The Democratic Party
and the Third World 1961-68
excerpted from the book
Confronting the Third World
United States Foreign Policy 1945-1980
by Gabriel Kolko
Pantheon Books,1988
The Democratic Administration Confronts World Change
p127
The Eisenhower Administration greatly advanced the belief that
the United States had both the right and the obligation to intervene
in any region or nation whose domestic affairs it thought had
international significance... the basic assumption that it could
arrogate to itself the authority to approve or disapprove the
politics of any nation was by the end of the 1950s a firmly implanted
conviction ...
p129
By the early 1960s most officials in Washington were convinced
that the consequences of their passivity in some nation whose
internal affairs displeased them were potentially more dangerous
than the unpredictable risks of action. The symbolic importance
of the credibility of power inherited from its less articulate
predecessors, and of the interrelated nature of changes in one
nation to events all around it and in the world, had become fixations
transcending a reasoned assessment of the sources of internal
tension and change. Indeed, given the economic considerations
operating in tandem with the essentially symbolic, the combination
invariably reduced opposition within the ranks of American leaders
to a more active U.S. role in some nation when the choice presented
itself. In a context where everything became potentially important,
for whatever the reason, and past successes removed inhibiting
concerns about the repercussions of failures in the future, it
was highly likely in 1961 that something like the Vietnam conflict
would soon occur somewhere, and only chance fixed on that poor
nation rather than another. No less inevitable, also, was that
such increasingly adventurous thinking would cause regional issues
to threaten to overwhelm the United States' priorities and broad
international goals and produce uncontrollable new dynamics in
its foreign policy and power.
By August 1962, when the NSC approved national policy on a
grand strategy toward the Third World, virtually everyone of importance
agreed that confronting internal disorder and insurgency in the
Third World-or Sino-Soviet "conquest from within," as
opposed to conventional warfare-was essential. The NSC favored
a greater readiness to act even when there was no direct Russian
or Chinese involvement but where they might gain objectively from
"other types of subversion" inimical to U.S. interests.
The minute issues of the internal affairs of various nations became
more than ever the legitimate concern of the United States, including,
if need be, a warrant for action. It was, even more than under
earlier administrations, the U.S. purpose to make certain "that
developing nations evolve in a way that affords a congenial world
environment"; naturally, this required "that strategic
areas and the manpower and natural resources of developing nations
do not fall under communist control...." But in the even
larger sense it meant that the United States had "an economic
interest that the resources and markets of the less developed
world remain available to us and to other Free World countries."
Here was the basis for a far greater activism in the Third
World. It embodied Washington's fears and stereotypes regarding
Soviet culpability for the poor nations, problems as well as its
residual right, even obligation, to manipulate autonomous trends
for which Communists were not responsible and recast them into
an integrated world order under U.S. hegemony.
The new Administration believed that its fresh will and far
greater wisdom, combined with a superior organizational structure
for implementing policy, would allow it to master the elusive
threads and contradictions that had plagued its predecessors.
All the involved agencies-the State and Defense departments, the
CIA, the Agency for International Development, and others-met
frequently to analyze in seminars and papers the "problems
of development and internal defense" for which they needed
common solutions. As Cambridge professors were invited to Washington
to supplement local talent in analyzing the vast panoply of social,
cultural, and political changes in the Third World, the United
States confidently prepared to confront it energetically.
One of its first and most important initiatives was in "counterinsurgency,"
a rubric that was more a vague philosophy of action than a concrete
set of techniques and goals, a typically "can do" vision
whose optimism was to carry the Administration along until Vietnam
raised profound doubts as to its efficacy. The debacle of the
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, rather than puncture
such sublime self-confidence and produce caution, actually became
a goad to further activity. It had revealed its CIA organizers
as incompetent and the U.S. confidence in its Cuban exile proxies
as naive, but instead of learning from this failure, the unanimous
consensus in Washington favored renewing the effort, in Kennedy's
words the day after the invasion failed, to fight subversion with
"the new concepts, the new tools, the new sense of urgency"
that were still in the process of being articulated.
Frequent references to "Vietnam and Thailand as counterinsurgency
laboratories," of Vietnam "as a test case" of U.S.
ability to fight wars of national liberation successfully, revealed
how experimental counterinsurgency doctrine was from the inception,
and it was based mainly on the assumption that American brains
and money together would quickly find ways to translate desires
into realities. Precisely because of this, Vietnam after 1961
was principally a conjunctural problem for Washington, set in
a regional and global context, its symbolism being as much a stimulus
to action as the domino theory. The mere fact that the conflict
in Vietnam was initially intended to be fought primarily "by
those on the spot" rather than with U.S. forces revealed
that those who led the world's most powerful nation, and who were
also still naive learners, were also extremely ignorant concerning
the huge void they were about to plunge into. The Administration
quickly created a special interagency group to coordinate counterinsurgency,
broken down into country sections. A Vietnam task force was organized
in April 1961 as the first response to the Bay of Pigs disaster,
on the mistaken assumption that Vietnamese might prove easier
than Cubans to overcome.
