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

by Vincent Bevins

What happened in Brazil in 1964 and Indonesia in 1965 may have been the most important victories of the Cold War for the side that ultimately won—that is, the United States and the global economic system now in operation.

Most shockingly, and most importantly for this book, the two events led to the creation of a monstrous international network of extermination—that is, the systematic mass murder of civilians—across many more countries, which played a fundamental role in building the world we all live in today.

Throughout the Americas, from Canada down to Argentina, European colonization killed between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people, around 90 percent of the native American population. Scientists recently concluded that the annihilation of these peoples was so large that it changed the temperature of the planet.

The Indonesian Communist Party, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), was founded in 1914 as the Indies Social Democratic Association with the help of Dutch leftists, worked alongside Sukarno and pro-independence Muslim groups in the 1920s, and then engaged in active antifascist work during the Japanese occupation.

By the time the Dutch withdrew, only around 5 percent of the Indonesian population of sixty-five million could read and write.11

Throughout the course of the CIA’s history, this dynamic would often be repeated. The Agency would act behind the back of the diplomats and experts at the State Department. If the CIA was successful, the State Department would be forced into backing the new state of affairs the Agency had created. If the secret agents failed, they would just move on, leaving the embarrassed diplomats to clean up the mess.

He recounts that locals came to him, time and time again, and asked, with genuine mystification: “We just don’t understand America. You were once a colony. You know what colonialism is. You fought and bled and died for your freedom. How can you possibly support the status quo?” After over a decade representing the United States in Asia, Jones had no answer. The behavior of the United States lent weight to the charge, he realized, “that we had become an imperial power ourselves.”39

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? Was it only that, as Francisca said, Americans simply trusted their European cousins—who were white, and therefore responsible—to handle the task of managing democracy? A complementary explanation might be that these countries, some still overseeing remnants of colonial empire, were incredibly rich and powerful. They were much harder to push around, even if Washington had wanted to, and—perhaps more importantly—they sat at the top of the world economy.

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.