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I will pay with my life for my loyalty to the people. And I tell you all that I am certain that the seed we have planted in the conscience in thousands and thousands of Chileans cannot held back forever.…
Viva Chile! Viva el pueblo! Vivan los trabajadores!
These are my last words, and I am sure my sacrifice will not be in vain.
He didn’t come back. They executed all of them. Jakarta had arrived.
Juraj Domic, the Croatian exile who introduced the “Jakarta” metaphor into Chilean politics, was given a job in Pinochet’s foreign ministry.
but to make resistance impossible and solidify the dominant political and economic structures.
Henry Kissinger had a very simple policy regarding South America’s new dictator: “Defend, defend, defend.”63
The capital of his own country had come to mean not cosmopolitanism, not Third World solidarity and global justice, but rather reactionary violence.
And now he was in another country, also backed by the US, whose governing forces celebrated that history rather than condemning it.
A mass murder that absolutely happened, that Pinochet had somehow replicated here. The graffiti wasn’t slander. It was reality.
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 for mass murder.
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.
After the fall of Saigon, there was no communist-led mass murder of civilians in Vietnam.
To put down the freedom fighters, the Indonesian Armed Forces killed up to three hundred thousand people.
a higher percentage than those who died under Pol Pot in Cambodia.
a grisly photo of his body, slung too close to the ground for hanging to be effective, made the dictatorship’s claims even more patently offensive—
Admiral Emilio Massera declared Argentina was fighting a “Third World War” between “dialectic materialism and idealistic humanism.” This meant removing the influence of Marx, as well as Freud and Albert Einstein.
“First we will kill all subversives, then we will kill all of their collaborators, then those who sympathize with subversives, then we will kill those that remain indifferent, and finally we kill the timid.”
Townley is now in FBI witness protection.
She didn’t know it, but this was the fourth time that Washington’s violent anticommunist campaign had affected her life personally.
First, the US-backed military, the nascent “state within a state,” had ignited anti-Chinese riots in her part of Indonesia, forcing her family to flee the country. Second, her family lived through Brazil’s US-backed military coup in 1964. Third, the mass murder in Indonesia demolished life for the relatives who had stayed home. And now, one of her college buddies was the victim of an Operation Condor campaign.
The Guatemalan government began to kill indigenous people en masse simply because of their ethnic background. Entire ethnicities, whole tribes, complete villages were marked as either communist or liable to become communist.
The scale of the violence, however, and the consequences of the actions are often underestimated.
turned to Israel and Taiwan,
Like Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Árbenz, Fidel, Sukarno, and Allende before them, the terceristas initially hoped to set up a government that Washington could tolerate.
as well as US Republican congressmen.43
“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.
“You can be a Communist,” he told reporter Laurie Becklund, “even if you personally don’t believe you are a Communist.”
In Guatemala it was anticommunist genocide.
“If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.”58
Using numbers compiled by the US-funded Freedom House organization, historian John Coatsworth concluded that from 1960 to 1990, the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America “vastly exceeded” the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period of time.60
Historians suspect that probably could have happened long before, if fanatical anticommunism had not led Washington to block any possibility of negotiations.
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.
Or perhaps the real threat Washington perceived was the possibility of a rival model outside the global American-led system, the same thing that we now know bothered US officials about Guatemala in 1954, Bandung in 1955, and Chile in 1973.
Barack Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, yet when he finished his term in 2016, the United States was actively bombing at least seven countries.63
The past two decades have led the best historians to take a wider view of US behavior. Before and after the Cold War, the United States was always an expansionist and aggressive power.
“In an historical sense—and especially as seen from the South—the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism th...
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“The new and rampant interventionism we have seen after the Islamist attacks on America in September 2001 is not an aberration but a continuation—in a slightly more e...
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“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.”
Ilom keeps sending more of its youth up north. This is not about love for the United States, or the American dream. They don’t want to go. They know who was responsible for the violence they’d suffered.
“A lot of us, just really a lot of us, have gone to the United States,” said Antonio Caba Caba as he was showing me around Ilom. We walked by the plaza where he watched almost every man he knew get murdered for being some kind of a suspected communist. He said, “I guess it’s funny—well, maybe ‘funny’ isn’t the word—but we know who is responsible for the violence that destroyed this place. We know it was the United States that was behind it. But we keep sending our kids there, because they have nowhere else to go.”
“The United States won. Here in Indonesia, you got what you wanted, and around the world, you got what you wanted,”
Winarso stopped fidgeting. “You killed us.”
The reality is that the white world, and the countries that conquered the globe before 1945, remain very much on top,
the period in which the US made routine violent interventions in global affairs, was not marked by a drop in the power of the white countries.
The Second World lost, and lost big. They lost the geopolitical power they had during the Cold War, their citizens often lost material wealth, and many did not even gain democratic freedoms to counterbalance that loss.5
“Think back to 1963, 1964. In those years, what world did you believe that you were building? What did you believe the world would be like in the twenty-first century?” Then I’d ask, “Is that the world you live in now?”
:(
I found evidence indirectly linking the metaphor “Jakarta,” taken from the largest and most important of these programs, to at least eleven countries (and twelve if we include Sri Lanka, where the government employed what it called the “Indonesian solution”).
6
I do want to claim that this loose network of extermination programs, organized and justified by anticommunist principles, was such an important part of the US victory that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today.
