The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World

by Vincent Bevins

Chile, one of Latin America’s most stable and prosperous nations. The Christian Democrats were the party favored by Washington—and the CIA—and they received very significant help from Uncle Sam. The Agency pumped $3 million into that election. That came out to almost a dollar per vote for Eduardo Frei, more than Lyndon Johnson spent in his own 1964 campaign.42 In addition to funds, the CIA also delivered a crude “scare campaign” to the Chilean people.43 The Agency made extensive use of the press, radio, films, pamphlets, and posters, and painted the walls of the cities. One red-baiting radio ad featured the sound of a machine gun operated by murderous communists, followed by a woman declaring, “They have killed my child!” There were up to twenty radio spots of this kind per day.44

In 1966, the MIR newspaper, Punto Final, published a text attributed to philosopher Bertrand Russell. “I fear that the horror of the killings in Indonesia was only possible because in the West we are so saturated with racism that the death of Asians, even in the hundreds of thousands, doesn’t impress us. Blacks in North America know it well,” the article continued. “Knowing the same thing, the peoples of the world should take the path of open struggle.”48 Punto Final also published a guide to CIA activities in Indonesia, the Congo, Vietnam, and Brazil.49 The paper got some details wrong; but just as was the case when Harian Rakyat covered Guatemala in 1954, Chile’s left-wing press described events in Indonesia more accurately than the mainstream US press at the time.

Suharto had severed relations with China and banned all Chinese-language materials in Indonesia. Even Chinese characters were banned. The government had passed legislation strongly recommending that Chinese Indonesians drop names of Chinese origin.

Like so many Indonesians of Chinese descent, he picked a Javanese-sounding last name. From then on, he was officially Benny Widyono.

At least, that’s what he told Nury and the family when he arrived back in Havana. Not long after, his job disappeared, because the embassy in Havana disappeared. He and his whole family lost their Indonesian passports.

Nury lost contact with her family and all her friends back in Jakarta; she and her father were considered communists now, and it was dangerous for anyone from their old life to speak with them. She settled into a life in Havana.

Things worked out so well that the US government and its allies began to use them as a model. Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, began working with the gringos to fight communism and create copycat regimes in its neighborhood. Indonesia, the largest country in Southeast Asia, would use anticommunism as an excuse to expand its influence eastward with Washington’s approval, and the leader of Southeast Asia’s second-largest country soon used a script similar to Suharto’s in order

Internally, when anticommunism is the ruling ideology, almost the national religion, any legitimate complaint from below can easily be dismissed as communist.

There’s a term that broadly describes this kind of economic arrangement. The people of Indonesia and Brazil lived under “crony capitalism.”

In West Germany, there was no influential communist party. But the main center-left party, the second-place Social Democrats, was founded as a Marxist party while Marx was still alive, and its leaders had chosen a more moderate path than the Leninists because of their success working within capitalist democracy.

It was very clear to Francisca why Europeans were allowed to experiment with social democracy and even communist politics, while

her country had been taken away from her forever. “Racism, very simply. White Europeans are offered tolerance and sympathetic treatment, while we are not.”

When Frank Wisner and Howard Jones were working to re-engineer West Germany’s financial system after World War II, the US government wiped out all public and private debt as they created the new deutsche mark. One shudders to think how a major Third World leader perceived as anti-American or “communist” would ...

Why did Cold War Washington let Western Europe “get away” with all this light socialism when similar policy orientations led to violent intervention in the Third World? Was it only that, as Francisca said, Americans simply trusted their European cousins—who were white,

and therefore responsible—to handle the task of managing democracy? A complementary explanation might be that these countries, some still overseeing remnants of colonial empire, were incredibly rich and powerful. They were much harder to push around, even if Washington had wanted to, and—perhaps more importantly—they sat at the top of the world economy. They were being fully integrated into the US-led system, and so there was much less of a risk they would try to radically reshape the global order, because it had served them quite well.

In the early days of the Suharto regime, US oil executives bragged that they were taking advantage of exactly those dynamics as they dined in front of Barack Obama’s mother. His government, along with the US-backed Mobutu regime in the Congo, would go on to set world-historical records for corruption.4

Brazil helped establish violent anticommunist regimes in Bolivia and Uruguay. By 1976, much of South America was a “killing zone” of US-backed regimes on its borders, which had employed Brazil as its “prototype.”

Operação Jacarta, or “The Jakarta Operation,” was the name of a secret part of an extermination plan, according to the documentation compiled

by Brazil’s Truth Commission. Testimony gathered after the fall of the dictatorship indicates Operação Jacarta may have been part of Operação Radar, which was aimed at destroying the structure of the Brazilian Communist Party.

