Villains Afoot
excerpted from the book
Cry of the People
The struggle for human rights
in Latin America
and the Catholic Church in conflict with US policy
by Penny Lernoux
Penguin Books, 1980, paper
p282
After years of using and abusing local and foreign religious groups
in Latin America, the CIA now appears to be seeking a lower profile
in this area, partly because of the ruckus caused by indignant
Catholic and Protestant organizations in the United States following
revelations in 1975 of CIA penetration of missionary groups.
p283
During the cold war, U.S. missionaries routinely collaborated
with the CIA and, on their return to the United States, visited
the State Department to be debriefed. In those days there was
nothing conspiratorial about this relationship, nor any suggestion
of moral conflict: most missionaries shared the concerns of their
government, particularly about the spread of communism. A number
of Foreign Service personnel came from missionary backgrounds,
and it was not uncommon for missionaries to take sides in military/ideological
confrontations, the classic example being John Birch. A Baptist
missionary who worked with the OSS in World War II and was later
killed by a Chinese communist while leading a patrol of Chinese
nationalists, Birch was canonized by Robert Welch and the radical
Right as the "first martyr" of the cold war.
Because of their personal relationships
with the people they serve and the status of their profession,
the forty-five thousand U.S. Catholic and Protestant missionaries
stationed abroad were and are an obvious source of intelligence,
in some areas perhaps the only source. This was particularly true
in Latin America, where twelve thousand U.S. missionaries work
and where most of the cases of CIA collaboration have been documented.
During the 1960s when the Alliance for Progress was in vogue,
nobody questioned this relationship, since Church groups and the
U. S. Government were agreed on the twin priorities of economic
development and anti-communism. "Part of the problem stems
from the fact that the great Latin crusade by the churches in
the 1950s and 1960s merged, at times almost totally, with the
thrust of the Alliance for Progress and its Truman-Eisenhower
predecessors," said Thomas Quigley, assistant director of
the Division for Latin America of the U. S. Catholic Conference.
"The stated goals were to promote development and contain
communism, and few then realized the ambiguities contained in
that statement. Only later was it learned that development, as
practiced, benefited the rich at the expense of the poor, and
that containment of communism was often simplistically equated
with protecting an unjust and unChristian status quo. Now we see
those aspects. But at that time, the average missionary-perhaps
especially the socially progressive ones-sensed a greater affinity
with certain people from the local United States embassy or consulate
than with fellow missionaries from another country or even congregation.
The prime targets for CIA contact were precisely such pragmatic
liberals sent in large numbers during the period to Latin America
from the United States churches-the 'concerned' missionaries from
the mainline Protestant Churches and from Catholic societies like
Maryknoll and the Jesuits."
p285
Darryl Hunt, a Maryknoll missionary who headed the Lima-based
Latin America Press news service covering hemispheric Church affairs,
recalled that visits to Maryknoll headquarters in New York were
routine up to a decade ago, when the order's superiors were alerted
to the agency's intentions. "They tried to get information
from the missionaries in the field by developing friendships with
them and appearing to ask disinterested questions without identifying
themselves as CIA," he added. "U. S. Embassy officials
in Lima asked me questions about progressive priests' movements
in Peru that later seemed highly suspect."
Jim O'Brien, a former priest who worked
in Guatemala in the late 1960s, described how CIA agent Sean Holly
used his background as a Maryknoll seminarian to develop contacts
with U.S. missionaries. Officially listed as the labor attaché,
Holly was later kidnapped by a Guatemalan guerrilla group and
freed in exchange for four political prisoners held by the Guatemalan
Government. Holly's job, said O'Brien, was to keep tabs on U.S.
missionaries, particularly Maryknoll priests and nuns.
According to John D. Marks, a former State
Department intelligence analyst and co-author of the controversial
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, 30 to 40 percent of the
churchmen he interviewed, during an investigation of the subject,
knew of a CIA-Church connection. Marks also reported a retired
CIA agent as stating: "Hell, I'd use anybody if it was to
the furtherance of an objective. I've used Buddhist monks, Catholic
priests, and even a Catholic bishop.''
