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. As such, they are among the most important events in a process that has fundamentally shaped life for almost everyone. Both countries had been independent, standing somewhere in between the world’s capitalist and communist superpowers, but fell decisively into the US camp in the middle of the 1960s.

I fear that the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.

The United States, a Western European settler colony in North America, emerged from World War II as by far the most powerful state on Earth. This was a surprise to most Americans, and to most of the world.

In 1950, more than two-thirds of the world’s population lived in the Third World, and with few exceptions, these peoples had lived under the control of European colonialism.12 Some of these countries had managed to break free of imperial rule in the nineteenth century; some earned their independence when fascist forces retreated at the end of World War II; some attempted to do so in 1945, only to be re-invaded by First World armies; and for many others, the war had changed little, and they were still unfree.

Like Ho Chi Minh in August 1945, Mao had also been under the illusion that he could have good relations with the United States. He was wrong, of course.33 After his victory, the emergency of “Red China” led to violent recriminations back in the United States.

Jack Kennedy, or JFK, was a rare bird among the US elite. He was a Catholic, and he was much more than the “First Irish Brahmin”—he was the first member of American royalty to descend from the masses of people who had come to the country as impoverished immigrants rather than as colonizers.

In 1951, he went on a trip to Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Indochina, Malaya, Burma, India, and Pakistan, and came to the conclusion that the United States had failed to understand the importance of “nationalistic passions… directed primarily against the Colonial policies of the West.”45 Later that year, he went on another one of his long jaunts, this time to Israel, Iran, Pakistan, Singapore, French Indochina, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia. He observed that the US “was definitely classed with the imperialist powers of Europe.”

Afterward, Jones was sent to work in Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists had set up a government. Because they refused to recognize Mao’s communist government on the mainland, the US government recognized this as the “real” China, even though Taiwan had its own population and identity before they arrived. This was no democracy. In February 1947, the new government massacred thousands of people opposed to Nationalist rule, beginning another period of White Terror and intermittent repression of dissidents, often justified on anticommunist grounds, that continued for years.

For Francisca and Zain, who began dating in earnest in the late 1940s, the colonial independence struggle was intimately tied to left-wing politics. So she, a wholehearted supporter of Indonesian freedom, fell naturally into socialist circles, as the two struggles had long been married together. In the 1930s and 1940s, practically no Europeans supported colonial independence except the leftists.

Not all of the Indonesian students could afford to attend, but she had the money for a ticket, so she jumped on the train and crossed what the Americans were now calling “the iron curtain.” She didn’t see one. For her, the trip was a wonder, and she stared out the windows as postwar Germany, then Austria and Hungary, flew by. Europe was in tatters; but still, Budapest was enchanting. And there, no one treated her like a second-class citizen, like they did in her home country. But nothing prepared her for the youth festival itself. She met left-wing students from all over the world, from nations across Asia, from Africa, and even from the United States! This was a real shock to her, as she’d really only seen Americans in the movies.

As a result of intentional Dutch neglect, the Indonesian people were badly deprived of education. By the time the Dutch withdrew, only around 5 percent of the Indonesian population of sixty-five million could read and write.11 Francisca said, “I think this was one of the worst crimes of colonialism. After three and a half centuries of Dutch occupation we were left with almost no knowledge of our own people, and our own culture.”

In strategic, US-controlled nations, they saw the necessity of breaking up feudal land control in order to build dynamic capitalist economies. But when carried out by leftists or perceived geopolitical rivals—or when threatening US economic interests—land reform was more often than not treated as communist infiltration or dangerous radicalism. The Dulles brothers had worked on Wall Street, and both had actually done work for the United Fruit Company.

Most crucially, he thought Americans failed to understand what nationalism was in the context of emerging countries, and its difference from communism. Nationalism in the Third World meant something very different from what it had meant in Germany a decade prior. It was not about race, or religion, or even borders. It was built in opposition to centuries of colonialism. Exasperated, Jones often stressed that to Americans, this might look like an instinctive anti-Western disposition, and that young nations might make early mistakes when forming a government.

He would watch, amazed, as Sukarno spoke eloquently on “the world, the flesh, and the devil: about movie stars and Malthus, Jean Jaures and Jefferson, folklore, and philosophy,” then wolf down a huge meal, and dance for hours. Even more impressive to Jones, who had lived a relatively comfortable life, was that this remarkable man—about the same age as Jones—learned to eat this way, and became so steeped in knowledge, while spending years behind bars for opposing Dutch colonial rule.48 Along the way, he had learned to speak in German, English, French, Arabic, and Japanese, in addition to Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Dutch.