Because counterinsurgency was at the beginning a strategy
employing surrogates, above all to avoid drawing in American manpower,
its first and quickest application was in the form of aid to the
police in various nations. The ClA's police training program,
which operated under an AID cover, had functioned until that time
at a modest level. It doubled its activities in fiscal 1962, beginning
in July 1961, over the previous year. Police training schools
were opened in both Panama and Washington as well as in Liberia.
By 1968, in addition, it had 458 U.S. police experts operating
in 34 countries, and by 1973 it had trained over 7,300 foreign
police in the United States alone.
This police program was overwhelmingly political in its functions
from its inception. In virtually all of the nations it operated
in, the police, as in Guatemala in 1956, were, as one American
official wrote, "acutely geared to security against subversive
activity and communist attack, with the primary police function
taking a secondary role." In Indonesia, a U.S. police adviser
could report in late 1960, he had left a "pro-Western influence"
among a vital force in a disturbingly anti-American nation. Reports
the AlD's overseas advisers sent back described countless examples
of the police's role in the "control [of] social unrest,"
to "maintain internal security," "investigating
and controlling subversives," and the like. All advisers
were given systematic political indoctrination to equip them for
this function. That the AlD's police program provided the status
quo in dozens of authoritarian regimes help to retain their power
was the explicit goal of the effort, not so much for the sake
of various dictators and juntas but primarily to immobilize leftists
and other undesirable elements as part of a global assault against
national liberation movements.
The police's function, as the liberal luminary Chester Bowles
explained to Kennedy in 1961 and as everyone acknowledged from
this time onward, was largely to eliminate the role of the military
in coping with violence, especially in the cities. Were guerrilla
warfare to break out, the military could then use its much larger
and more destructive firepower, but that was to be avoided- as
indeed it was in most places. Since use of the military against
strikers or demonstrations was counterproductive, by 1965 some
Pentagon officials argued it was more essential in Latin America
to equip the police adequately rather than the military since
the police were much more likely to utilize what they received.
What the police did in numerous nations was to serve as the basic
instrument of violence, allowing the military, with whom it was
invariably allied ideologically, the time to assume a much larger
role in the Third World's politics during the 1960s than ever
before. This, too, was understood and desired in Washington.
p132
Just as the Kennedy Administration's action academics came to
power animated by notions of counterinsurgency they justified
with social science jargon, so, too, did they possess a much more
articulate vision of the role of the military in Third World societies
than their predecessors. True, the Eisenhower Administration preferred
military regimes, but its rationale for doing so-that they kept
order-was clumsy even if honest.
The Pentagon itself by 1959 had qualms about such a crude
defense of the official NSC policy, and so it commissioned various
think tanks, the Rand Corporation being the most important, to
develop a more sophisticated rationale. Rand's 1959 conference
of experts on the military in the Third World argued, despite
a few skeptics gathered there, that in addition to providing a
stable alternative to democracy when it failed, the military alone
possessed the technical and administrative proficiency essential
for more rapid modernization and were in fact the leading carriers
of industrial and secular values. Given the semiliterate nature
of most of these nations, the officers transmitted vital skills
to their largely peasant soldiery and were prone even to be solicitous
of the needs of society's poor. Rather than being a menace, the
officer class was an integral aspect of solutions for Third World
problems congenial to American interests. Similar views came from
other analysts, and the articulate minority of consultants who
disputed such notions was ignored. "Military modernization"
theory was to become a major social science fashion for the next
decade and beyond, especially among Washington's large stable
of subsidized professors.
In later versions, modernization theorists added that civilian
institutions could not direct or control civilian demands but
that the military's "efficiency, honesty, and nationalism,"
as Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington described them, caused it to
become true defenders of middle-class order against the impatient
masses, and that they were the best friends of U.S. ambitions
and needs in most of the Third World. Walt Rostow by early 1962
was employing such analyses in an aggressive campaign to win Administration
support for targeting the officer classes as its main allies.
He did not deny that in some nations they might not conform to
the desired model, but their role in the modernization process
was potentially decisive-extending well beyond their task of maintaining
internal security. The NSC's official policy on "internal
defense" in August 1962 reflected Rostow's influence: "A
change brought about through force by non-communist elements may
be preferable to prolonged deterioration of governmental effectiveness,"
it stated, giving approval to those alone who had access to sufficient
power to mount coups. "It is U.S. policy, when it is in the
U.S. interest," it continued, "to make the local military
and police advocates of democracy and agents for carrying forward
the developmental process."
From this point onward, with leading Rand advocates of this
position incorporated to help define the rationale for the strategy,
U.S. dependence on officers and the military for "nation-building"
became a standard aspect of the indoctrination of all Americans
working on "internal defense" and counterinsurgency.
This vision was to shape Washington's political policies decisively
... in every major area of the Third World ... The era of the
generals was inaugurated not just in the realm of policy, as under
Eisenhower, but in theory as well.
Still unresolved in the early 1960s was whether this use of
ideas to influence policy was merely an attempt to justify an
existing brutal one and make it appear more respectable in order
to intensify it. Did the United States want officers who were
truly modernizes conforming to their abstract technocratic model
or simply pliable anti-Communists who would also sacrifice their
national interests if they clashed with American needs? In a word,
what would be Washington's response to officers who were genuine
nationalists rather than merely anti-Communist, especially when
true nationalism also conflicted with the United States' integrative
requirements and ambitions?
