundamentalists breezily dismissed the charges against the army as “totally wrong or totally perverted,”54 echoing Ríos Montt. “We have no scorched-earth policy,” the general explained at a news conference after conferring with Reagan. “We have a policy of scorched Communists.”55 A few months later, following Pope John Paul II’s call for respect for Indians’ human rights during a visit marred by attacks by Fundamentalist pastors on the pontiff as “the Beast” of the Apocalypse,56 even Ríos Montt would admit that “We know and understand that we have sinned, that we have abused power.”57
Massacres by Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s evangelical dictator, caused massive dislocation of more than 1 million Indians in 1982 and 1983.
Source: Luisa Frank and Philip Wheaton, Indian Guatemala, p. 97.
Yet, through all the massacres of Indians and murders of clerics, nothing seemed to penetrate the consciousness—or conscience—of SIL’s leaders. In January 1982, the first civilian militia in the Ixil altiplano was organized in Cotzal with the help of an Ixil Pentecostal pastor who collaborated with SIL’s Paul Townsend. When Ríos Montt drafted the Cotzal militia into his mandatory Civil Self-Defense Patrol, Townsend’s only reaction was to actively support the dictator’s stated desire to “humanize” the army’s operations. And when this was demonstrated by the army’s killing sixty-four Indians, including the pastor’s brother, as a reprisal for guerrilla attacks on the occupation, the pastor blamed the guerrillas and helped the army hunt down the guerrillas’ support network among the Indian villages; out of twenty-nine villages placed on the army’s list, twenty-six were burned or depopulated within three months.58
That year Paul Townsend published the primer he had written in Cotzal, in the heart of Ixil country, without a word about the slaughter around him. It was as if a strange veil, blinding and deafening, had fallen over SIL’s headquarters in Guatemala City and the United States, including North Carolina, where a different kind of deathwatch was taking place.
“It won’t be long now until you’re over there in Glory,” Cam’s physician told him on April 22.
“It’ll be good to be over there,” said Cam.
The next day, just after the sun set, he was.
More than a thousand people came to the funeral at Charlotte’s Calvary Church. This church was no cathedral, but a simple church. The singing was not by a renowned opera star, but by a congregation who knew Cam’s missionary hymn, “Bibleless Tribes,” by heart. The personal tributes were warm, the grief genuine.
Ken Pike described Cam as “a giant under God, one of the greatest leaders since Paul.” Yet not one of the national leaders Cam called friends in so many countries throughout the world came to his funeral. But a few did send messages. Peru’s Belaúnde spoke of “an irreparable loss,” and Colombia’s Turbay, of “profound sadness.” Billy Graham, unable to attend, sent a message describing Cam’s death as “a great loss to the Christian world. I lost a great personal friend.”59
But in the end, only his followers and closest collaborators were there to see him off to “the other side.” On this side, his body was laid to rest in a grove of pines beside the Cárdenas Museum. Even in death, Cam was promoting his dream, serving the institution he created, which lived on after him. Chiseled in the simple headstone is the script of a last message, as if by Cam’s own hand: “Dear ones, by Love, serve one another. Finish the task: Translate the Scriptures into every language. Uncle Cam.”
Visitors can read Cam’s favorite Bible verses displayed on six pedestals. At a seventh pedestal, one can press a button and hear Cam’s voice from his last public speech. The impression is powerful, as if the Founder is speaking from the grave: “There will be in glory among the redeemed, some from every tribe, nation and language.” His millennial vision, though his eyes were closed, was undimmed, fixed in eternity upon the terrible Apocalypse and the judgment of the Second Coming.