It was not just economic sabotage, however. “Track two never really ended,” said one CIA officer, meaning that since 1970, the Agency had never stopped looking for ways to organize a coup. The officer’s notes from the time record Kissinger asking, “Since Allende is holding himself out as a moderate, why not support extremists?”

However, just as with Brazil’s military dictatorship, the consequences of Pinochet’s violence were far from limited by the borders of his own narrow country. Almost immediately after taking power, he sought to influence events abroad, both by fighting “communism” throughout the hemisphere and by executing civilians around the world.

Chile’s new dictator, on the other hand, had elevated a group of well-connected Chilean economists who had studied at the University of Chicago, and favored a radical turn toward free-market economics. This group, which came to be known as the “Chicago Boys,” were far more zealous than even Benny’s old acquaintances in the “Berkeley Mafia” back in Indonesia.

The capital of his own country had come to mean not cosmopolitanism, not Third World solidarity and global justice, but rather reactionary violence. “Jakarta” meant brutal elimination of people organizing for a better world. And now he was in another country, also backed by the US, whose governing forces celebrated that history rather than condemning it.

But were the students actually wrong? He had to face this. He knew the whole city of Jakarta in its dirty, beautiful complexity. But outside the country—here in Chile—all that arrived was the story of mass murder. A mass murder that absolutely happened, that Pinochet had somehow replicated here. The graffiti wasn’t slander. It was reality.

He thought back on his own life, to his time in Kansas in the late 1950s and early ’60s. He thought of those Indonesian military men coming over to eat Indonesian food at his home and then going out on the town. It was then that those men were being trained, by the United States, in the ways of violent, fanatical anticommunism. It was those men who returned to Jakarta, after nights of strip clubs and heavy drinking with Benny, to help carry out the world’s most notorious right-wing extermination program. That’s where it all started. Back in Kansas, he thought. That’s why the name of the city I grew up in, where I studied, where I learned about socialism and marched

against colonialism and racism, has become a synonym...

The United States left South Vietnam. In the Western world, this meant that Saigon “fell.” From the perspective of Hanoi, the Vietnamese had only achieved what they should have gotten, through the referendum that Washington had helped cancel, back in 1956. Three million had died, the entire nation was militarized, and huge swathes of the country’s lush jungles were rendered poisonous for generations because of US chemical warfare. After the fall of Saigon, there was no communist-led mass murder of civilians in Vietnam.

The massacres came in Cambodia. In 1970, the United States had orchestrated a coup to oust Prince Sihanouk, and installed Lon Nol, a general who was supposed to be Cambodia’s Suharto. His forces trained in Bandung, not far from the site of Sukarno’s 1955 Afro-Asian Conference.1 During Lon Nol’s rule the United States continued to bomb the country indiscriminately, killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly peasants, in a futile attempt to stop Vietnamese communists from moving through the countryside. The United States dropped three times the tonnage on Cambodia that fell on Japan during World War II, atom bombs included.

After the US-backed coup that deposed him, the ousted prince, Sihanouk, published a book of memoirs titled My War with the CIA. “We refused to become US puppets, or join in the anti-communist crusade,” he wrote. “That was our crime.”

In 1975, Magdalena and Sakono were still in prison. They were still surviving on starvation rations, and forced to endure backbreaking work in Indonesia’s system of concentration camps. For ten years, it had been drilled into them that they were evil, outcast, unwanted. Entirely cut off from family.

On Bali, one group of prisoners would carefully collect and utilize their own feces to fertilize tiny bits of soil and grow vegetables. They would pass the time by singing songs, either those from the days of Sukarno or based on their own experiences. The refrain to one of them, sung in Spanish, came from the title of Fidel Castro’s 1953 speech—“La historia me absolverá”—history will absolve me.5

Among Portugal’s newly freed colonies was the small nation of East Timor, which shared an island with Indonesian territory. When East Timor gained its independence, Suharto claimed he was threatened by communism on his borders.

The party that oversaw the Timorese declaration of independence, FRETILIN, did have a left wing, and some of its members used Marxist language, which was hardly surprising for a Portuguese-speaking national liberation movement at the time. But this was enough for Washington, which was convinced that East Timor could become a “Cuba in Asia”—even though Nixon had already re-established relations with the Communist Party in Beijing. He gave Suharto a “big wink,” and the Indonesian generals quickly drew up Operasi Seroja—Operation Lotus.

