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

by Vincent Bevins

Suharto took this propaganda a bit further than statues and annual speeches—he ordered the production of a gruesome, three-hour film depicting his version of events, which was broadcast on September 30 each year on public television. The Army still screens it.

The story spread by Suharto hits on some of the darkest fears and prejudices held by Indonesians, and indeed men in general—around the world. A surprise night raid on your home. Slow torture with blades. The inversion of gender roles, the literal assault on strong men’s reproductive organs carried out by demonic, sexually depraved communist women. It’s the stuff of a well-written, reactionary horror film, and few people believe Suharto came up with it himself.

What officials in the embassy and the CIA decided the Army really did need, however, was information. Working with CIA analysts, embassy political officer Robert Martens prepared lists with the names of thousands of communists and suspected communists, and handed them over to the Army, so that these people could be murdered and “checked off” the list. As far as we know, this was at least the third time in history that US officials had supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to allies, so that they could round them up and kill them. The first was in Guatemala in 1954, the second was in Iraq in 1963, and now, on a much larger scale, was Indonesia 1965. “It really was a big help to the army,” said Martens, who was a member of the US embassy’s political section. “I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”

They walked back home for an hour, processing the knowledge they would never lay him to rest, and sickened by the vast sea of humanity they had just entered. In total, at least 5 percent of the population of Bali was killed—that is, eighty thousand people, probably the highest proportion in the country.29

According to Subandrio, his former foreign minister, Suharto intentionally engineered hyperinflation by working with businessmen to restrict the supply of basic goods like rice, sugar, and cooking oil.34 Suharto encouraged anticommunist student groups, often drawn from the same schools Benny had attended just years earlier, to protest those high prices. The US government was intentionally destabilizing the economy.35

It wasn’t only US government officials who handed over kill lists to the Army. Managers of US-owned plantations furnished them with the names of “troublesome” communists and union organizers, who were then murdered.

Of course, as Washington’s military engagement ramped up, Hanoi was hardly in a position to do anything about Indonesia. The Vietnamese communists did eventually win against the Americans, but at tremendous cost. Three million Vietnamese people were killed in that war, and two million of them were civilians.5 Many more were killed in Cambodia and Laos. In Indochina, Washington’s anticommunist crusade erased human life on a truly colossal scale, with no appreciable positive results.

The US military launched the Phoenix Program with the assistance of Australia and the South Vietnamese government in 1968. The goal was to “neutralize” the enemy’s administration through persuasion or assassination. This meant murdering civilians, not waging war. The military drew up blacklists and went hunting for its targets. Operation Phoenix killed tens of thousands of bureaucrats and unarmed people.

Because they didn’t sign, they had their passports revoked and lost their citizenship—which is to say, they lost their country. The same thing happened to thousands of Indonesians around the world, all of whom became stateless, condemned to seek assistance from the place where they were stuck or wander across borders—without a passport—until they could find a government that would take them.14 They could not communicate with their families in Indonesia. They were marked as communists, and as a result were fully and truly outcasts.

Soon after, Mein requested the services of John P. Longan, a former Border Patrol officer in the US who had worked with the CIA, in Thailand and elsewhere.18 Longan had worked for the same Bangkok office that had authorized the supply of weapons to the Indonesian military during the killings.19 Soon after Longan arrived from Venezuela, he formed death squads. Within three months they carried out Operation Cleanup, or Operación Limpieza, which kidnapped, tortured, and executed thirty prominent left-wing figures in March 1966, just as Sukarno was stepping down in Indonesia.

US government officials were almost uniformly celebratory of the massacres in Indonesia, even as their scope and brutality became clear.

The US economic elite heard a very different message. Indonesia was open for business. In 1967, the first year of Suharto’s fully consolidated rule, General Electric, American Express, Caterpillar, and Goodyear Tire all came to explore the new opportunities available to them in Indonesia. Star-Kist foods arrived to see about fishing in Indonesian waters, and of course, defense contractors Raytheon and Lockheed popped over, too.

At least one million Indonesians were still in concentration camps, comprising one of the largest populations of political detainees anywhere in the world. They were subject to starvation, forced labor, physical and psychological torture, and attempts at anticommunist re-education.