It was, in a bizarre way, proof of Fundamentalism’s final triumph over Nelson Rockefeller. Today, Nelson Rockefeller’s voice is not heard or revered. Nor did the institution that carried his dream survive him. Nelson’s IBEC is gone, swallowed up by larger European capital.60 The historical significance of IBEC’s disappearance was not lost on some observers. “The Rockefeller dream of using a private company to develop the economies of backward lands is apparently over,” commented the Wall Street Journal in 1980.61 IBEC, which never paid a dividend, had passed into history within two years of the death of its founder. Only Fazenda Bodoquena survived as a Rockefeller holding. David continued the family’s partnership with Moreira Salles until the Brazilian was replaced by a new partner, Robert O. Anderson,62 former director of Chase Manhattan Bank and chairman of ARCO, the Atlantic Refining Company spin-off of the old Standard Oil Trust.
ARCO now was stripping coal in the Powder River Basin (where the Sioux had fought Custer), plumbing the depths of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay for oil, and prospecting for oil in China (including China’s claimed waters between Hainan Island and the coast of northern Vietnam). Closer to Bodoquena, the lands of Peru’s Mayoruna Indians near the Brazilian border had been the site of ARCO drilling, and the Ganso Azul field near SIL’s Yarinacocha base now belonged to ARCO, thanks to Anderson’s purchase of Sinclair Oil in 1979. But the most germane development for the Rockefeller/Moreira Salles investment in Bodoquena was ARCO’s purchase of Anaconda, the third-largest American copper company, in 1977, just two years after the Engineering and Mining Journal confirmed that Project RADAM’s all-powerful aerial scanners had found significant deposits of copper in the Bodoquena hills. Anderson, a devotee of ranching (he owned a 100,000-acre spread in New Mexico) may have bought into more than beef. Fazenda Bodoquena, already by 1972 the eighth-largest agribusiness in Brazil (in comparison, King Ranch do Brazil ranked twenty-ninth, and IBEC’s Sementes Agroceres S.A., sixtieth63), was turning out to be Nelson Rockefeller’s biggest Brazilian success story.
But few would know it. In a twist of official fate, the life of Nelson Rockefeller was more open to public scrutiny before his death than after it. Nelson’s papers, open to selective researchers during his lifetime, were closed on his death by the family and sealed in the archives that bore his name. In the interest of a vague security to the nation and clearer security to the family name, the re
cords of Nelson’s dreams and life were condemned to a basement vault, like the remains of their creator, under ground. They were not reopened for a decade, and then only in part. By 1994, many of these records were still unprocessed or censored, an ironic legacy of a life that had always sought recognition.
Cam’s dream, in contrast, flourished in the apocalyptic fears of the Reagan years. Wycliffe’s membership increased an astounding 72 percent in the three years that followed Chester Bitterman’s martyrdom and Reagan’s ascension to power, to over 5,600 members. In 1984, Wycliffe, under its SIL alias, entered its 1,000th tribe.64 In 1988, SIL withdrew from Bolivia; in 1991, from Ecuador, proclaiming its task completed. New Testaments had been translated for every tribe. Evangelical Fundamentalist pastors had been left behind, too.
SIL computer centers in the United States, England, the Philippines, Peru, Colombia, and Australia hum into the night. Programs now help translators perform grammatical, statistical, and phonetic analyses, speeding the translation of languages joined by a common root.65 But with only six years left to reach another 3,500 Bibleless tribes, the millennial goal seems unlikely to be fulfilled by the year 2000. New languages are always being discovered, and after them, new dialects.
Ten years after Townsend’s death, his influence was still felt in Brazil. At the First Global Forum on the Environment, held in Rio de Janeiro, SIL’s translators were participating in workshops, showing its video on bilingual education, and exhibiting its materials at its booth. SIL was larger than ever, wealthy with tangible assets like computers, new airplanes (including a jet), even a linguistics campus in Texas (assisted by a $100,000 gift from Sunoco’s Pew family66). But SIL’s heyday had clearly passed. Now it was only one voice among many, only one booth among hundreds.