It is precisely this amoral-some would
say immoral-attitude that altered the thinking of many missionaries:
that and political conditions in the countries where they worked.
In the days before Vietnam and Watergate, few missionaries questioned
U.S. support of right-wing dictatorships, because those governments
claimed to be anti-communist. But as the United States expanded
its role as world policeman, its police methods becoming ever
more dubious, the missionary was forced to face the conflict posed
by his dual role as American citizen and bearer of Christ's universal
Good News. Indigenous Christians were suffering imprisonment,
torture, and death, as well as hunger and social discrimination,
at the hands of repressive governments; and yet these governments
were receiving U.S. economic and military aid, and in some instances
had been brought to power by the United States. For the missionaries
working and living with these people, this was not a remote issue
of foreign relations but a question of neighbors and friends.
As one Protestant writer put it, "Most missionaries loved
the countries and the people where they worked far too much to
knowingly damage them.'' Thus, when these missionaries realized
that they had been used as tools by their own government to harm
the interests of the people they had thought to serve, they were
shocked and angry. The crux of the matter was the blatant violation
of freedom of worship, one of the fundamental guarantees in the
United States Constitution, by an agency funded by American taxpayers,
and all on behalf of right-wing political interests. According
to U. S. Senate investigations, the CIA attempted to play God
in Latin America, deciding who should be President, who should
be eliminated, how the people should live, and whom they should
have as allies and enemies. Foreign missionaries and local religious
groups were among the many means used to achieve these ends, but
because of what they believed and taught, their manipulation must
be viewed as an act of calculated cynicism.
CIA Director William Colby's assertion
that CIA use of clergy and churches was "no reflection upon
their integrity or mission" was absurd: there is conclusive
proof that the CIA used religious groups in Latin America for
its own secret ends. At the same time it contributed to the persecution
and division of Latin America's Catholic Church by supporting
right-wing Catholic groups and financed and trained police agencies
responsible for the imprisonment, torture, and murder of priests,
nuns, and bishops, some of them U.S. citizens. That is why missionary
groups in the United States have changed from complacent collaborators
to harsh critics of the CIA-they have seen the results of the
agency's intervention with their own eyes.
After President Ford announced his approval
of illegal U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of the Latin-American
countries, sixteen officials of Catholic and Protestant mission
agencies wrote him: "Contrary to what you would have us believe,
CIA covert actions in the Third World frequently support undemocratic
governments that trample on the rights of their own people. We
missionaries have felt first-hand the effects of such interventions,
which are certainly not in 'the best interests' of the majority
of the citizens of those countries.... Nor do such actions, which
are prohibited by international law and by Article 6 of our own
Constitution, serve 'our best interests,' as you stated. Gangster
methods undermine world order and promote widespread hatred of
the United States."
Warned New World Outlook, published by
agencies of the United Methodist and United Presbyterian churches:
one cannot "defend democracy by destroying it." As long
as U.S. citizens shrug their shoulders, romanticize "spy
thrillers," and pass the buck to politicians, it added, there
will be blood on our hands, "for it is our money and our
government that pay for the regimes that do the killing."
p287
David A. Phillips, the CIA's former chief of Latin-American operations
and a self-appointed public relations spokesman for the agency,
said that "any information-gathering organization would be
derelict if it did not take advantage of the in-depth experience
of American clerics working in the area." He added that CIA
contacts with U.S. missionaries were "to mutual advantage,''
though he failed to specify what advantage a missionary might
gain from collaborating with an agency involved in the arrest
and abuse of priests. Phillips is himself a good example of the
mentality that has alienated and shocked so many religious groups.
His book The Night Watch, a CIA whitewash that does not even try
to refute ex-CIA agent Agee's CIA Diary, makes it evident that
in the CIA no means, however illegal or unpleasant, is ever questioned
if it achieves the desired goal. While admitting reservations
about the CIA's operations in Chile, for example, Phillips justified
the agency's intervention by arguing that orders were orders-after
all, who was going to deny President Nixon if he wanted Allende's
head? There is no room for moral distinctions in that line of
reasoning, and collaboration with the CIA is indeed a reflection
on the integrity and mission of U.S. churchmen, whatever Colby
may say. Phillips' assertion that CIA contacts with missionary
groups have declined in recent years is undoubtedly true, but
that is more because missionaries have learned to be suspicious
than because the CIA has resolved to be scrupulous.
