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

by Vincent Bevins

The Soviets continued to view Latin America as Washington’s sphere of influence, and they maintained their long-held orthodox view that revolution should progress gradually in the Western Hemisphere.28 Allende had opposed aggressive Soviet moves in the international arena, and had condemned the 1956 invasion of Hungary and Moscow’s 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia.

Operação Jacarta. Yakarta Viene. Plan Yakarta. In both Spanish and Portuguese, in all three ways it was used, it’s clear what “Jakarta” meant, and it’s a far cry from what the word meant back in 1948, when the Truman administration was guided by the “Jakarta Axiom.” Back then, “Jakarta” stood for independent Third World development that Washington need not view as a threat. 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.

He had to ask around to figure out exactly what the graffiti meant, where all the slogans came from. He found out, and that was even more of a shock. 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.

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.

The men behind Operation Condor often considered the nonviolent democracy and human rights activists operating abroad to be even more dangerous than armed guerrillas at home.19 Most infamously, this logic led US citizen, known CIA contact, and Condor operative Michael Townley to murder former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in the heart of Washington, DC. A car bomb placed on Embassy Row blew Letelier’s legs off, killing him instantly; his twenty-five-year-old American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, staggered from the car and slowly drowned in her own blood.20 Townley is now in FBI witness protection.

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.

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,

Perhaps Castro had committed the unforgivable sin of very publicly surviving repeated coup and assassination attempts in a way that embarrassed Washington. Or perhaps the real threat Washington perceived was the possibility of a rival model outside the global American-led system, the same thing that we now know bothered US officials about Guatemala in 1954, Bandung in 1955, and Chile in 1973.

“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.”

What kind of world did we get after the Cold War? Who won this war? Who lost? And more specifically, how did the anticommunist crusade concretely affect life for billions of people today? These questions were in the back of my head as I traveled the world, reporting this book. I had been raised with a certain set of answers to the questions. To say that what I learned since I started working on this project shook my faith in those answers would be a severe understatement.

But what is clear is that China is absolutely not an anticommunist regime created by US intervention in the Cold War. One way of looking at it indicates that global inequality has gone down slightly since 1960, largely because of China (see Appendix Three). Another way of looking at it—that is, by grouping countries into regions—indicates that the Third World has been stuck where it was, while the First World has gotten even better off (see Appendix Four).

we do not live in a world directly constructed by Stalin’s purges or mass starvation under Pol Pot. Those states are gone. Even Mao’s Great Leap Forward was quickly abandoned and rejected by the Chinese Communist Party, though the party is still very much around. We do, however, live in a world built partly by US-backed Cold War violence.

Within the current structure, the only real examples of large Third World countries becoming as rich as those in the First World since 1945 are South Korea and Taiwan, and it’s very clear that these nations were given special exemptions from the rules of the world order because of their strategic importance in the Cold War.9

“Even when we meet with NGO groups, the most internationally informed type of people, that know about Rwanda, Pol Pot, everything, no one has any idea what happened here,” said Ngurah Termana, who is a founding member of Taman 65, or the 1965 Garden, a collective dedicated to promoting memory and reconciliation on the island. The group put out a book on the killings in Bali as well as a CD of songs that prisoners sang in the concentration camps here.

I was sitting and waiting in Djakarta Bali, an Indonesian restaurant a few blocks from the Louvre, when an elderly woman came zooming toward the front door. I couldn’t see her feet, so I was confused how she was going this fast. But then she hopped off a Razor scooter and walked in. It was Nury Hanafi, the daughter of Sukarno’s ambassador to Cuba. This restaurant is her family’s, opened in Paris after they came here from Cuba. On the walls, there are photos of her father with Che, and with Fidel, back in the days when they thought they were building a tricontinental movement. We had the excellent daging sapi rendang, one of my favorite dishes from Indonesia. She told me the scooter was her “Harley Davidson.” It might have looked strange, a white American man and an old Asian woman speaking Spanish in Paris. After years in Bulgaria, she came back here, and was reunited with her family.