This issue was not to arise in many places, much less quickly,
and so the theory's impact caused U.S. officials increasingly
to regard military aid to many Third World nations as political
in purpose, because to varying degrees it strengthened the officers'
actual and potential power in the political structure of every
state receiving aid, thereby shaping its political evolution.
Few needed arms for external defense, in any case, and most had
no insurgency to confront. U.S. military missions working in foreign
nations were integral to the effort, as a Pentagon official was
later to phrase it, "to maintain our relations with the people
who are in a position of influence in those countries so we can
help to influence the course of events in those countries."
Officers are "the coming leaders of their nations,"
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara argued: "It is of
inestimable value to the United States to have the friendship
of such men." Between 1950 and 1969, as a consequence, about
128,000 Third World officers and enlistees were given training
in the United States, while U.S. missions trained 76,000 abroad.
The political potential of this enormous, costly effort was
obvious to all in Washington, including those who dismissed Rostow's
attribution of efficiency and virtue to the military as either
false or irrelevant-or both. When an aid review committee under
retired General Lucius Clay in early 1963 argued for reducing
economic and military assistance to inefficient or corrupt regimes
in order to save taxpayers' money, the circle of key policymakers
around Kennedy thought it excessively naive. "I daresay if
we confined our aid to those countries who would use it effectively
...," Robert W. Komer told the president, "we could
reduce the list of our clients considerably.... But in applying
such criteria we would be opting ourselves out of shoring up,
or otherwise influencing, a whole series of client states which,
whatever their own internal weaknesses, it is in our strategic
interest to help." Regardless of their character or form,
the United States was more firmly committed than ever to working
politically with the military in the Third World.
The Challenge of Latin America
p139
Cuba Shakes Up the Hemisphere
Cuba, more than any place in Latin America, had been virtually
a de facto U.S. colony. Economically, preferential tariff arrangements
since 1901 transformed it into a vast dependent sugar plantation
tied wholly to the U.S. market while importing three-quarters
of its needs from the north. During the 1950s the stagnant sugar
industry still accounted for 80 percent of Cuba's export earnings
and a quarter of its national income, requiring a country with
vast uncultivated estates reserved for sugar to import a quarter
of its food needs. Cuba's trade deficit with the United States
in the decade up to 1959 amounted to one billion dollars. U.S.
investors owned fully 40 percent of Cuba's sugar production, 90
percent of its utilities, half of its railroads, and much else-while
naturalized citizens controlled a significant part of the remainder.
The main economic function of the highly Americanized Cuban middle
and upper classes was to service this United States-owned system
as well as the immensely profitable industry that catered to Yankee
tourism with hotels, prostitution, and gambling. Marginalized
and with precious little national identity, this comprador bourgeoisie
preferred to make and spend money and left politics, and the army
that controlled it under Fulgencio Batista for most of the time
since 1933, to déclassé, highly corrupt soldiers
with few ties to the established local economic elites. Perhaps
more than for any other nation in the hemisphere, the United States'
domination had created in Cuba a centrifugal, highly unstable
society.
It was the very nature of this ruling class, combined with
the economic and social consequences of a dependent export economy
with large unemployment and growing land tenure problems, that
made the July 26 Movement under Fidel Castro capable of winning
power so quickly and with relatively few forces, for the Cuban
status quo had few defenders ready to stand and fight for it.
The proximity to Florida and the elite's strong personal and economic
links elsewhere in the area, where it had diversified a large
part of its money, also allowed it to be highly mobile. Cuba was
a nation with a society the United States had made over for its
own needs and desires, and m 1959 it was to become a challenge
to it without precedent.
p144
Social and economic conditions in Latin America gave the deeply
agitated Kennedy Administration no cause for complacency. Statistical
indicators, whatever their methodological deficiencies, revealed
a troubled region in the process of a structural crisis and with
a vast mass of humanity in profound distress.
Latin America has been the most rapidly urbanizing Third World
region in this century, in large part due to the failure of the
existing land system to provide the minimum livelihood for survival.
From 1930 to 1960 the percentage of the population (201 million
people in 1960) living in urban areas had doubled, to reach 33
percent. East Asia, by contrast, had only 18 percent urbanized,
and the other Third World continents even less. This pattern of
growth continued in much the same fashion for the next twenty
years. Put another way, in 1960 two-thirds of the Latin population
lived in rural areas, while agriculture and mining, the basic
economic activities to which they related, generated only 17 percent
of the gross domestic product.
The social causes of the misery the masses lived in were diverse,
but the inequitable structure of land tenure was by far the most
important. In Peru, with the highest rate of urbanization, those
owning more than 1,000 hectares of land in 1960, or 0.2 percent
of all landholders, accounted for 69 percent of the land. Over
nine-tenths of those engaged in agriculture owned no land whatsoever,
working as tenants or laborers. In Argentina the 5.8 percent of
the holders with 1,000 or more hectares had 74 percent of the
land. In Brazil, 0.9 percent of the owners held 44 percent of
the land, while in Chile 1.3 percent owned 73 percent. In Colombia,
0.3 percent owned 30 percent of the land, while in Venezuela 1.3
percent held 82 percent.