Whereas it sought out U.S. missionaries
primarily for information, the CIA funded and directed local religious
groups in Latin America for all manner of covert activities, from
bombing church buildings to overthrowing constitutionally elected
governments. It ranged the political spectrum from extreme right
to center-left, usually preferred the former, particularly for
dirty tricks.
p292
... the activities of ... Chilean Catholic groups funded by the
CIA, particularly the notorious Fatherland and Liberty goon squads
that formed the guerrilla arm of the extreme Right before and
after Allende's election. A modern version of the Spanish Inquisition-the
Pinochet junta later employed a number of the organization's members
as police interrogators-Fatherland and Liberty received CIA funds
for a variety of purposes, ranging from an attempted military
coup to violent demonstrations at political rallies, which its
militants attended in full riot gear. Its CIA contact was Keith
Wheelock, then secretary of the U. S. Embassy in Santiago. According
to a U. S. Senate investigation that revealed CIA funding of Fatherland
and Liberty, the organization's tactics came to parallel those
of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), but whereas the
armed forces treated MIR's guerrillas as outlaws, they allowed
Fatherland and Liberty to act with impunity. In the waning months
of the Allende government in 1973, Fatherland and Liberty spokesmen
boasted to a U.S. correspondent about their arsenal of weapons,
classes in target practice, and attacks on Allende's followers.
Some of the most bloodthirsty militants were women, many of whom
had participated in the much-publicized "Empty Pots March,"
a supposedly middle-class women's demonstration against the Allende
government that was composed principally of the wives of high-salaried
employees, managers, senior executives, and industrialists. During
the march the women attacked several boys who shouted "Viva
Allende," all but castrating them.
Fatherland and Liberty organized an abortive
CIA-sponsored military coup in June 1973, for which it took public
responsibility in the Santiago press. It also took credit for
70 attacks (of an estimated 290) on government offices, public
works, and Allende newspapers; assassinated Allende's naval aide,
Commodore Arturo Araya; and abetted a truck owners' strike by
strewing miguelitos, three-pronged steel spikes, on the highways.
Two months before Allende's overthrow, Fatherland and Liberty's
second-in-command, industrialist Roberto Thieme, announced that
the organization would unleash a total armed offensive to destroy
the government. After Allende's death, Thieme's followers joined
the junta's security police, DINA, which was responsible for the
torture and death of hundreds of Chileans.
Vigilante Squads
Though dangerous, the Fatherland and Liberty
fanatics were less influential than their counterparts in the
Chilean branch of a right-wing Catholic movement known as Tradition,
Family, and Property (TFP), principally because TFP's militants
had an intellectual base that appealed to a large number of officers
in the armed forces. Founded in the early 1960s by the Brazilian
philosopher Plinio Correa de Oliveira, TFP has followers in most
Latin American countries, including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay,
and l Brazil. While akin in some respects to twentieth-century
fascism, particularly to Mussolini's corporate state, TFP is really
a throwback to eighteenth-century Europe, as yet untouched by
the French Revolution, when the Catholic Church defended aristocratic
privilege as a divine right. Indeed, TFP's insignia is a medieval
lion. Most of its members are from the wealthy, propertied classes
and yearn for an earlier time when the Latin-American Church upheld
the right of a few patrones to rule a mass of peons.
TFP's first commandment is the utter sanctity
of private property, and in countries with progressive bishops,
such as Chile and Brazil, this has forced it into repeated clashes
with the hierarchy on the issue of agrarian reform. The movement's
members tend to be narrow-minded nationalists with a xenophobic
reaction to any suggestion by foreigners that there might be something
wrong with their country, particularly if the government is running
the country for the benefit of the wealthy, as in Pinochet's Chile.