It was under Sukarno’s watch that the young country chose to make Bahasa Indonesia the official Indonesian language. A leader of less wisdom might have been inclined to make his native Javanese into the official tongue, but this is a hard language to learn and easily could have been seen as a kind of chauvinistic or even colonial imposition from the strongest island. Instead, Indonesia picked an easy, seemingly neutral language, and most of the country learned it within a generation or two. This was a significant achievement; nearby countries in Southeast Asia still have not established truly national languages.

How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism? For us, colonialism is not something far and distant. We have known it in all its ruthlessness. We have seen the immense human wastage it causes, the poverty it causes, and the heritage it leaves behind when, eventually and reluctantly, it is driven out by the inevitable march of history. My people, and the peoples of many nations of Asia and Africa, know these things, for we have experienced them.…

For leaders like Sukarno and Nehru, the idea of the “nation” was not based on race or language—it indeed could not be in territories as diverse as theirs—but is constructed by the anticolonial struggle and the drive for social justice.

Before leaving for Bandung, Wright spoke to North Americans and Europeans aghast at the idea of the conference, certain that a meeting of those nations could only amount to “racism in reverse,” hatred of whites inspired by the Communists, or a global antiwhite alliance.67 Even Wright himself was skeptical of the Bandung mission until he saw the legacy of colonialism and heard the speeches. He realized quickly that locals would speak to him entirely differently when there were no white people in the room.

The vice president at the time, Richard Nixon, gave voice to the general feeling in Washington when he said that “a democratic government was [probably] not the best kind for Indonesia” because “the Communists could probably not be beaten in election campaigns because they were so well organized.”11 And most importantly, Jones recognized that the PKI was going into the countryside, delivering the kind of programs that spoke directly to the people’s needs. The party was “working hard and skillfully to win over the underprivileged,” he worried.12

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.

Jones did not enjoy the position that Wisner’s CIA operations put him in one bit. Reflecting later on the tragic, absurd failure of the operation, Jones turned back to the nature of his country to find an explanation. “Washington policymakers had not been privy to all the facts nor really grasped the inwardness of the situation, but had proceeded on the assumption that Communism was the main issue,” he wrote. “This was the all too common weakness of Americans—to view conflict in black and white terms, a heritage, no doubt, from our Puritan ancestors. There were no grays in the world landscape. There was either good or evil, right or wrong, hero or villain.”

Decolonization was far from finished in Southeast Asia. When the Dutch finally gave in to the revolutionaries in 1949, they ceded control of most of their territory to the young republic. But they did not give up their claim to a giant piece of land to the east of Java and north of Australia—that is, the western half of New Guinea, the second-largest island in the world. Indonesia as it stood was already an incredibly diverse country, but the people of Papua (or New Guinea) are visibly different both physically and culturally from people from the other islands.

Liberalism and party democracy, he complained, were a Western import that pitted everyone against each other, forcing each person to fight for their own selfish interests. That was not the Indonesian way, he claimed.2 He wanted a decision-making process based on the traditional village assembly, in which everyone got together and chose a course of action after careful consideration. Every party would be represented in the cabinet—called a gotong royong cabinet, after the traditional village practice of doing collective work—and there would be a “National Council” representing civil groups like workers, peasants, intellectuals, religious groups, and entrepreneurs. The idea was that minority considerations could never be excluded. However, when Sukarno declared the system would be put in place in July 1959, he was overstepping his constitutional powers. He cemented himself as the leader of the government, and major parties—such as the Masjumi (the Muslim party that received CIA funds in 1955, then supported the regional rebellions) and the Socialist Party—were effectively excluded from the new system. Western-style elections would not occur again under President Sukarno.

As a candidate, JFK had run on solidly anticommunist credentials, of course. It was the United States. But in his inauguration speech, he also made a pledge to the Third World. “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right,” Kennedy said. “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge—to convert our good words into good deeds—in a new alliance for progress.”13

Sukarno could not get JFK to budge on West New Guinea, but reportedly was impressed with the man himself. Kennedy, reportedly, called Sukarno “an inscrutable Asian.”29

Kennedy’s White House, and especially his brother Bobby, became obsessed with destroying Castro, and put the CIA to the task. Robert McNamara, who served as secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968, later called the Kennedys’ approach to Cuba “hysterical.”

the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), which had grown in opposition to dictator Abd al-Karim Qasim. The ICP thought of making a bid for revolution—and the Soviets advised against it. But Washington backed a successful coup by the anticommunist Baath Party, which immediately moved to crush the ICP. The CIA supplied lists of communists and alleged communists to the new regime, which slaughtered untold numbers of people. A Baath Party member named Saddam Hussein, only twenty-five years old, took part in the US-backed anticommunist terror that followed the coup.43

