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

by Vincent Bevins

Manuel Contreras, a close collaborator with the CIA who created Pinochet’s deadly DINA secret police, knew that the point of state terror was not just wanton destruction of enemies, but to make resistance impossible and solidify the dominant political and economic structures.

The capital of his own country had come to mean not cosmopolitanism, not Third World solidarity and global justice, but rather reactionary violence. “Jakarta” meant brutal elimination of people organizing for a better world. And now he was in another country, also backed by the US, whose governing forces celebrated that history rather than condemning it.

“That’s simply the name of our capital! How dare you imply it’s synonymous with massacre?”

When East Timor gained its independence, Suharto claimed he was threatened by communism on his borders. Calling this a wild exaggeration would be generous. Neither China, the Soviet Union, nor Vietnam was backing the tiny country.

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.

General Ibérico Saint-Jean explained how this worked: “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.”

This is some Third Reich shit.

Life was a permanent cat-and-mouse game, and Guatemala City became a deadly, sprawling obstacle course, sometimes for the entire life span of its victims.

In Indonesia, it may not have been the case that the mass murder was genocide. It was simply anticommunist mass murder. In Guatemala it was anticommunist genocide.

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.

Even the anticommunists’ great enemy, the supposed reason for all this terror, did not deploy this kind of violence. 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

In different ways and to varying degrees, fanatical anticommunism remained a powerful force in both countries and in the surrounding regions. It took different forms, both overt and latent, but it was there, always threatening to reanimate. It certainly did not leave the earth when the putative Soviet threat disappeared.

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.

“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.”

“The Cold War was a conflict between socialism and capitalism, and capitalism won. Moreover, we all got the US-centered capitalism that Washington wanted to spread. Just look around you,” he said, gesturing to his city, and the entire Indonesian archipelago around him. How did we win, I asked. Winarso stopped fidgeting. “You killed us.”

But citizens of the United States vastly underestimate the size of the gap between them and the rest of the world. The gap between the First World and Third World is enormous. The US economy is not just a little bigger than Indonesia’s. It is twenty times larger.

I was born and raised in the United States; it is probably no coincidence that it was someone with my background who was able to acquire the contacts and funding to tell this global story, rather than a woman from the Javanese countryside or resident of a Brazilian favela.

Privilege used right.

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.

Or could things have been different?

Without the mass murder of the PKI, the country would not have moved from Sukarno to Suharto. 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.

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.

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.

The importance of being skeptical :((((

The government has buried that history deep, even deeper than it was buried on the island of Java. The tourism boom, which started in the late 1960s, required that. Before Suharto, a huge amount of Bali’s land was communal, and often disputed. “They needed to kill the communists so that foreign investors could bring their capital here,” said Ngurah Termana. “Now, all visitors here see is our famous smile,” he continued. “They have no idea the darkness and fire that lurks underneath.”

“When I talk to younger people from Indonesia now, I realize we don’t have the same history,” she said. “I don’t mean that we have different personal stories. I mean they don’t even know the truth of what our country used to be—our struggle for independence, and the values we held.” Life for the exiles in Europe and Asia remains hard. But, she admits quickly, things for victims back home have been much worse.

Much worse things happened than this to the families of communists and accused communists. In Indonesia, being communist marks you for life as evil, and in many cases, this is seen as something that passes down to your offspring, as if it were a genetic deformity. Children of accused communists were tortured or killed.5 Some women were prosecuted simply for setting up an orphanage for the children of communist victims.

“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.”