They are also blindly anti-communist, seeing subversion in anything
remotely resembling reform, and are convinced that reds lurk everywhere
in Latin America's new, socially conscious Church. Thus TFP divides
the Catholic Church into "our" Church, which is a class
Church, rooted in another century, and "their" Church,
which is a classless Church and therefore subversive.
While the organization exists primarily
to maintain the privileges of the rich, that goal has been disguised
by jargon about "degenerate political systems," which
TFP claims have caused the Western countries to succumb to Marxist
penetration. Society is to be purified, along the lines of Mussolini's
corporate state, by replacing traditional political parties with
special-interest groups, to which people are assigned according
to job and social class. This is supposed to produce a society
in which everyone knows his place and is happy to keep it. What
TFP doesn't say is that its model of government effectively nullifies
any social or economic gains made by Latin America's middle and
lower classes.
TFP's activities in Chile, Brazil, and
elsewhere are an important part of the CIA story in Latin America,
because its members were the intellectual and financial backers
of military coups supported by the agency. After the military
took over, TFP members and fellow travelers were active in these
regimes' persecution of the Catholic Church, as in the case of
police agent Adolfo Centeno and the smear campaign against priests
and bishops in Uruguay. In some countries-Brazil, for example,
where TFP established a series of training camps near Rio de Janeiro-
members were instructed by the Army and the police, who, in turn,
received military training and political orientation from the
CIA, the Pentagon, and AID. But there were still closer ties:
in Chile and Brazil the evidence points to both financial and
political links between TFP and the CIA in plotting the overthrow
of the Allende and Goulart governments.
When it supported right-wing Catholic
groups, the CIA had principally in mind the political objective
of removing left-wing governments by military intervention, but
one result of the collaboration was to strengthen such organizations
as TFP, which emerged as religious vigilante squads for the military
regimes. Thus the CIA could be accused-and was accused by a number
of prominent Catholic leaders, including Brazil's Archbishop Helder
Camara-of inciting one sector of the Church to attack another.
Moreover, in some countries, Bolivia being one, this collaboration
extended to persecution of U.S. citizens when the CIA provided
military governments and right-wing Catholic organizations with
confidential dossiers on American priests and nuns.
A good example of TFP's connections with
both the CIA and the military is the branch in Chile, which supplied
the Chilean armed forces with a social philosophy-the generals
had none - and a religious basis for the regime's political witch-hunts.
p296
In the last months of the Allende government, TFP, the gremios,
Fatherland and Liberty, and other right-wing opposition groups
merged in a common front. The National Agriculture Society, for
example, was controlled by Fatherland and Liberty and received
CIA funds through an organization called the Congress for Cultural
Liberty. The society, in turn, worked with the Association of
Manufacturers, whose president, Orlando Saenz, was one of the
directors of the TFP-backed gremios as well as a secret leader
of Fatherland and Liberty. A month before the coup Saenz publicly
thanked the president of the Agriculture Society for "the
services lent earlier by you to our cause." Both groups had
close ties with El Mercurio, Santiago's largest newspaper, which
was financed by the CIA and used as an outlet for anti-Allende
propaganda, according to U. S. Senate investigations. They also
shared important Brazilian connections. Fatherland and Liberty
obtained arms from Brazil through a Chilean coffee-importing firm
which brought in, via the port of Valparaiso, crates of guns disguised
as raw material for the manufacture of instant coffee. Saenz was
in close touch with the financial and ideological backers of Brazil's
TFP, which had been in at the kill of Goulart's regime. (Several
of the tactics used in Chile were tested by TFP in Brazil. With
CIA help, TFP sponsored in Sao Paulo a march of several thousand
middle- and upper-class women that was psychologically crucial
to the coup ten days later. Similarly, women's groups sponsored
by TFP and Fatherland and Liberty held their largest demonstration
five days before Allende's overthrow.