This basic pattern in land ownership showed up in income distribution
statistics. In 1960, the richest 5 percent of the population earned
33.4 percent of the income in Latin America taken as a whole,
with 29.2 percent for the next richest 15 percent-or 62.6 percent
for the wealthiest fifth. Peru and Colombia had the most inequitable
distribution in the hemisphere and among the worst in the entire
Third World. Latin America's poorest half of the population received
13.4 percent of the income in 1960. The per capita annual income
of those in the poorest fifth in 1960 was $60, while those in
the wealthiest 5 percent received $2,600. Latin America was, above
all, a class society with a vast gulf-economic, social, and political-between
the rich and the poor. Indeed, the statistical gap between them
was significantly greater in Latin America than in any other Third
World region.
p145
Politics in Latin America both reflected and reinforced the highly
inequitable economic structure, and even those civilian parties
that disturbed the United States, with the exception of the relatively
unimportant Marxist groups, never challenged a system of distribution
that favored them. As complex as civilian politics in the region
was-and the distinctions among the many countries in this regard
discourage excessive generalizations-beliefs in egalitarianism
never influenced it. The general rhetoric of reform, on the other
hand, was far more important because the huge congregations of
displaced peasants in the cities, most without appropriate skills
and living precariously, made labor-absorbing economic development
a key issue for them, reinforcing the political strength of those
sectors of the middle and upper classes who for their own reasons
and interests wanted economic, and particularly industrial, growth.
Elite-dominated populism created a distinctive political dialogue
in many Latin states, but it scarcely shaped economic policy beyond
the creation of employment-a goal for which most of the masses
were grateful. Nor was political democracy in the formal, institutional
sense an important issue in civilian politics in Brazil, Argentina,
and elsewhere. Civilian elites were ready to manipulate the masses
for their own purposes, but not to give them power, for the continuation
of their own privileges precluded that.
p161
The Dominican Republic: Dictatorship and Intervention
U.S. Marines installed Rafael Trujillo to run the Dominican
Republic in the 1920s while they occupied it, and he ruled one
of the hemisphere's poorest countries as America's loyal servant.
His corruption was legendary and his repression comparable. Not
until the advent of Castro did Washington begin to doubt the wisdom
of relying upon him, and an OAS condemnation of his regime on
June 8, 1960, goaded it further when several weeks later there
was a Trujillo-sponsored assassination attempt against President
Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela, who had led the criticism against
Trujillo's incarceration of many thousands of political prisoners,
murder, and torture. The Eisenhower Administration then reduced
its purchases of Dominican sugar, essential for the island's economy,
and later attempted to cut it entirely. In response, on August
25 Trujillo's radio began to defend Castro and announced it would
broadcast Soviet news agency reports. By that time the CIA had
established contact with various opposition groups and begun to
provide them with guns fitted for assassinations.
On May 30, 1961, one of them killed Trujillo. With his vice
president and the dead dictator's longtime ally, Joaquin Balaguer,
nominally in control, Trujillo's eldest son assumed power with
the backing of the army. Yet the United States remained undecided
what to do as the military, a conservative middle-class party,
and a democratic Left party, the Dominican Revolutionary Party
(PRD), under Juan Bosch, emerged as the main contenders. Finally,
despite Balaguer's reimposition of repressive measures, the Kennedy
Administration resolved to try to liberalize the existing regime
and proposed that the OAS lift its economic sanctions. It demanded,
however, that the Trujillo clan, which was seeking to hold on
to power, leave the island, and threatened an invasion should
they refuse. On November 17,1961, the Trujillos departed, taking
an estimated two-hundred-million-dollar fortune with them and
leaving behind four times that in property. Balaguer and the army
took over, and at the beginning of 1962 U.S.-Dominican relations
were normalized, the sugar quota restored, and large amounts of
economic aid given the impoverished country.
Meanwhile, riots and aborted coups forced Balaguer to leave
office, and the island remained in suspense pending the outcome
of elections in December 1962. A new U.S. ambassador, John Bartlow
Martin, arrived to keep all the contending factions in order until
then, while a council of former Trujillo officers provided a transitional
government, but he quickly resolved that the Left should be suppressed,
and he assiduously cultivated the military. The four deeply disunited
and small radical parties disturbed him greatly, but he later
conceded that "None of the Castro/Communist parties seemed
to me prepared to try to overthrow the government by force,"
but instead would try to infiltrate larger groups-though how they
could do so while divided remained unclear. When Bosch, however,
won the December 20 election by a two-to-one majority, what Martin
feared most appeared to him about to come to pass.
Martin was hostile toward Bosch from the inception, and especially
resented the freedom he gave to the smaller leftist parties to
function, suspecting he had secret ties with them himself if he
was not actually a "deep-cover Communist"-a claim that
found echoes in Washington.' Almost as ominous, Bosch pressed
his social and economic reforms, canceled an Esso contract and
then stopped delivery of sugar under the U.S. quota because world
prices were far higher and the Dominicans had already lost six
million dollars in potential income thereby. On September 20,
1963, seven months after he came to office, a rightist-led strike
against Bosch caused the State Department to wash their hands
of him just as an inevitable coup seemed days away. Martin himself
opposed Bosch but feared abandoning the constitutional process
even more, making a feeble gesture to keep the Right from taking
over, but five days later a military coup installed a pro-American
civilian junta while generals remained in the background, supervising
it. After several months of feigned distress, the State Department
recognized it.
