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

by Vincent Bevins

They were building a strong, independent nation, and they were in the process of standing up as equals with the imperial countries. Socialism wasn’t coming right away, but it was coming, and

they would create a world without exploitation or systemic injustice.

They are living out their last years in a messy, poor, crony capitalist country, and they are told almost every single day it was a crime for them to want something different.

As we have seen, in the years 1945–1990, a loose network of US-backed anticommunist extermination programs emerged around the world, and they carried out mass murder in at least twenty-three countries (see Appendix Five). There was no central plan, no master control room where the whole thing was orchestrated, but I think that the extermination programs in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka,

Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam should be seen as interconnected, and a crucial part of the US victory in the Cold War.

“globalization.” That term certainly caught on for a while. But for those who want to be truly accurate, a better word is “Americanization,” Westad says.7 For better or worse, almost all of us now live in the global economic system that Indonesia and Brazil entered in the mid-1960s, a worldwide capitalist order with the United States as its leading military power and center of cultural production. That may change soon—who knows. But we’re still here.

It’s now probably broadly accurate to say that all of Latin America, with the exception of Cuba, consists of crony capitalist nations with powerful oligarchies. In Southeast Asia, the same is true for the majority of countries, and even the communist nations were integrated into ASEAN, which Indonesia and the Philippines set up as anticommunist in 1967.

But another reason that I think Brazil and Indonesia were such important elements of the process of Americanization that ultimately shaped most of the globe is that, after 1964 and 1965, so many of their neighbors landed on paths that were influenced, directly or indirectly, by the anticommunist regimes in the region’s largest countries.

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the

hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what t...

This is not how elderly Indonesians live. They live in houses with big families—and if they don’t have that, the neighborhood takes care of them. As I walked into her house, no one on her street greeted us. She was not wrong when she figured that she would be marked for life. This kind of situation is extremely common for survivors of the 1965 violence and repression.

There are an estimated tens of millions of victims or relatives of victims still alive in Indonesia, and almost all live in worse situations than they deserve. This ranges from abject poverty and social isolation to simply being denied the admission that a parent or grandparent was killed unjustly—that their family was not guilty of anything at all.

Like Magdalena, he converted to Christianity in prison. This is also very common among survivors, especially among 1965 victims who were raised to observe the Javanese form of Islam. After being accused of atheism, communists were rejected by the large Muslim institutions in Java, which often collaborated in the killings, but they still believed in God and sought spiritual comfort from the material horrors of their lives.

Domingo, the owner of the bus, had this answer: “Well, they said they were communists and that communists are dangerous. But actually, the government are the ones who did all the killing. So if anyone was dangerous, if anyone was ‘communist,’ it must be them.”