U.S. congressional investigations have
established that the CIA spent $13 million to thwart Allende,
but with some exceptions, such as El Mercurio and Fatherland and
Liberty, details of how the money was allocated have not been
revealed. How much the CIA gave the TFP may never be known, but
there are numerous links between the two organizations, particularly
through Fatherland and Liberty, in addition to an established
connection in the campaign to discredit the country's Catholic
Church.
p282
After years of using and abusing local and foreign religious groups
in Latin America, the CIA now appears to be seeking a lower profile
in this area, partly because of the ruckus caused by indignant
Catholic and Protestant organizations in the United States following
revelations in 1975 of CIA penetration of missionary groups.
p283
During the cold war, U.S. missionaries routinely collaborated
with the CIA and, on their return to the United States, visited
the State Department to be debriefed. In those days there was
nothing conspiratorial about this relationship, nor any suggestion
of moral conflict: most missionaries shared the concerns of their
government, particularly about the spread of communism. A number
of Foreign Service personnel came from missionary backgrounds,
and it was not uncommon for missionaries to take sides in military/ideological
confrontations, the classic example being John Birch. A Baptist
missionary who worked with the OSS in World War II and was later
killed by a Chinese communist while leading a patrol of Chinese
nationalists, Birch was canonized by Robert Welch and the radical
Right as the "first martyr" of the cold war.
Because of their personal relationships
with the people they serve and the status of their profession,
the forty-five thousand U.S. Catholic and Protestant missionaries
stationed abroad were and are an obvious source of intelligence,
in some areas perhaps the only source. This was particularly true
in Latin America, where twelve thousand U.S. missionaries work
and where most of the cases of CIA collaboration have been documented.
During the 1960s when the Alliance for Progress was in vogue,
nobody questioned this relationship, since Church groups and the
U. S. Government were agreed on the twin priorities of economic
development and anti-communism. "Part of the problem stems
from the fact that the great Latin crusade by the churches in
the 1950s and 1960s merged, at times almost totally, with the
thrust of the Alliance for Progress and its Truman-Eisenhower
predecessors," said Thomas Quigley, assistant director of
the Division for Latin America of the U. S. Catholic Conference.
"The stated goals were to promote development and contain
communism, and few then realized the ambiguities contained in
that statement. Only later was it learned that development, as
practiced, benefited the rich at the expense of the poor, and
that containment of communism was often simplistically equated
with protecting an unjust and unChristian status quo. Now we see
those aspects. But at that time, the average missionary-perhaps
especially the socially progressive ones-sensed a greater affinity
with certain people from the local United States embassy or consulate
than with fellow missionaries from another country or even congregation.
The prime targets for CIA contact were precisely such pragmatic
liberals sent in large numbers during the period to Latin America
from the United States churches-the 'concerned' missionaries from
the mainline Protestant Churches and from Catholic societies like
Maryknoll and the Jesuits."
p285
Darryl Hunt, a Maryknoll missionary who headed the Lima-based
Latin America Press news service covering hemispheric Church affairs,
recalled that visits to Maryknoll headquarters in New York were
routine up to a decade ago, when the order's superiors were alerted
to the agency's intentions. "They tried to get information
from the missionaries in the field by developing friendships with
them and appearing to ask disinterested questions without identifying
themselves as CIA," he added. "U. S. Embassy officials
in Lima asked me questions about progressive priests' movements
in Peru that later seemed highly suspect."
Jim O'Brien, a former priest who worked
in Guatemala in the late 1960s, described how CIA agent Sean Holly
used his background as a Maryknoll seminarian to develop contacts
with U.S. missionaries. Officially listed as the labor attaché,
Holly was later kidnapped by a Guatemalan guerrilla group and
freed in exchange for four political prisoners held by the Guatemalan
Government. Holly's job, said O'Brien, was to keep tabs on U.S.
missionaries, particularly Maryknoll priests and nuns.
According to John D. Marks, a former State
Department intelligence analyst and co-author of the controversial
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, 30 to 40 percent of the
churchmen he interviewed, during an investigation of the subject,
knew of a CIA-Church connection. Marks also reported a retired
CIA agent as stating: "Hell, I'd use anybody if it was to
the furtherance of an objective. I've used Buddhist monks, Catholic
priests, and even a Catholic bishop.''
It is precisely this amoral-some would
say immoral-attitude that altered the thinking of many missionaries:
that and political conditions in the countries where they worked.