The new junta took office with no concessions to the modest
U.S. demands that it return to constitutional processes while
also excluding Bosch and the Left, and it refused to broaden its
membership because it realized that in the existing hemispheric
context Washington would not challenge it. Until April 1965 it
ran the Dominican Republic in a way that alienated virtually everyone:
the masses, who suffered as much as they had under Trujillo; the
middle class parties, who disliked the return of rampant corruption;
reformers within the military itself; and even some officers who
had served Trujillo and wanted to see Balaguer's reinstatement.
By that date Bosch had managed to wield together an alliance that
demanded a restoration of the 1963 constitution, and when it initiated
an uprising on April 24 a large part of the army rallied to its
side, as well, of course, as the masses. The junta fell the next
day, and on April 26 the army distributed guns to from three thousand
to ten thousand people in the capital, Santo Domingo, where the
combat was confined. Within three days it was virtually in the
constitutionalists' hands, and only a few pockets of resistance
remained.
Following the crisis, State Department officials convinced
themselves immediately that guns passed out to the population
might end up in the hands of the deeply divided leftist groups,
who could then take leadership away from the pro-Bosch officers.
But they did not believe it was certain to occur if they did not
act, for the CIA estimated that there were about fifty-five disunited
Castroists and Communists among the rebels, and from three hundred
to three thousand in the entire country. American officials urged
the remnants of the military to continue resisting, but on April
28, when their local allies' defeat appeared imminent, they made
a unanimous decision to recommend the use of U.S. forces. Their
immediate concern was that proCastro nationalists would take power,
but to reach this conclusion they had to number Bosch and his
party among them; and while risk of a leftist takeover appeared
dangerous enough, even more persuasive was the credibility of
American power in the world-since at least that, Washington believed,
seemed certain to be at stake. President Johnson made it plain
that he did not propose "to sit here with my hands tied and
let Castro take that island. What can we do in Vietnam if we can't
clean up the Dominican Republic?"
On April 28 U.S. troops began landing in the Dominican Republic,
reaching twenty-three thousand on May 9. Ostensibly to protect
the lives of American citizens and arrange a cease-fire, their
obvious objective was to keep Bosch and the Left out of power.
They complied with none of the ostensible OAS procedures for actions
such as this, and indeed the Dominican invasion was, and still
remains, the most massive U.S. direct hemispheric intervention
in this century. Press opinion in Latin America ran ten to one
against it, and Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, and others protested
formally. The sham pretensions of inter-Americanism were laid
to rest, but the message that the United States had both the will
and the capacity to act decisively was unmistakably clear to the
entire world.
The rest was foredoomed, since foreign troops were there to
fight against real or alleged Communists, and this meant restoring
the pro-American military to complete control of the army. U.S.
forces were reduced, but enough remained to make it possible for
Washington to dictate settlement terms, which culminated in June
1966 in an election between Balaguer and Bosch that, not surprisingly,
brought Trujillo's intimate back to power. While the United States'
defenders insisted that the election was genuinely free, the point
would be irrelevant even if true. With all the arms in the hands
of Balaguer's allies, and U.S. soldiers still present and Washington's
position on Bosch unmistakably known, the population's option
of a resumption of the war or a vote for the U.S. candidate alone
would have been sufficient to determine the outcome.
Balaguer restored many former Trujillo officers to military
service and brought back the old regime. "The terrorism,
corruption and misery that marked Rafael Trujillo's 31-year dictatorship
. . . are even more widespread today under constitutionally elected
President Joaquin Balaguer," a Wall Street Journal reporter
said in summing up his reign in late 1971; "So say some friends
as well as most foes of the U.S.-backed Balaguer government, and
evidence is mounting to support their view."
In the end, Washington far preferred to save the dictators
of its own choice to tolerating the array of democrats, demagogues,
nationalists, and reformers that the people of Latin America chose
to lead them.
The Other Southeast Asian Challenges
p173
The United States' consistent policy after the Indonesians won
their independence was to aid the police and military with equipment
to maintain order against the Communist Party (PKI). In late 1948
Sukarno and his army ruthlessly suppressed a PKI-supported land
reform movement in the Madiun region, virtually destroying the
PKI leadership, jailing thirty-six thousand, and greatly increasing
Washington's respect for him and particularly his officers. Strategically,
by 1953 the NSC resolved to encourage those nationalist forces
the army especially personified, as well as the very large Islamic
parties, to prevent Indonesia from moving toward the Left. The
security of Japan, whose access to the islands' vast resources
it believed crucial to keep it safely in the U.S. camp, was unquestionably
its primary concern, and for practical purposes it assigned Indonesia
to Japan's economic sphere of interest. Indonesia was a major
link in its expanded geopolitical domino theory for East Asia.
