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

by Vincent Bevins

In 1966, the MIR newspaper, Punto Final, published a text attributed to philosopher Bertrand Russell. “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,” the article continued. “Knowing the same thing, the peoples of the world should take the path of open struggle.”

The idea frightened her, the notion that history could be swallowed up so completely, the same way the rich and loamy earth could soak up the rivers of blood that had once coursed through the streets; the way people could continue about their business beneath giant posters of the new president as if nothing had happened…

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.

This includes any whiff of socialism or social democracy, any land reform, and any regulation that would reduce monopoly power and allow for more efficient development and market competition. It includes unions and any normal demands for workers’ rights.

It was very clear to Francisca why Europeans were allowed to experiment with social democracy and even communist politics, while her country had been taken away from her forever. “Racism, very simply. White Europeans are offered tolerance and sympathetic treatment, while we are not.”

They were being fully integrated into the US-led system, and so there was much less of a risk they would try to radically reshape the global order, because it had served them quite well.

In the early 1970s, under Médici, Brazil began intervening across South America, creating brutal regimes in its own neighborhood that also served Washington’s interests.

Brazil helped establish violent anticommunist regimes in Bolivia and Uruguay. By 1976, much of South America was a “killing zone” of US-backed regimes on its borders, which had employed Brazil as its “prototype.”14 But Brasília’s most notable right-wing foreign intervention took place over on the west coast of South America, in pacific Chile.

The chaos and violence in Chile was not caused by President Salvador Allende, or the failures of his democratic socialist project. US-backed right-wing terrorism began before he even took office.

Washington was not worried that Chile’s economy would be destroyed under irresponsible left-wing mismanagement either, or even that Allende would harm US business interests. What scared the most powerful nation in the world was the prospect that Allende’s democratic socialism would succeed.

Now “Jakarta” meant something very different. It meant anticommunist mass murder. 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.

Fanatical anticommunism, once more, was the founding ideology for a new, murderous regime in the Global South. Internationally, the junta would be a close ally of the United States. But locally, they didn’t want to emulate the US. They wanted to emulate Brazil.58 The junta began establishing a dictatorship and justifying their own existence.

The problem was that torture and murder—as they often do—had created powerful elements within the state whose privileges derived from the existence of endless war.

Before this new storm of blood and screams even started, brutal oppression was already the rule for the vast majority of the population. The region was ruled by dictators who rarely bothered to hide their cruelty. The practice of “forced labor”—that is, the enslavement of the indigenous peoples that had started centuries prior—was still widespread.

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. They were often people who had only a vague idea of what Marxism or the guerrilla groups were. This was new, different from the urban terror tactics, in which government forces kidnapped individual people. For the Mayans and other indigenous groups, the Army would come and simply kill every single one of them.

Miguel Ángel Albizures and others who lived through the late 1970s and ’80s in Central America always stress that these new Central American guerrilla movements emerged after attempts at peaceful transition to democracy were brutally suppressed or, indeed, exterminated. They say that almost every political ideology in the world—not just the socialism and Marxism dominant in those guerrilla groups—allows for armed resistance against tyrants, and that includes the US revolutionary tradition. Nor is it surprising that the surviving movements were left-wing militants: by the late ’70s, most of the moderate dissidents were dead.

The Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 is often forgotten, for two reasons. First, it complicates narratives about the putative international communist conspiracy, or at least the supposedly monolithic Asian communist movement. According to uninformed Western thinking, China and Vietnam were supposed to be on the same side. But more importantly, the episode has been forgotten because the Vietnamese immediately defeated and humiliated the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. After decades of battle with France and the US, the Vietnamese were too good for the nation that had once ruled them for more than a thousand years.32

Clashes with China in the second half of the 1970s also led to the worst human rights violations under the new communist regime in united Vietnam. Partly as a way to undermine the power of ethnic Chinese in Vietnam—seen as potentially disloyal—Hanoi announced the nationalization of all private businesses. Hundreds of thousands of refugees set off, including the so-called “boat people,” penniless and looking for a new life, and tens of thousands died.

in 1978.35 Washington banned the sale of weapons to regimes that did not meet basic human rights criteria. Rather than even try, the Guatemalan dictatorship, now run by a man named Fernando Romeo Lucas García, turned to Israel and Taiwan, which stepped in to supply the weapons and assistance instead.

In 1977, convinced that Carter had abandoned them in their “holy war” on communism, Argentine officials began providing military training to the Somoza regime in Nicaragua.

After the 1979 Sandinista victory, they set up a base in Honduras to teach Guatemalans and Nicaraguans the arts of counterrevolution and repression.

Central American soldiers went to Chile for training in anticommunist counterinsurgency tactics.

The 1980 meeting of the Latin American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, held in Buenos Aires, enabled death squad leaders to form even closer ties with South American governments, as well as US Republican congressmen.

apace. As was the case in Indonesia, and Brazil and Argentina, Montt’s religious zeal gave the anticommunist violence a theological justification. “They are communists and therefore atheists and therefore they are demons and therefore you can kill them” is how one civil war victim, now the head of one of Guatemala’s most prominent research organizations, summarizes the logic.57 The vast majority of the murdered were practitioners of traditional Mayan religions.

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.

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

This did not happen. They are living out their last years in a messy, poor, crony capitalist country, and they are told almost every single day it was a crime for them to want something different.

Even in countries where the fate of the government was not hanging in the balance, mass murders functioned as effective state terror, both within the countries and in the surrounding regions, signaling what could happen to you if you resisted.

I am not saying that the United States won the Cold War because of mass murder. The Cold War ended mostly because of the internal contradictions of Soviet Communism, and the fact that its leaders in Russia accidentally destroyed their own state. 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.

Washington’s anticommunist crusade, with Indonesia as the apex of its murderous violence against civilians, deeply shaped the world we live in now, in five ways.

First, most simply, there is the trauma, which is mostly unresolved. Countries like Chile and Argentina did a fairly good job of coming together for national reconciliation. Brazil did a worse job. And Indonesia did absolutely nothing of the kind. But even in the best-case scenario, it’s obvious you cannot simply delete the scars of mass terror in a generation or two. The psychological effects of US covert action are felt everywhere, including in North America.

Second, Washington’s violent anticommunist crusade destroyed a number of alternative possibilities for world development. The Third World movement fell apart partly because of its own internal failures. But it was also crushed. These countries were trying to do something very, very difficult. It doesn’t help when the most powerful government in history is trying to stop you.

Third, the operations profoundly affected the nature of the regimes and economic systems set up in their wake. Indonesia and Brazil are two, perhaps the two crucial, examples.

The fourth way that anticommunist extermination programs shaped the world is that they deformed the world socialist movement.

Finally, the fifth consequence of the crusade: fanatical anticommunism has never really left us, even in the First World. Not only in Brazil and Indonesia in the past few years, it has become clear that this violent, paranoid style in politics remains a very potent force. But I think it’s clear that the ghosts of this battle most actively haunt the countries of the “developing” world.

“The solution is for this nation to recognize its sins and to repent. I value even the most difficult experiences I went through, because they taught me to show love to everyone,” he said. “If we can recognize what our nation has done, and ask for forgiveness, we can move forward.”

There’s the beginning of a small plaque for Indonesia. Then it ends abruptly: “Indonesia abolished the law that would establish their truth commission.”