In the days before Vietnam and Watergate, few missionaries questioned
U.S. support of right-wing dictatorships, because those governments
claimed to be anti-communist. But as the United States expanded
its role as world policeman, its police methods becoming ever
more dubious, the missionary was forced to face the conflict posed
by his dual role as American citizen and bearer of Christ's universal
Good News. Indigenous Christians were suffering imprisonment,
torture, and death, as well as hunger and social discrimination,
at the hands of repressive governments; and yet these governments
were receiving U.S. economic and military aid, and in some instances
had been brought to power by the United States. For the missionaries
working and living with these people, this was not a remote issue
of foreign relations but a question of neighbors and friends.
As one Protestant writer put it, "Most missionaries loved
the countries and the people where they worked far too much to
knowingly damage them.'' Thus, when these missionaries realized
that they had been used as tools by their own government to harm
the interests of the people they had thought to serve, they were
shocked and angry. The crux of the matter was the blatant violation
of freedom of worship, one of the fundamental guarantees in the
United States Constitution, by an agency funded by American taxpayers,
and all on behalf of right-wing political interests. According
to U. S. Senate investigations, the CIA attempted to play God
in Latin America, deciding who should be President, who should
be eliminated, how the people should live, and whom they should
have as allies and enemies. Foreign missionaries and local religious
groups were among the many means used to achieve these ends, but
because of what they believed and taught, their manipulation must
be viewed as an act of calculated cynicism.
CIA Director William Colby's assertion
that CIA use of clergy and churches was "no reflection upon
their integrity or mission" was absurd: there is conclusive
proof that the CIA used religious groups in Latin America for
its own secret ends. At the same time it contributed to the persecution
and division of Latin America's Catholic Church by supporting
right-wing Catholic groups and financed and trained police agencies
responsible for the imprisonment, torture, and murder of priests,
nuns, and bishops, some of them U.S. citizens. That is why missionary
groups in the United States have changed from complacent collaborators
to harsh critics of the CIA-they have seen the results of the
agency's intervention with their own eyes.
After President Ford announced his approval
of illegal U.S. intervention in the internal affairs of the Latin-American
countries, sixteen officials of Catholic and Protestant mission
agencies wrote him: "Contrary to what you would have us believe,
CIA covert actions in the Third World frequently support undemocratic
governments that trample on the rights of their own people. We
missionaries have felt first-hand the effects of such interventions,
which are certainly not in 'the best interests' of the majority
of the citizens of those countries.... Nor do such actions, which
are prohibited by international law and by Article 6 of our own
Constitution, serve 'our best interests,' as you stated. Gangster
methods undermine world order and promote widespread hatred of
the United States."
Warned New World Outlook, published by
agencies of the United Methodist and United Presbyterian churches:
one cannot "defend democracy by destroying it." As long
as U.S. citizens shrug their shoulders, romanticize "spy
thrillers," and pass the buck to politicians, it added, there
will be blood on our hands, "for it is our money and our
government that pay for the regimes that do the killing."
p287
David A. Phillips, the CIA's former chief of Latin-American operations
and a self-appointed public relations spokesman for the agency,
said that "any information-gathering organization would be
derelict if it did not take advantage of the in-depth experience
of American clerics working in the area." He added that CIA
contacts with U.S. missionaries were "to mutual advantage,''
though he failed to specify what advantage a missionary might
gain from collaborating with an agency involved in the arrest
and abuse of priests. Phillips is himself a good example of the
mentality that has alienated and shocked so many religious groups.
His book The Night Watch, a CIA whitewash that does not even try
to refute ex-CIA agent Agee's CIA Diary, makes it evident that
in the CIA no means, however illegal or unpleasant, is ever questioned
if it achieves the desired goal. While admitting reservations
about the CIA's operations in Chile, for example, Phillips justified
the agency's intervention by arguing that orders were orders-after
all, who was going to deny President Nixon if he wanted Allende's
head? There is no room for moral distinctions in that line of
reasoning, and collaboration with the CIA is indeed a reflection
on the integrity and mission of U.S. churchmen, whatever Colby
may say. Phillips' assertion that CIA contacts with missionary
groups have declined in recent years is undoubtedly true, but
that is more because missionaries have learned to be suspicious
than because the CIA has resolved to be scrupulous.