No later than December 1954, the NSC decided that the United States
would use "all feasible covert means" as well as overt,
including "the use of armed force if necessary," to
prevent the richest parts of Indonesia from falling into Communist
hands.
p177
By mid-1964 Sukarno had become seriously ill, leaving the country
often for medical treatment, and it was clear that the entire
precariously balanced power structure over which he presided would
not last much longer. At stake for many officers were careers
and fortunes, so the tensions within the military intensified.
The U.S. embassy received constant coup rumors from January 1965
onward. That month, those in charge of the army organized a secret
committee, which others dubbed the "Generals' Council,"
to deal with purely political issues relating to Sukarno, and
it definitely considered what to do should he become incapacitated
or die. Sukarno fell seriously ill again in early August, and
the CIA learned that the Generals' Council convened a meeting
in Djakarta on September 30. With rumors of threatened coups from
both sides circulating throughout September, any gesture by one
side was certain to evoke a response, including a preemptive one,
by the other. It was a time, as the second-in-charge of the U.S.
embassy later recalled, when "there was a power play going
on, everybody was maneuvering to get to the top." Regardless
of its truth or falsity, a pro-Sukarno faction of the military
was convinced that the Generals' Council was planning a coup against
Sukarno on Armed Forces Day, October 5, when many of their troops
could be brought unnoticed into the city, ostensibly to parade.
Since the army leadership had contingency plans should Sukamo
leave the scene, their fear may have been wrong, but it was not
implausible. The September 30 Movement was the pro-Sukamo officers'
response to this alleged or real danger, and it was not a coup
but principally an effort to keep him in command, as well as a
struggle between factions of the military.
p179
Indonesia by late 1965 presented U.S. strategy in Southeast Asia
with a danger at least as great as Vietnam at a time when its
preoccupation there made large-scale intervention in Indonesia
impossible. The logic of the domino theory applied to it as much
as to Vietnam, but its economic and strategic value was far greater.
Relying on peaceful means, the PKI had grown consistently, and
could be expected to continue to do so. The United States had
depended on the military since 1949 to create a barrier to the
Communists, and it understood well that Sukarno's skilled balancing
of contending forces to maintain his control would end in the
near future with his death. The events of September 30 created
a small challenge but also an enormous opportunity to resolve
America's dilemmas by directing the military's wrath against the
Communists.
181
... the Indonesian generals in early November approached the United
States for equipment "to arm Moslem and nationalist youths
in central Java for use against the PKI...." Most were using
knives and primitive means, and communications gear and small
arms would expedite the killing. Since "elimination of these
elements" was a precondition of better relations, the United
States quickly promised covert aid-dubbed "medicines"
to prevent embarrassing revelations. At stake in the army's effort
was the "destruction," as the CIA called the undertaking,
of the PKI, and "carefully placed assistance which will help
Army cope with PKI" continued, as Green described it, despite
the many other problems in Indonesian-U.S. relations that remained
to be solved.
The "final solution" to the Communist problem in
Indonesia was certainly one of the most barbaric acts of inhumanity
in a century that has seen a great deal of it; it surely ranks
as a war crime of the same type as those the Nazis perpetrated.
No single American action in the period after 1945 was as bloodthirsty
as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre,
and it did everything in its power to encourage Suharto, including
equipping his killers, to see that the physical liquidation of
the PKI was carried through to its culmination. Not a single one
of its officials in Washington or Djakarta questioned the policy
on either ethical or political grounds; quite the contrary. "The
reversal of the Communist tide in the great country of Indonesia"
was publicly celebrated, in the words of Deputy Undersecretary
of State U. Alexis Johnson in October 1966, as "an event
that will probably rank along with the Vietnamese war as perhaps
the most historic turning point of Asia in this decade."
No one counts the dead in a massacre, and those able to make
a reliable estimate afterward had no incentive to do so in this
case. On December 4, as they both were clamoring for yet more
killing, Green wrote to Rusk that over 100,000 but not more than
200,000 had been murdered in northern Sumatra and central and
eastern Java alone, and the destruction was still going on. At
the beginning of the following April the CIA estimated roughly
250,000 deaths in a party of 3 million and 12 million front group
members. By the end of the month it dismissed the government's
claim of 78,000 dead and thought 250,000 to 500,000 closer to
reality. But "An accurate figure is impossible to obtain,"
the CIA concluded. A State Department estimate that year placed
the figure at roughly 300,000, a number former ambassador Jones
employed when he published his memoirs five years later-though
he, too, did not exclude 500,000. Other estimates range up to
I million dead, and official Indonesian data released a decade
later gave 450,000 to 500,000 as the number killed. As stunning
as these figures are, not a single official U.S. document dealing
with them has ever expressed dismay or regret!
p184
The system that emerged in Indonesia after 1967 was even more
centralized around one man than it had been under Sukamo, who
at least had allowed a modicum of civil liberties and permitted
parties to function far more freely as long as he could control
them. Sukamo co-opted many of his potential opponents, but Suharto
put them in prison, or worse. He also concentrated all power over
the army in the hands of a monolithic clique, which had never
existed under Sukamo, and used it as both a mechanism for political
control of the state apparatus at all levels and economic aggrandizement
via a level of corruption that ranks among the highest in the
world after 1945. Politically it created an unstable administrative
order subject to arbitrary changes, predictable only in that its
primary function was to reinforce the Suharto clique's power.
