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

by Vincent Bevins

As the coup began, the US State Department began an operation it dubbed Brother Sam, and made tankers, ammunition, and aircraft carriers available to the conspirators.70 None of these were needed. The Brazilian Congress declared the presidency “vacant,” in clear violation of the constitution. Then, after that first Institutional Act removed about forty of their left-wing colleagues from office, 361 of Brazil’s remaining lawmakers voted to install General Castelo Branco as president. Almost all of Brazil’s media supported the coup.71 US assistance began to pour back in.72 With Jango gone, the military delivered a very different kind of speech at the 1964 memorial of the 1935 Intentona. General Pery Constant Beviláqua declared, “The fatherland is here! There it is in this beautiful flag! As we contemplate it, we feel your presence, you heroes of November 1935!”73 Ambassador Lincoln Gordon called the 1964 coup “the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century.”74 As Brazilian historian Marco Napolitano puts it, “Just as in a Hollywood film, there was a happy ending (for the plotters, that is). The communist bad guys and their sympathizers were deposed. The good guys were in power. And best of all: this was achieved without the United States needing to appear as a visible agent of the conspiracy.”75 This was huge, and novel. In Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958) and Cuba (1961), anyone who was paying attention knew that Washington had b...