Whereas it sought out U.S. missionaries
primarily for information, the CIA funded and directed local religious
groups in Latin America for all manner of covert activities, from
bombing church buildings to overthrowing constitutionally elected
governments. It ranged the political spectrum from extreme right
to center-left, usually preferred the former, particularly for
dirty tricks.
p292
... the activities of ... Chilean Catholic groups funded by the
CIA, particularly the notorious Fatherland and Liberty goon squads
that formed the guerrilla arm of the extreme Right before and
after Allende's election. A modern version of the Spanish Inquisition-the
Pinochet junta later employed a number of the organization's members
as police interrogators-Fatherland and Liberty received CIA funds
for a variety of purposes, ranging from an attempted military
coup to violent demonstrations at political rallies, which its
militants attended in full riot gear. Its CIA contact was Keith
Wheelock, then secretary of the U. S. Embassy in Santiago. According
to a U. S. Senate investigation that revealed CIA funding of Fatherland
and Liberty, the organization's tactics came to parallel those
of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), but whereas the
armed forces treated MIR's guerrillas as outlaws, they allowed
Fatherland and Liberty to act with impunity. In the waning months
of the Allende government in 1973, Fatherland and Liberty spokesmen
boasted to a U.S. correspondent about their arsenal of weapons,
classes in target practice, and attacks on Allende's followers.
Some of the most bloodthirsty militants were women, many of whom
had participated in the much-publicized "Empty Pots March,"
a supposedly middle-class women's demonstration against the Allende
government that was composed principally of the wives of high-salaried
employees, managers, senior executives, and industrialists. During
the march the women attacked several boys who shouted "Viva
Allende," all but castrating them.
Fatherland and Liberty organized an abortive
CIA-sponsored military coup in June 1973, for which it took public
responsibility in the Santiago press. It also took credit for
70 attacks (of an estimated 290) on government offices, public
works, and Allende newspapers; assassinated Allende's naval aide,
Commodore Arturo Araya; and abetted a truck owners' strike by
strewing miguelitos, three-pronged steel spikes, on the highways.
Two months before Allende's overthrow, Fatherland and Liberty's
second-in-command, industrialist Roberto Thieme, announced that
the organization would unleash a total armed offensive to destroy
the government. After Allende's death, Thieme's followers joined
the junta's security police, DINA, which was responsible for the
torture and death of hundreds of Chileans.
Vigilante Squads
Though dangerous, the Fatherland and Liberty
fanatics were less influential than their counterparts in the
Chilean branch of a right-wing Catholic movement known as Tradition,
Family, and Property (TFP), principally because TFP's militants
had an intellectual base that appealed to a large number of officers
in the armed forces. Founded in the early 1960s by the Brazilian
philosopher Plinio Correa de Oliveira, TFP has followers in most
Latin American countries, including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay,
and l Brazil. While akin in some respects to twentieth-century
fascism, particularly to Mussolini's corporate state, TFP is really
a throwback to eighteenth-century Europe, as yet untouched by
the French Revolution, when the Catholic Church defended aristocratic
privilege as a divine right. Indeed, TFP's insignia is a medieval
lion. Most of its members are from the wealthy, propertied classes
and yearn for an earlier time when the Latin-American Church upheld
the right of a few patrones to rule a mass of peons.
TFP's first commandment is the utter sanctity
of private property, and in countries with progressive bishops,
such as Chile and Brazil, this has forced it into repeated clashes
with the hierarchy on the issue of agrarian reform. The movement's
members tend to be narrow-minded nationalists with a xenophobic
reaction to any suggestion by foreigners that there might be something
wrong with their country, particularly if the government is running
the country for the benefit of the wealthy, as in Pinochet's Chile.
They are also blindly anti-communist, seeing subversion in anything
remotely resembling reform, and are convinced that reds lurk everywhere
in Latin America's new, socially conscious Church. Thus TFP divides
the Catholic Church into "our" Church, which is a class
Church, rooted in another century, and "their" Church,
which is a classless Church and therefore subversive.