Now Indian voices can be heard, many of them asserting their rights; challenging the ongoing efforts to flood or burn their homelands; confronting the continual incursions of promised reserves by cattle ranchers, settlers, and mining companies; and warning the conquerors that pharaonic visions will lead to their own destruction. The source of much of the world’s oxygen lies within the 1 million square miles of the Amazon basin: almost two-thirds of the trees on the planet. Yet, despite this role as the lung of the earth, much of the Amazon rain forest is being burned down and turned into the source of dangerous increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In 1992 Canadian investigators reported that Brazil’s rain forest alone was being burned at a rate of an acre every minute; every thirty seconds, an area the size of a football field was being destroyed by fire; every year, the equivalent of one-half the size of California was being devoured by flames.
Whatever the actual rate of destruction, most observers agree that the gases released into the upper atmosphere are creating a greenhouse effect, allowing the sun’s rays to enter and preventing heat from escaping. Soil protected for centuries by the forest’s 200-foot-high canopy is now exposed to the sun and increasing doses of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Its fertility has declined, often leaving a sun-baked wasteland and prompting still further slashing and burning of virgin forest. Fortunes are being made, but not by small farmers or would-be settlers.
In 1992, there were 30 million homeless people in Brazil, 7 million of them children. Rio was still a city besieged by the poor. Many of these poor people were swept off the streets by the army before delegates to the Global Forum arrived and were sent to unknown destinies, some, it was rumored, to graves, many to work in clearing the Amazon or on the ranches that are responsible for 80 percent of the deforestation.
Exports of beef and lumber continue to grow, keeping up profits for multinational corporate exporters and their Brazilian junior partners, and keeping up debt payments to banks like Chase Manhattan, which in 1982 led a $400-million loan syndicate to finance Brazil’s offshore oil-drilling program—ample reasons for President George Bush to have been the only head of state at the Rio summit to refuse to sign the proposed treaty to protect the world’s environment. So the Amazon’s holocaust goes on in the names of national sovereignty and an elusive progress, with 50,000 fires in the Brazilian Amazon in September 1991 alone, to clear land that can support, on the average, only one head of cattle per acre.
This is one legacy of Nelson Rockefeller’s “shining dream” of a conquered Amazon. Another, of course, is the survival of the Special Group, the supersecret small team from the National Security Council that Nelson was the first to chair and that Ronald Reagan and George Bush inherited to give “plausible deniability” its widest scope to date. This secret general staff, operating out of a White House basement office, waged covert warfare in the name of democracy against Soviet communism, against alleged enemy agents in other democracies, against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government despite Congress’s legislated prohibition, and ultimately against the United States’ own Constitution. “To save the village we had to destroy it,” was its rationale in Vietnam; to allegedly save democracy, both at home and abroad, they risked destroying it in both places.
This Rockefeller legacy, too, was global in scope, leaving behind few happy, prosperous people, many dictatorships, and much debt. In 1986, almost a decade after eight South American governments signed the Amazon Pact committing their countries to an integrated economic development of the Amazon basin (but not to protection of Indian land rights), and ten years after David Rockefeller led a bankers’ delegation to Brazil to help the military regime secure additional loans, Latin Americans were again rioting against the visit of a Rockefeller. This time it was David. Argentines, upset over the sharp decline in real wages caused by government austerity measures imposed to repay Argentina’s whopping $50 billion debt, blamed David. Chase Manhattan and other American banks had lent the military dictatorship billions of dollars during its twenty-year reign; when the generals finally handed over the government to elected civilians in 1984, it handed over the regime’s debt as well, and David expected the new civilian government to pay, prompting a top adviser to the Argentine president to call him a “bloodsucker” and senators and at least one cabinet member to refuse to meet with him.