Economically it is far more complex save in one regard: what Suharto
and his circle have done for themselves.
Suharto never truly committed himself to an economy patterned
along United States- or IMF-endorsed classical lines but rather
acted as the State Department's experts in March 1966 predicted
he would: He became richer. After 1972 and the massive entry of
Japanese capital into Indonesia, Suharto found he had leverage
in dealing with the rest of the world and his debtors- which he
used repeatedly to borrow immense amounts for the state oil company,
Pertamina, and other huge ventures. Local banks loaned massive
sums to his political friends or their generally Chinese business
associates, who still run most of the state as well as most of
the private sector, and the magnitude of the corruption and waste
nearly led to Pertamina's bankruptcy in 1977 and a serious weakening
of the internal banking system. By astutely playing off foreign
interests and milking them all, the political structure Suharto
controlled worked with allied national business interests to operate
a debt-ridden economy whose stability was as much dependent on
a world economy that encouraged and funded such high-risk economic
strategies as on Suharto's wisdom or folly. Indonesia's external
public debt was $2.4 billion in 1970 but $14.9 billion a decade
later, much of which had funded patronage projects. By 1986 Suharto
and his family controlled thirty companies dealing in transport,
electronics, chemicals, and much else. He had become a fabulously
wealthy man.
Less problematical were the conditions of life for the masses,
which in Indonesia meant largely the rural areas. During 1963-67,
a depressed period, and 1970-74 the nation's ability to supply
its own cereals declined, and in 1969-71 per capita calorie consumption
was only 83 percent of minimum requirements-making Indonesia the
poorest nation in Southeast Asia. In 1969, a total of 47 percent
of the rural population lived in the starkest poverty. While data
on such trends are uneven, all point to a decline in the rural
living standards during Suharto's "New Order." The introduction
of capital-intensive agriculture among wealthier peasants reduced
employment for the poorer without reversing the national food
deficit. Peasants after 1965 were afraid to organize, so landlessness
increased and ownership became more concentrated. In eastern and
western Java, by the late 1970s the real wages of rural workers
was declining sharply, while land ownership also dropped. The
percentage of farmers owning less than half a hectare grew from
46 percent in 1973 to 63 percent in 1980. In the end it was the
peasantry, as everywhere, who paid the costs of the regime the
United States supported ...
p186
It remained the United States' desire, in the 1960s as in previous
decades, to use the Philippines to show the world what it alone
could do to create democracy and an ideal society in the Third
World. At the same time, it regarded the country as a key market
and investment outlet as well as a major supplier, and it insisted
that Filipino politics adjust to its needs rather than pursue
the nationalist economic policies to which the Garcia regime,
despite its traditional corruption, had surprisingly given momentum.
Yet the fact that a truly indigenous national bourgeoisie emerged
during these years had political implications that greatly exceeded
the still relatively marginal economic resources such a class
could mobilize. As long as economic development was linked to
the control of political power, the main threat to the United
States after 1960 came not from the dormant Left but from middle
and upper-class entrepreneurs who by necessity had to expound
a nationalism that was synonymous with anti-Americanism.
The United States supported the victorious Macapagal in the
November 1961 elections not because the Liberal was less corrupt
than Garcia, and honesty was the main campaign issue, but because
he favored a restoration of the U.S.-Philippines bilateral trade
system to its original form-notwithstanding a formidable nationalist
contingent in Congress. His first major act upon taking office
was to implement IMF and U.S. Treasury recommendations and lift
all exchange controls, in return for which the Philippines, which
had earlier been denied IMF and World Bank loans, received $300
million in U.S. and IMF aid. With the peso devalued by about half,
the Philippine economy once again became an open hunting ground
for U.S. businessmen, most of whom still preferred sending previously
blocked profits out of the country rather than investing further-to
the extent, in fact, that in no year after 1945 had new foreign
investment equaled profits repatriated to the United States. Macapagal's
economic program, the price of continued IMF aid was consciously
antinationalist, and the major damage it inflicted on local business
interests led to an end of the rapid growth of the manufacturing
sector that had occurred during the 1950s. Export interests, in
conformity with the standard U.S. and IMF formula, were ascendant
once more.
Economically, the results showed up quickly in inflation,
which drove down the real income of labor and forced thousands
of businesses to the brink of failure or over it. By 1964 a tenth
of the labor force was unemployed, while almost a third of the
remainder was underemployed-farm labor that worked the smaller
part of the year, or the innumerable urban poor who had been forced
off the land to live a lumpen existence in slums. The larger structural
trends in the economy during this decade were testimony to the
ability of the U.S.-IMF program to impose countless otherwise
avoidable difficulties on national economic development strategies.
By 1965 almost a third of the nation's capital stock was foreign-owned,
mainly American-owned, and two-thirds of the hundred largest corporations,
dominant in manufacturing, utilities, and commerce, were foreign.
