For God (And the CIA)

For God (And the CIA)

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May 142014

 

THY WILL BE DONE
The Conquest of the Amazon:
Nelson Rockefeller & Evangelism in the Age of Oil
by Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett
Harper Collins, New York, 1995, $35

by Bill Weinberg
A century ago, the first John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil completed the conquest of the American west. After the Cavalry had pacified the Plains and Rockies, the missionaries had brought the light of civilization–and a new Indian that understood the values of private property, buying and selling. It was thanks to the groundwork laid by the missionaries that the Rockefeller empire had a domesticated leadership to deal with as railroads penetrated Indian territory and vast mineral resources were discovered.
Ironically, Christian fundamentalists saw the Rockefellers, who were sinking money into universities and “modernizing” Protestant institutions, as a sinister force of liberal, urban ways. Even today, the family is thought by many on the radical right to be at the center of the Eastern Liberal conspiracy.
But in THY WILL BE DONE, The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller & Evangelism in the Age of Oil, spanning a century in 960 pages, co-authors Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett present the case for the existence of a de facto cooperative arrangement between the Rockefeller empire and the most effective, ambitious and zealous fundamentalist missionary group. The common challenge was the post-World War II pacification of the new frontiers of the developing world–especially the Amazon rainforest.
THY WILL BE DONE charts the interaction of two men: Nelson Rockefeller, John D.’s politically ambitious grandson, and William Cameron (Cam) Townsend, founder and mastermind of America’s biggest fundamentalist missionary group, Wycliffe Bible Translators.
Wycliffe, with its affiliated Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and Jungle Aviation & Radio Service (JAARS), maintains globe-spanning operations and develops the foremost scholars of indigenous languages. In the Amazon and elsewhere, Wycliffe missionaries are sometimes the first to contact remote indigenous peoples–even before the local national government. With cutting-edge linguistic and anthropological work fueled by a millennial vision of having translated the Bible into every tribal tongue on earth by the year 2000, Wycliffe is uniquely skilled in cracking native languages. Ostensibly funded by small donations from supporters, Wycliffe in fact receives grants from private foundations, government agencies, corporations and universities.
The overlapping worlds of government, industry and religion follow each other across the globe as the needs of counterinsurgency, development and saving souls demand: Wycliffe entered the Philippines in the 1950s as the CIA combatted the peasant Huk rebellion, then moved to South Vietnam in the ’60s, where the Rockefellers planned a massive development effort around a series of Mekong River hydrodams. But the greatest prize was the vast resources in the continental interior of the traditional US influence sphere, Latin America.
Cam Townsend began as a missionary among the Maya Indians of the Guatemalan highlands in the 1920s, while Rockefeller was directing private disease-eradication efforts in the region. In the 1930s, Townsend launched his own operation and won the heart of Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas, then seeking to break the grip of the Catholic Church over Mexico’s Indians. SIL and Wycliffe gained a first Latin beachhead in the revolutionary nationalist Mexico of Cardenas, ironically. But the Mexico operations were only a training ground for Townsend’s real destiny–to bring light to the “green hell” of the Amazon, where whole peoples had yet to be “contacted.”
Nelson Rockefeller also charted his course to global power through Latin America. In World War II, President Roosevelt appointed him chief of his own office, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA). After a turf war with Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, Nelson’s CIAA won exclusive rights to anti-Axis propaganda and espionage–as well as mapping and securing of vital resources for the war effort–in Latin America. CIAA disease-eradication and education projects were directed to those regions where oil, minerals, rubber and other resources needed to be exploited. But a compliant labor source also needed to be secured. Perhaps underestimating the actual degree of Axis intrigue in Latin America, the authors portray a CIAA that merely used anti-fascism as a cover for suppression of indigenous and labor struggles. Clearly there were such instances–as when striking Indian miners in Bolivia were brutally put down in 1942, at a cost of hundreds of lives.
Nelson also saw his operations in these years as a mere prelude to post-war ambitions. Beyond the mines and oilfields of Mexico and the Andes lay the untapped riches of South America’s remote interior–the Amazon.
From these beginnings emerged a web of powerful men moving back and forth from the worlds of Rockefeller foundations and the top levels of government power. Rockefeller companies and ranches penetrated the Amazon as Wycliffe began operations there. Through tortuous routes of universities and foundations, Rockefeller money found its way into Wycliffe operations. So did money from US aid and intelligence agencies.
Rockefeller Brothers Fund analysts would find themselves in the Cabinet and CIA (successor to the wartime OSS) of even such postwar presidents as Kennedy, an open Rockefeller rival. One such analyst and close Nelson crony, Adolf Berle, was ambassador to Brazil during what Colby and Dennett call America’s “first Cold War coup”–in October of 1945 against President Getulio Vargas, who sought to nationalize the country’s oil. Vargas resurrected the dream upon returning to power in 1950. Four years later, after founding the state oil company Petrobras, he shot himself in the head, leaving behind a suicide note accusing “international economic and financial groups” of undermining
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