While the organization exists primarily
to maintain the privileges of the rich, that goal has been disguised
by jargon about "degenerate political systems," which
TFP claims have caused the Western countries to succumb to Marxist
penetration. Society is to be purified, along the lines of Mussolini's
corporate state, by replacing traditional political parties with
special-interest groups, to which people are assigned according
to job and social class. This is supposed to produce a society
in which everyone knows his place and is happy to keep it. What
TFP doesn't say is that its model of government effectively nullifies
any social or economic gains made by Latin America's middle and
lower classes.
TFP's activities in Chile, Brazil, and
elsewhere are an important part of the CIA story in Latin America,
because its members were the intellectual and financial backers
of military coups supported by the agency. After the military
took over, TFP members and fellow travelers were active in these
regimes' persecution of the Catholic Church, as in the case of
police agent Adolfo Centeno and the smear campaign against priests
and bishops in Uruguay. In some countries-Brazil, for example,
where TFP established a series of training camps near Rio de Janeiro-
members were instructed by the Army and the police, who, in turn,
received military training and political orientation from the
CIA, the Pentagon, and AID. But there were still closer ties:
in Chile and Brazil the evidence points to both financial and
political links between TFP and the CIA in plotting the overthrow
of the Allende and Goulart governments.
When it supported right-wing Catholic
groups, the CIA had principally in mind the political objective
of removing left-wing governments by military intervention, but
one result of the collaboration was to strengthen such organizations
as TFP, which emerged as religious vigilante squads for the military
regimes. Thus the CIA could be accused-and was accused by a number
of prominent Catholic leaders, including Brazil's Archbishop Helder
Camara-of inciting one sector of the Church to attack another.
Moreover, in some countries, Bolivia being one, this collaboration
extended to persecution of U.S. citizens when the CIA provided
military governments and right-wing Catholic organizations with
confidential dossiers on American priests and nuns.
A good example of TFP's connections with
both the CIA and the military is the branch in Chile, which supplied
the Chilean armed forces with a social philosophy-the generals
had none - and a religious basis for the regime's political witch-hunts.
p296
In the last months of the Allende government, TFP, the gremios,
Fatherland and Liberty, and other right-wing opposition groups
merged in a common front. The National Agriculture Society, for
example, was controlled by Fatherland and Liberty and received
CIA funds through an organization called the Congress for Cultural
Liberty. The society, in turn, worked with the Association of
Manufacturers, whose president, Orlando Saenz, was one of the
directors of the TFP-backed gremios as well as a secret leader
of Fatherland and Liberty. A month before the coup Saenz publicly
thanked the president of the Agriculture Society for "the
services lent earlier by you to our cause." Both groups had
close ties with El Mercurio, Santiago's largest newspaper, which
was financed by the CIA and used as an outlet for anti-Allende
propaganda, according to U. S. Senate investigations. They also
shared important Brazilian connections. Fatherland and Liberty
obtained arms from Brazil through a Chilean coffee-importing firm
which brought in, via the port of Valparaiso, crates of guns disguised
as raw material for the manufacture of instant coffee. Saenz was
in close touch with the financial and ideological backers of Brazil's
TFP, which had been in at the kill of Goulart's regime. (Several
of the tactics used in Chile were tested by TFP in Brazil. With
CIA help, TFP sponsored in Sao Paulo a march of several thousand
middle- and upper-class women that was psychologically crucial
to the coup ten days later. Similarly, women's groups sponsored
by TFP and Fatherland and Liberty held their largest demonstration
five days before Allende's overthrow.
U.S. congressional investigations have
established that the CIA spent $13 million to thwart Allende,
but with some exceptions, such as El Mercurio and Fatherland and
Liberty, details of how the money was allocated have not been
revealed. How much the CIA gave the TFP may never be known, but
there are numerous links between the two organizations, particularly
through Fatherland and Liberty, in addition to an established
connection in the campaign to discredit the country's Catholic
Church.
Cry
of the People
Latin
America Watch
Index
of Website
Home Page