Thy Will Be Done, The Conquest of the Amazon:
http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/feb99/1127.html
NELSON ROCKEFELLER and Evangelism in the Age of Oil
by Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett
Harper Collins, 1995. 960 pages
reviewed by Carmelo Ruiz
Carmelo Ruiz is a Puerto Rican journalist and research associate at the
institute for Social Ecology, email ise@ igc.apc.org at Goddard College,
Vermont.
Connect: ernail: carrneloruiz@hotmailcom
In 1976, reporters Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett traveled to Brazil as
part of a journalistic team to write stories about the work of Christian
missionaries in the Amazon basin. High on Colby and Dennett's list of
priorities was to learn about a mysterious missionary organization called
the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). This outfit, also known as the
Wycliffe Bible Translators, had gotten kudos from both conservatives and
liberals for translating the Bible into hundreds of indigenous languages in
Central and South America and helping native peoples cope with the
intrusion of Western civilization into their lives.
However, Colby and Dennett had heard of a darker side to SIL. Numerous
critics had alleged that SIL was the vanguard of the destruction of both
the rainforests and their native inhabitants. They had heard from Latin
American acquaintances that SIL was, in military fashion, a scouting party
that surveyed the Amazonian hinterlands for potential sources of opposition
to natural resource exploitation (read cattle ranching, clearcutting and
strip mining) among native peoples and that it employed a virulent brand of
Christian fundamentalism that relied on linguistics to undermine the social
cohesion of aboriginal communities and accelerate their assimilation into
Western culture. In addition to all this, numerous articles in the Latin
American press accused 511. of being funded by the American intelligence
community.
That last charge sounded particularly believable, since the authors' trip
took place in the wake of recent revelations by the Church Committee of the
US Senate, which investigated the activities of US intelligence agencies.
It bears mentioning that Colby was by then no stranger to corporate and
political intrigue. In 19 74, writing as Gerard Colby Zilg, he published
Dupont: Behind the Nylon Curtain, a 600+ page tome that narrated the Dupont
family's corrupt history, from its profiteering on gunpowder sales to its
manufacture of ozone-depleting gases. However, don't expect to see it in
bookstores. When a Dupont PR representative said the book was scurrilous
and actionable, publisher Prentice Hall was intimidated into letting Dupont
go out of print. (In 1984, an expanded and updated 900 page-long edition of
the book was published, which included, among other things, the Dupont's
little-known connection to the Nicaraguan contras. Unfortunately, it met
the same fate as the previous edition.)
Dennett was also a veteran journalist, having recently been stationed in
Beirut, where she covered the civil war then raging in Lebanon. The authors
found SIL a veritable empire whose missionary activities spanned every
country in the Amazon basin, with a network of bases that look more like
picket-fenced American suburbia than the frontier outposts for the global
economy that they actually are. SIL even has its own air force and
communications system, the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS), which
permits it to act virtually independently from the governments of the
countries where it operates. After years of research, Colby and Dennett
found a number of irrefutable links between SIL and US counterinsurgency
operations. Among these, SIL agressively denied that the native peoples of
Brazil and Guatemala were being slaughtered by the military regimes of
their countries; it allowed its base in the Ecuadoran Amazon to be used by
Green Berets who were combing the Western Amazon for signs of armed
insurgency; and it assisted the Peruvian air force, which had napalmed the
Mayoruna and Campa Indians.
If Colby and Dennett had limited themselves to just exposing SIL, Thy Will
be Done would still have been a formidable journalistic achievement. But
the authors went on to research the American institutions, private and
governmental, that provided support for SIL's mission. These included
Standard Oil of New Jersey; the Pew family, creators of the Sun Oil Company
(Sunoco) and the Pew Charitable Trusts, the US Agency for International
Development, and the US military through its donations of surplus military
equipment. Although they could find no smoking gun directly linking the CIA
to SIL, they did find several circumstantial and indirect links, such as
financial support from a foundation that was later exposed as a CIA front
and the fact that JAARS's top pilot, Lawrence Montgomery, was on the
Agency's payroll.
In the course of their investigation, the authors learned that SIL had a
big debt to institutions and individuals associated with the Rockefell