By the mid-1960s the repatriation of profits and the amortization
of its loans were costing close to $400 million annually, forcing
Manila to continue borrowing. The national public external debt
rose from $174 million in 1960 to $480 million in 1965, then doubled
by 1970.
p187
The war defined the U.S. response to the November 1965 election,
in which Macapagal and Ferdinand Marcos, who switched over to
the Nacionalistas to obtain their nomination, were the two major
contestants. By that time economic problems had become acute with
rising inflation, and informed Manila experts estimated that corruption
was consuming about a third of all government revenues. The CIA
believed that all the candidates were pro-American and that neither
would do much to bring reforms to the nation, making a stronger
Left in the future likely. Both would send forces to Vietnam,
despite the fact that Marcos had earlier opposed Macapagal's bill
to dispatch engineering troops, and Marcos was deemed a "ruthless
politician" while Macapagal was flabby. Washington always
considered Marcos a cynical opportunist...
Given the fact that it could not lose, the United States remained
neutral in the election. Marcos won and immediately assumed the
role of the typical Philippine politician, in the United States'
estimate, and in July 1966 he helped push through a measure that
authorized two thousand engineer troops to Vietnam. Even more
important to the United States, which still hoped to get combat
forces from Marcos, was a carte blanche from him to use American
bases in the Philippines as logistics centers and even, possibly,
for combat launches in the Vietnam War. In September 1966, to
"Keep Marcos on our side and help him silence his critics,"
whom the war had made far more numerous, Marcos fulfilled his
desire to visit Washington. The Administration knew that it would
have to reward him with significant aid and that it would be channeled
into Marcos's political coffers-perhaps even his pocket. In addition
to eighty million dollars in grants, Marcos received thirty-nine
million dollars for the expenses of his Vietnam contingent-part
of which was paid in cash and deposited in banks he controlled.
It was in this context that the United States also pressed Marcos
to "improve general trade and investment climate in the Philippines
and find ways to protect American acquired rights after 1974,"
when the Laurel-Langley Agreement was to expire. However much
Vietnam dominated relations between Washington and Manila after
1964, economics was still very alive in everyone's calculations.
Marcos' visit proved to the Johnson Administration that he
could be bought and that he would remain a loyal ally in protecting
American interests just in his own country but in Southeast Asia
as well.
p189
By 1969 and the beginning of the Nixon Administration, politics
within the Philippine ruling class had long since reached an impasse,
and the existing political institutions and forces no longer had
the capacity to resolve the profound contradictions and needs
of the contending sections of the elite, much less the larger
society. The nation's economic malaise, which threatened to deepen
into a crisis with untold implications, was not only making a
travesty of the U.S. desire to use its former colony as an example
of what it was capable of accomplishing for the world but also
reflected the continuing role of the United States in the economy.
The election of November 1969 was the turning point, pitting Marcos
against Serging Osmena, a former collaborator with the Japanese.
Osmena had switched parties constantly since 1945 and was a classic
Philippine oligarch who knew everything about patronage, corruption,
and violence. He stood only for himself, leaving no one to represent
the nationalist businessmen. He was also ardently pro-American,
and while neither he nor Marcos threatened Washington, Nixon as
much as endorsed the president. Marcos took no chances and simply
raided the national treasury, spending from fifty million to two
hundred million dollars, depending on the source, on his campaign-more
than the cost of all postwar elections combined. The violence
and ballot-box manipulation that went with it were also unprecedented.
The election's impact on the economy and society, its morale and
cohesion, ushered in a new era that I at the same time reflected
the inevitable logic of politics in the nation the United States
had created after 1946.
p198
The Probem of Sub-Saharan Africa
Africa frustrated the United States consistently throughout
the 1960s, and as its problems in Vietnam and elsewhere increased
monumentally, it sought to relegate the continent to the very
bottom of its concerns. AU this only reinforced the Administration's
natural inclination to employ the ideas on the crucial role of
the military in modernizing new nations that it was applying elsewhere,
if only to locate sympathetic anti-Communist elements in the hope
that they might create stability where none existed. At the inception
of the decade its Rand consultants on Africa argued that the military
alone might modernize tribal societies and impose skills and a
common language on them. In a region where most Africanists influential
in establishment circles believed the state had preceded formation
of the nation, officials in Washington dealing with Africa were
instinctively drawn to supporting the military. There were sixty-four
military mutinies and failed or successful coups in Africa in
196348 alone, and many American specialists thought that military
coups were a healthy response to foreign "alien ideologies"
that such civilians as Nkrumah, Lumumba, or African socialists
were advocating. These more "realistic" officers, their
reasoning went, would be "more receptive to the free world
economic doctrine and technology." CIA experts tried to amend
this optimistic analysis by pointing out that while officers were
becoming the decisive power group in Africa, they shared none
of the military's capacity elsewhere to administer nations. They
were primarily ambitious and interested in power, but rather than
noting the risks in this reality Washington simply accepted the
military as a dominant, unavoidable, and desirable fact of life.
But in its quest for stability, which by 1966 caused even the
small group of reformers among U.S. decisionmakers to regard the
African political climate after so many military takeovers as
"the best it has ever been," the United States opted
for relying on the armies in Africa also.
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