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but a growing social consciousness pushed her to the left,
They told the Communists, no, the only way is armed resistance.
“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,”
Benny also watched as Bangkok slowly began to turn into a destination for sex tourism—American soldiers would visit for their “rest and recreation” breaks from the war in Vietnam. The steady inflow of GIs transformed parts of the city into a kind of factory row for prostitution.
but Benny knew just from hanging out at Rendezvous that something very disturbing was beginning to take place to his east.
The pilots were clearly describing indiscriminate bombing and the massacre of civilians.
authoritarian developmentalism, close ties with Washington, and, most importantly, anticommunism.52
where Texas oilmen bragged about bribing officials and their wives complained about the quality of the Indonesian help.
“That’s usually enough. Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They’re just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man’s land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man’s woman is pretty, the strong man will take her.” He paused to take another sip of water, then asked, “Which would you rather be?”
Both military dictatorships, Brazilian and Indonesian, would quibble with Washington over this or that economic issue or foreign policy decision, but the big questions were settled.
They certainly were not trying to rewrite the rules of the global economy, or use the power of a unified Third World to shift influence back to the majority of the world’s peoples,
Modernization Theory.
And in both cases, the countries had stable governments made up of local rulers who could trace their legitimacy to some Brazilian or Indonesian past, rather than appearing to their populations and the world as the obvious imposition of Washington.
Both Indonesia and Brazil were anticommunist dictatorships, and this doesn’t only have consequences on the international stage. Internally, when anticommunism is the ruling ideology, almost the national religion, any legitimate complaint from below can easily be dismissed as communist.
It includes unions and any normal demands for workers’ rights.
this arrangement may be just as far from the system that economics textbooks describe as Soviet society was from the sketches of socialism provided by Karl Marx.
In capitalism, feudal lords are not supposed to be running much of the country as their own personal fiefdoms.
like massive cor...
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“crony capitalism.”
“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 have been treated if his country tried the same thing after a war of independence.
!!!
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?
“national security.”
“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” Kissinger said.
the peaceful “Chilean way” to socialism.
US-backed right-wing terrorism began before he even took office.
1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!… $10,000,000 available, more if necessary… best men we have make the economy scream19
If all that failed, they would “condemn Chile to utmost deprivation and poverty,” Ambassador Edward Korry told Kissinger,
At first, the Agency didn’t even know which of their local partners had done it.
Would there be an anticommunist monument to Schneider in the center of Santiago, like the one in Jakarta?
What scared the most powerful nation in the world was the prospect that Allende’s democratic socialism would succeed.
Our main concern in Chile is… that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to
the world will be his success.… If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble. I want to work on this and on military relations—put in more money. On the economic side we want to give him cold Turkey [sic].… We’ll be very cool and very correct, but doing these other things which will be a real message to Allende and others.… No impression should be permitted in Latin America that they can get away with this.
they felt that communism would come all by itself because of the misery and poverty in these countries.”
The problem for both men, in other words, was not an international communist conspiracy. The problem was that they thought the Soviets and Chinese might be right.
the order was to “destroy anyone who claims there is a Sudanese Communist Party.” This didn’t make much of a splash in the West, either.33
Patricio “Pato” Madera, a founding member of the left-wing Ramona Parra Brigade of muralists, recognized the “Jakarta” graffiti as the handiwork of the same class of hired hands who had been painting right-wing slogans in recurring terror campaigns since 1964. But this was an escalation. It was a mass death threat.38
The CIA, working with its far-right partners, was trying to ruin the economy, and doing its best to make it look like it was Allende’s fault.
Truckers—who were indirectly receiving funding from Washington—brought transportation to a halt, meaning regular people were left without basic supplies. Once the strike started, the CIA did its best to keep it going.
The officer’s notes from the time record Kissinger asking, “Since Allende is holding himself out as a moderate, why not support extremists?”41
The Philippines was the site of Washington’s largest experiment with direct colonial rule, and its independence had been carefully managed to keep Manila in the Western camp, ever since the CIA had defeated the left-nationalist Huks using terror and psychological warfare in 1954.
The right-wing Marcos, re-elected under slightly suspicious circumstances in 1968, and his wife, Imelda, were close friends of California Governor Ronald Reagan, who attended the gala opening of Imelda’s lavish, multimillion-dollar Cultural Center.43
that the unarmed PKI had left itself too vulnerable.
(Sison told me that what he saw in Indonesia in 1965 convinced him the CPP had to be armed and clandestine, and the party is active to this day.)44
“Disorders must now be induced into a crisis so that stricter measures can be taken,” he wrote. “A little more destruction and vandalism, and I can do anything.”45
The plan was to kill around ten thousand people, the left and its core supporters, as a way of ensuring a stable transition to a right-wing government.
It meant the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States. It meant forced disappearances and unrepentant state terror. And it would be employed far and wide in Latin America over the next two decades.
estarán aquí hasta que se produzca el Yakarta”
Strangely, right-wing media began to run an inverted version of the “Jakarta” terror meme. El Mercurio, the CIA-funded paper, reproduced the story that communists had massacred generals in Indonesia, and could do so in Chile, too.51
“Our bosses explained to us that for this or that reason the Marxist government should be overthrown, and the people should be washed of its Marxist leaders. For them, every left-wing leader would get, without a doubt, the Jakarta Plan.”