Pol Pot and his followers were also paying very close attention to Indonesia. They studied the collapse of the PKI, and concluded that its strategy of aligning with Sukarno and winning mass democratic support had only led to disaster. As a result, he vowed that his movement would not meet the same fate at the hands of reactionaries, and resolved that power for his group would be achieved and maintained through arms and violence. The PKI had no arms, and trusted far too much in democratic niceties; that was its downfall, the secretive leader of the “Khmer Rouge” concluded. He would be different.35

In his 1965 book, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, he wrote that “neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism.” According to Nkrumah, the new way of the world was that “foreign capital is used for the exploitation, rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world,” and that imperial powers no longer even had to admit what they were doing—not even to themselves.38 In 1966, while the US was still assisting in the extermination of Indonesia’s leftists, Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup backed by the United States and Britain. The role of the CIA is still unclear; it is established, however, that the coup plotters had trained in the United Kingdom. Nkrumah took refuge in Guinea, then led by Third World movement ally Ahmed Sékou Touré.

1964, the Christian Democratic Party easily won presidential elections in 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 The CIA also distributed disinformation and “black propaganda,” falsely attributing materials to the Communist Party.

There was no opposition allowed in Brazil or Indonesia, however, which meant that elites could get away with everything. Venality and violence ruled the day in Jakarta and Brasília. With a population too terrified to speak up, corruption exploded. 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 Of course, the regime that Suharto set up was founded on mass violence. And by the late 1960s, Indonesia was operating a system of US-supported concentration camps comparable to the worst years of the Soviet Union.5

In the first years of the military dictatorship, students, artists, and intellectuals could still protest the regime, and violent repression was reserved for union leaders and the organized left. In the anos de chumbo, from 1969 to 1974, all that changed. Anyone could be suspected of being a “subversive” and taken off to a basement in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro for rounds of torture that might end in death. In addition to their constant contact with the US government, soldiers learned techniques that the French had developed in Algeria, like the use of electric shocks.10

Médici was recorded as saying that “he did not believe that the Soviets or the Chinese were interested in giving any assistance to these countries’ communist movements; 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 impoverished people in Brazil’s neighboring countries might choose “communism” all by themselves, and they had to be stopped.

Pinochet hated Benny’s office. For him, the whole UN was basically a hive of communists. But even worse, Benny worked at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). This was a bastion of what Pinochet and his global allies considered unacceptably leftist economic thought. CEPAL was the epicenter of development economics and dependency theory; 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. Their ascendance was not planned—the Pinochet government’s raison d’être was anticommunism, not market fundamentalism—but under these economists, Chile became the world’s first test case for “neoliberal” economics, and Benny’s CEPAL offered advice that was no longer welcome.

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 1976, a coup in Argentina brought to power the bloodiest of these regimes. Under General Jorge Rafael Videla, the dictatorship kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared tens of thousands of people. Videla’s regime cast a much wider net than Pinochet’s men did. This period is often called, somewhat incorrectly, the “Dirty War”—but there was no war. It was a top-down anticommunist extermination campaign with ideological roots in Argentina’s homegrown fascist movement.13 “Subversives” were tortured and killed for their real or perceived communism; for their real or perceived atheism; for their real or perceived Jewishness; or just for union activities. Ford Motor Company and Citibank collaborated with the disappearance of union workers.14 Even beards were suspect—that’s why a Brazilian piano player named Tenorinho was brought in, thrown on a parrilla, or grill, for torture in Buenos Aires, and then drowned.

From 1978 to 1983, the Guatemalan military killed more than two hundred thousand people.59 Around a third of these were taken away and “disappeared,” largely in urban areas. Most of the rest were indigenous Mayans massacred in the open air of the fields and mountains where their families had lived for generations. The Salvadoran civil war took seventy-five thousand lives; again, the majority were innocent people killed by the government. Argentina killed twenty thousand to thirty thousand civilians, and other Operation Condor nations killed tens of thousands more. Anticommunist extermination had spread all across Latin America, always with the assistance of the United States. Taken together, the death toll approaches the estimated size of the 1965–66 massacres in Indonesia.

There’s another thing the US certainly didn’t change. Immediately after the end of the Cold War, US officials, especially President George H. W. Bush, had talked about a “Peace Dividend.” The idea was that, with Soviet Communism gone, Washington would cut back on military spending and violent foreign engagements. The exact opposite happened. There was a small decrease in spending in the ’90s, and then the Pentagon budget exploded again after the turn of the century. 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

“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.”

“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.”

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. (I am not including direct military engagements or even innocent people killed by “collateral damage” in war.)

The establishment of Americanization was helped along by the mass murder programs discussed in this book. In a way, they made it possible.

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 the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.

Almost none of the tourists who come, no matter how well meaning and well educated, know what happened here, says Ngurah Termana, the nephew of Agung Alit, the man who spent a darkly absurd afternoon sifting through skulls in search of his father’s body. In contrast to Cambodia, where Western backpackers faithfully (or morbidly) visit the Killing Fields Museum outside Phnom Penh, few people who come to Bali are aware that a huge part of the local population was slaughtered right underneath their beach chairs.