When he last visited Argentina in 1980, there had been protests then, too, over his perceived closeness with the military regime and the expense involved in renting the country’s leading opera house to give him a posh reception. But he had faced nothing like this. Now, in 1986, water cannons and rubber bullets had to be used by police to stop protesters from marching too near the American club in downtown Buenos Aires, where David, now chairman of the Americas Society (an offspring of his old Business Group for Latin America), was conferring with American businessmen with interests in Argentina. More than eighty demonstrators were arrested, and five were hurt; windows were smashed and eggs and rocks were thrown against the heavily armed police. A United States flag was burned.67
Relegated to the back pages of U.S. newspapers, most reports, with the exception of a New York Times story, focused on the riot rather than its root cause. And even the Times led its account by describing the violence and noting that one of those gravely injured was a young member of the Communist party. Since Nelson’s youth, Rockefellers were always fair game for communists, as communists were for Nelson. The Times pointed out that the Communist party had helped sponsor the march, although as only one of seven political parties in the Peronist-led coalition that had organized it. U.S. support for military dictatorships, whether Péron’s or the supposedly more exotic “new military” species, was part of Nelson Rockefeller’s legacy to Latin America; but it was not mentioned. The specter of an International Communist Conspiracy exploiting a nation’s anger sufficed, as always.
But then Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev gave a promise—and warning—to a startled President Reagan that “we are going to take your enemy away.” With the collapse of a Soviet Union ruined by an arms race and a stifling police state and inefficient bureaucratic centralism also went the rationale for illegal arms sales like those of the Iran-Contra scandal, coups like Brazil�
��s, and military interventions like Vietnam. Nation-building, the Rostowian term used to describe the soft side of the Cold War’s counterinsurgency operations, has yet to find favor among Americans when applied just in Somalia, much less globally, to create a “New World Order” that appears only vaguely democratic—and more exclusively corporate in its multinational reach.
But there will always be enemies to demonize and indigenous peoples to conquer with love or bullets. That is because indigenous peoples, despite all they have been forced to face, survive. Their survival continues the cultural challenge to Euro-American delusions about a model of development that requires economic “austerity” deprivations and inhumane policies to pay off debts to foreign and domestic corporate entities, particularly banks, controlled by wealthy minorities, the origins of whose fortunes owe much to the plunder of tribal lands.
The conquest of the American West was marked by such policies toward tribal peoples as killing off their food base (the American buffalo), forced removal, religious persecution, and deculturation by missionaries and by the breakup of families by mandatory attendance at the BIA’s boarding schools. These were subtler means of genocide, just as deadly as massacres and the deliberate distribution of disease-infected army blankets. This conquest, complete with its search-and-destroy cavalry sweeps, happened decades before the Soviet Union came into existence. The Rockefellers and the Townsends, in different ways, were part of that saga. Given the continued dynamics of unrestrained corporate expansion, their heirs could be part of the next conquest as well, starting out, like Nelson Rockefeller and William Cameron Townsend, on a road paved with good intentions.
Brazil’s rubber tappers, once the hapless vanguard of the world market’s penetration of the jungle, recently learned that lesson. Trying to save the rain forest with the very market forces that were destroying it, the rubber gatherers went into business with Cultural Survival Enterprises of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to produce “non-timber forest products,” such as food products made with Brazil nuts, as an alternative to razing the rain forest. The Americans had been inspired to come to the aid of the rubber tappers by the martyrdom of Chico Mendes, who was assassinated in 1988 by landowners in Rondônia for organizing the seringueiros to defend their rights. It did not take long, however, before the anthropologists of Cultural Survival and the producers of Ben and Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch candy and ice cream found their need to make profits conflicting with the economic survival of nut gatherers, who began complaining in 1991 of being squeezed by their American backers to repay a $100,000 loan the Americans gave to help the tappers set up a nut-shelling and processing factory.68 Market forces alone could not meet human needs; left unguided, market forces ran amok, beyond the control of the nut gatherers. With huge companies setting prices, pressuring the nut gatherers’ cooperative to be “more competitive,” and lenders dictating terms and costs of loans, the prospects for the tappers maintaining their independence were questionable. Their plight was not unlike that facing Brazil as a whole or other countries struggling to retain national sovereignty in the new world order of the multinational corporations. Like Nelson’s, the tappers’ dream of everyone profiting was being shattered by the reality that an expanding marketplace does not make profits neutral, that someone profits and someone does not, and that expanding markets historically lead to ever-newer frontiers where the weak are conquered by the strong.