Indonesia invaded in December 1975. The people of East Timor did not want the Indonesian military there. FRETILIN radicalized, and launched a “people’s war” against the invaders. To put down the freedom fighters, the Indonesian Armed Forces killed up to three hundred thousand people.8 From 1975 to 1979, while both Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter sat in the White House, Washington’s closest ally in Southeast Asia annihilated up to a third of the population of East Timor, a higher percentage than those who died under Pol Pot in Cambodia.

In January 1979, the Khmer Rouge fell, and the world found out what had been happening in Cambodia. The government, if it can be called that, fell because the Vietnamese Communists realized what Pol Pot had been doing—and also because he bafflingly attacked his more powerful former allies. Vietnam invaded and easily toppled the secretive, psychotic cabal that had been terrorizing the country since 1975. The Khmer Rouge were driven into the forests and mountains along the Thai border. Vietnam took over most of the country, closed down the killing fields, and allowed Cambodians to return to the cities under a government of their own creation. Around a quarter of Cambodians were dead.

The United States did not celebrate the fall of the murderous Khmer Rouge. China, which had been moving closer to Washington since Nixon’s visit in 1973, was allied with Pol Pot. Deng Xiaoping was furious, and unwilling to tolerate what he perceived as Vietnam’s aggression against China’s ally. He resolved to invade Vietnam, and told the US about the plan. President Carter said he could not openly condone an attack but assured Deng he understood that “China cannot allow Vietnam to pursue aggression with impunity,” and he privately promised to support Beijing if the Soviets threatened to assist the Vietnamese.

The United States chose to recognize the remnants of the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations, keeping its tiny regime alive, and refusing to recognize the Vietnamese-allied government. This would last for years.

“We won’t need to kill a million like in Indonesia,” López Rega reportedly said, “because we can get it done with ten thousand.” He guessed low. Anticommunists killed far more than that in Argentina.

In Indonesia, it may not have been the case that the mass murder was genocide. It was simply anticommunist mass murder. In Guatemala it was anticommunist genocide.

In Afghanistan, where Soviet troops had been trying to prop up a communist ally for nine years, Moscow’s forces retreated, the CIA-backed Islamist fundamentalists set up a fanatical theocracy, and the West stopped paying attention.

For the two biggest anticommunist governments ever set up in the former Third World, the end of the Cold War had an indirect effect. Both Indonesia and Brazil transitioned from authoritarian rule to multiparty democracy. They did so at different times—Brazil started the process well before the fall of the Berlin wall, and Suharto left power almost a decade after it fell. Crucially, however, they both did it the same way. In Brazil and Indonesia, the transition from military dictatorship was carried out in a controlled manner. Negotiated transfers of power both maintained the fundamental social structure the dictatorships were set up to protect and provided impunity for the rulers, who remained wealthy and influential.

This was now the case in almost every country in Latin America, and the vast majority of Southeast Asia. In different ways and to varying degrees, fanatical anticommunism remained a powerful force in both countries and in the surrounding regions. It took different forms, both overt and latent, but it was there, always threatening to reanimate. It certainly did not leave the earth when the putative Soviet threat disappeared.

In Africa, the civil wars ended in different ways, but crony capitalism and resource extraction became the rule almost everywhere.65 In Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism was not as clean a process as the West often believed.

In 1990, Bulgaria held an election. Despite Washington’s generous support for the opposition, the Bulgarian Socialist Party—the new name for the Communists—won. But US

and European officials made it clear they were unwilling to deal with the Socialists, and after a period of strife and protest, the Socialists handed power to a coalition government. Over the next few years, living standards dropped precipitously. Nury and her husband, who had been used to high employment and decent public services at least, if not democratic freedoms, watched in horror as the economy shrank for nine years in a row and inflation spiraled out of control.

“When I finally got to go back to Indonesia, it was shocking to hear what people think communism is,” Nury said. “I lived through it, and they are just wrong. And living in Bulgaria under communism was a hell of a lot better than living in Suharto’s Indonesia.”

In 1955, Sukarno and much of the rest of the Third World came together with the intention of changing the relationship between the First and Third World. They believed that after centuries of racist colonialism, it was their time to take their

With very few exceptions, the countries that were at Bandung have remained in the same structural relationship to the former imperial powers.

He finds only five real capitalist success cases: Albania, Poland, Belarus, Armenia, and Estonia, which have been somehow catching up with the First World. Only three are democracies.

Which means, Milanovic calculates, that only 10 percent of the population of the former communist world in Eastern Europe got what they were promised when they tore the wall down. The Second World lost, and lost big.