Other things were new to her. Brazil had only one language—Portuguese—and it came from Europe, not from Brazil. White colonizers had brought it with them, and it had functionally annihilated all the local languages. This was very different from Indonesia, of course, which spoke to itself in a hurricane of intermixed indigenous languages that had essentially blown Dutch away before she was born. And there was just one religion—Christianity. The colonizers had brought it, and Brazil’s local traditions were practiced only in the jungle far away, somewhere she knew she wasn’t expected to go. It was all very different from Indonesia, which had five or six religions, depending on how you counted.

Soon after the liberation of African-descendant Brazilians, in 1888, the largest country in South America promptly embarked upon a policy of explicit branqueamento, or whitening. The idea was to bring in white immigrants, and to breed the African blood out of the population through “miscegenation.” Newly freed slaves were intentionally left languishing in poverty, rather than paid to work in the new system. This approach was also what brought Ing Giok’s Japanese classmates to São Paulo. Brazilians deemed the Japanese, which they categorized as the “whites of Asia,” the most desirable Asian immigrants.7 This racism remained public and paramount, with cultural organizations producing posters to “show” that a Japanese man and a Brazilian woman would produce “white” offspring.8 More conservative in outlook than its neighbors, Brazil looked more to Washington than to Spanish-speaking Latin America.

Under Kennedy, US activity in Brazil was different from what had been done in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s. There were no large, noisy interventions with Uncle Sam’s hand quite obviously pulling the strings. The US carefully nurtured powerful anticommunist elements, and let them know they would have support if they were to act. It was also a major departure from JFK’s promises to the Third World, and from the original intent behind the Alliance for Progress. That program was now widely seen as an imperfect cover for traditional US policy in the region, not only because Washington continued intervening throughout the region.

When the uprising reached Recife, also in the northeast, the government’s response was a slaughter, as the military put down the uprising and executed the leftist rebels. “It was brutal, tremendous repression! They killed left and right, crooked and straight. The life of a communist wasn’t worth ten bits of raw honey,” said Lieutenant Lamartine Coutinho, using an old Portuguese expression we might translate as “wasn’t worth shit.” Then the final act came, on a small beach just around the bend from Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro. The attack began in the wee hours of the morning on November 27, 1935. Military troops launched a grenade toward the barracks, which blew up in front of a pillar. Then they opened fire.

A few weeks later, Kennedy himself was murdered, while driving through Dallas. The men closest to him, knowing they had been actively trying to get rid of Castro, and were using methods that were far from innocent all over the world, scrambled to guess who had done it. Bobby Kennedy himself suspected the killing might have been the work of the CIA, the mob, or Castro, all of which would have meant he himself was partly responsible. Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s first suspicion was that it was retaliation for Diem’s murder.56 Johnson did not even know the administration had been trying to kill Castro, and as he took over the presidency, he struggled to wrap his mind around the network of covert operations he would inherit.

Despite his support among the population, the legally elected Jango did not mount a counteroffensive. He likely believed that this, like other coups in Brazilian history, would be a minor reset to the system, and that he would be able to regroup and run in the next election. He was wrong. Brazil would not hold another democratic election for twenty-five years. Washington’s commitment to military-led modernization remained strong during the Johnson administration, and Brazil was now one of the most important US allies in the Cold War.

The coup in Latin America reverberated around the globe, and made its way to Indonesia. The mainstream press in Indonesia covered it; so did the communist People’s Daily.

She was struck, for life, by seeing an event organized entirely by people from the Third World, and by the athletic and cultural performances put on that week in Jakarta. “For the first time in my life, I became aware that I didn’t actually come from an uncultured or backwards people, and the other peoples of Africa and Asia weren’t backwards either.

US officials, however, could usually only see reactions like this as irrational paranoia, a view shared by Modernization Theorist Lucian Pye, who went as far as to see anti-Americanism in postcolonial states as a psychological pathology.

The similarities with the Brazilian legend of the Intentona Comunista are striking. Just a year after a coup in the most important nation in Latin America was inspired partly by a legend about communist soldiers stabbing generals to death in their sleep, General Suharto tells the most important nation in Southeast Asia that communists and left-wing soldiers whisked generals away from their homes in the dead of night to be murdered slowly with knives, and then both Washington-aligned anticommunist military dictatorships celebrated the anniversary of those rebellions in very much the same way for decades.

At the police station, officers began to yell at her, interrogating her. They told her they knew she was a member of the Gerwani, the Women’s Movement affiliated with the Communist Party. She wasn’t. She didn’t know what to say to them, except that she wasn’t. According to the mythology spread by Indonesia’s new command, this meant she was part of the group that danced naked while mutilating the military high command’s genitals. She was in Jakarta, they said. Maybe she was even at the slaughter. She didn’t know anything about this, she told them.

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 The Balinese had been especially strong supporters of Sukarno’s multifaith political project, because it gave Hindus more freedom in a Muslim-majority country.30

F. Without becoming directly involved, promote arrangements between the [Government of Indonesia] and the American oil companies.… H. Within the limits of prudence, give open or covert advice and assistance to responsible and competent anti-communist groups for worthwhile activities.

Regardless, Suharto used it as permission to take over immediately, and completely. In his first acts, he officially banned what was left of the Communist Party, then arrested much of Sukarno’s cabinet, including Subandrio. The United States immediately opened the economic floodgates. The stranglehold on the economy was loosened, and US firms began exploring opportunities for profit. Within days of the transfer of power, representatives from the US mining company Freeport were in the jungles of West New Guinea, and quickly found a mountain filled with valuable minerals. Ertsberg, as it is now called, is the largest gold mine on the planet.

The prime responsibility for the massacres and concentration camps lies with the Indonesian military. We still do not know if the method employed—disappearance and mass extermination—was planned well before October 1965, perhaps inspired by other cases around the world, or planned under foreign direction, or if it emerged as a solution as events unfolded. But Washington shares guilt for every death.

Indonesia did indeed become a “quiet, compliant partner” of the United States, which explains why so many Americans today have barely heard about the country. But at the time, things were very different. The annihilation of the world’s third-largest communist party, the fall of the founder of the Third World movement, and the rise of a fanatically anticommunist military dictatorship violently rocked Indonesia, setting off a tsunami that reached almost every corner of the globe.

Apparently, as late as December, Mao thought the leftists would rise once more in Indonesia. Instead, they were being slaughtered, and anticommunist protesters and student groups increasingly targeted the Chinese embassy. In February, more than a thousand right-wing youth attacked the building, and staff did their best to defend themselves with beer bottles, light bulbs, and kung fu. Taiwan’s anticommunist, anti-Beijing government provided resources and training to these groups as they carried out more assaults.

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.

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.

By the end of the 1960s, it was safe to say that the Third World movement was in disarray, if not destroyed. The “Bandung Spirit” had become a ghost. The leaders of the progressive wing of the postcolonial movement were gone: Nehru had died in 1964; Sukarno was languishing in Indonesia as his allies bled out, waiting to die soon himself; Ghana’s Nkrumah and Burma’s U Nu had been deposed in military coups. Many of Iraq’s leftists were already dead, and US-backed Saddam Hussein would finish them off soon; Egypt’s Nasser had been weakened by the collapse of the United Arab Republic following a coup in Damascus, whose leaders in turn purged the Syrian Communist Party.

The name he was born with, Hong Lan Oei, was too Chinese. Suharto had severed relations with China and banned all Chinese-language materials in Indonesia. Even Chinese characters were banned. The government had passed legislation strongly recommending that Chinese Indonesians drop names of Chinese origin. Benny had gotten away with keeping his own name on his passport for a while, because he was outside the country and working at the UN. But he had two options. Either he would drop his family name, or he would be subjected to periodic harassment and interrogation. Like so many Indonesians of Chinese descent, he picked a Javanese-sounding last name. From then on, he was officially Benny Widyono.

Young Barack Obama had seen what this dynamic did to his stepfather. “Guilt is a luxury only foreigners can afford,” Lolo told Barack’s mother. Lolo did understand. “She didn’t know what it is like to lose everything, to wake up and feel her belly eating itself… without absolute concentration, one could easily slip, tumble backward.”2 There’s a term that broadly describes this kind of economic arrangement. The people of Indonesia and Brazil lived under “crony capitalism.”

The last time Francisca had seen Western Europe, just after the war, it was very different. Back in the 1940s, access to meat and butter was strictly limited, and everyone was scrambling to rebuild their lives. In the 1960s it was just, rich and relaxed. The region’s economies had been rebuilt along more American lines thanks to the Marshall Plan. But these were not fanatically anticommunist nations when it came to their own affairs. Certainly not as much as the US, and nowhere near as much as Indonesia or Brazil. Even though the supposed Red Menace was just a few miles to the east, ready to swallow them up, Western Europeans were far less afraid of it than the United States, sitting half a world away.