Book summary “The Jakarta Method”: summary

Introduction

You live in a world shaped by a hidden history of mass murder. When you look back at the Cold War, official narratives often present a peaceful struggle between democracy and communism that somehow avoided a direct nuclear holocaust. Yet this perceived peace in the First World rested on unimaginable violence inflicted across the Global South. You rarely hear about the systematic slaughter of millions of ordinary people who dared to imagine a more equitable distribution of wealth and power.

Vincent Bevins investigates how the United States and its local allies constructed a global network of extermination. The central idea of The Jakarta Method is that Washington did not merely contain communism through diplomacy or economic pressure; it destroyed democratic leftist movements through targeted state-sponsored terror. When people in developing nations used democratic systems to vote for social change, they collided with a violent imperial reaction. The destruction of the Indonesian left in 1965 became a lethal blueprint that was subsequently exported to Latin America and beyond.

You will trace this dark history from the early covert operations of the Central Intelligence Agency to the brutal military dictatorships that scarred the twentieth century. The book reveals how modernization theory masked brutal authoritarianism and how Operation Condor coordinated cross-border assassinations. You will discover how the word Jakarta became a terrifying codeword among right-wing death squads from South America to Southeast Asia.

• How did the United States shift from supporting fragile democracies to backing military dictatorships?
• What specific mechanisms allowed local intelligence agencies to collaborate across national borders?
• Why did peaceful democratic organizing in countries like Indonesia and Brazil end in genocide?
• How does the legacy of these covert wars continue to haunt global politics and economics today?

1. The Postwar Global Order and US Power

The United States emerged from World War II as the world's dominant power, shaped by a history of settler colonialism, racial oppression, and exceptionalist ideology.

European colonization resulted in between fifty million and seventy million indigenous people killed by European colonization in the Americas. Around 90 percent of the native American population died from colonization. The internal history of the US included slavery, racist terror campaigns, and an apartheid society until well into the twentieth century. You inherit a paradoxical international champion of democracy that was simultaneously rooted in deep racial hierarchy.

Senator Harry S. Truman stated in 1941 that the US should help Russia if Germany was winning, and help Germany if Russia was winning, to let them kill as many as possible.

The Three Worlds

The postwar global order divided nations into three distinct blocs:

• the First World of wealthy capitalist powers;
• the Second World of the Soviet Union and its sphere;
• the Third World of the majority population seeking decolonization.

The First World amassed wealth through historical colonialism. The Second World bore catastrophic human losses while industrializing rapidly under Soviet rule, with at least twenty-seven million Soviet citizens dead by 1945. Seven men for every ten women between ages twenty and twenty-nine died in the Soviet Union by 1945. The Third World encompassed the vast majority of humanity escaping European imperial control and searching for independent paths to development. More than two-thirds of the world's population lived in the Third World in 1950.

Ho Chi Minh appealed to the American Declaration of Independence in 1945 to assert Vietnamese sovereignty, hoping the US would support anti-colonial self-determination rather than French re-conquest.

The Truman Doctrine and Global McCarthyism

President Harry S. Truman launched a fanatical anticommunist crusade, institutionalized by the Truman Doctrine, framing local conflicts as part of a monolithic global Soviet conspiracy. Washington exaggerated the threat of international communism to mobilize domestic support and justify intervention. You find policymakers misinterpreting localized struggles and nationalist movements as direct orders from Moscow, despite Stalin frequently telling foreign communists to stand down.

The Royal Hellenic Air Force dropped napalm to crush leftist guerrillas in Greece during the civil war supported by US intervention. Millions of dollars were funneled by the US to the Christian Democratic Party in Italy to defeat communists in the 1948 elections.

Domestic McCarthyism created a paranoid political climate in the United States that purged dissenting experts and labeled any social reform or non-alignment as treasonous subversion. Driven by political incentives and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the anticommunist consensus established Actual Existing Anticommunism where mild social reforms were viewed as communist window-dressing. HUAC active from 1938 until 1975 treated low membership numbers as proof of devious underground infiltration.

2. Origins of US Covert Intervention

The CIA created a dedicated clandestine apparatus to wage secret warfare against anti-colonial nationalism, establishing operational blueprints in Iran and Guatemala.

Staffed largely by wealthy corporate lawyers and Ivy League graduates with an aggressive imperial worldview, the CIA's clandestine branch repeatedly attempted to infiltrate Soviet-bloc territory. You find that their early operations were systematically compromised by moles and local resistance.

Frank Wisner recruited desperate Ukrainian and Albanian refugees to parachute into communist territory to spark revolts. Almost all of them were captured or killed because British agent Kim Philby was a Soviet mole.

Wisner's Apparatus and Operation Ajax

The newly established Central Intelligence Agency created a dedicated covert operations wing led by elite figures like Frank Wisner to wage secret warfare against global communism. This group became known as Wisner's Weirdos inside the Office of Policy Coordination.

Prompted by British anxieties over oil resources, the CIA engineered a regime-change operation in Iran to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized the country's oil production. This established the Jakarta Axiom where any attempt at economic nationalism was treated as a fatal security threat.

Kermit Roosevelt directed Operation Ajax with a million-dollar budget, hiring operatives to fabricate communist ties for Mossadegh and staging fake attacks on mosques using gangsters posing as Tudeh Party members. This utilized bribery, paid street thugs and circus performers to riot, and funded anti-communist propaganda to reinstall the Shah as dictator. A total of 2,000,000 Iranians died in a famine during the period of British imperial dominance that preceded these struggles.

Overthrowing Jacobo Árbenz

The United States overthrew the democratic government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala primarily because its land reform program threatened the economic interests of the United Fruit Company and set an independent example for Latin America. Washington utilized psychological warfare, fabricated communist infiltration evidence, and organized a mercenary rebel force under Carlos Castillo Armas to force Árbenz to resign, after which a wave of executions followed. Jacobo Árbenz took power in 1951, facing opposition from the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo.

The CIA dropped explosive devices nicknamed sulfatos on Guatemala City solely to cause terror and panic rather than physical damage. This bombing campaign prompted nine-year-old Miguel Ángel Albizures to hide under church pews.

A brutal purge followed the coup:

• 3,000 to 5,000 Árbenz supporters were rounded up and executed by Castillo Armas in the first few months of his government.

3. The Rise of the Third World

Newly decolonized nations gathered at Bandung to forge an independent geopolitical force, while the Indonesian Communist Party built a massive legal movement.

The Spirit of Bandung

You watch the map of global power shift as dozens of new nations emerge from the wreckage of European empires. Leaders from newly independent and colonized territories reject both Washington and Moscow to chart a sovereign path.

On the 18th of April 1775, Paul Revere rode to warn colonists against British troops. President Sukarno evokes that exact date to open the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Indonesia.

Delegates from 29 countries gather in Bandung, representing 1.5 billion people out of the world's 2.8 billion total. This historic summit champions:

• economic sovereignty;
• antiracism;
• non-alignment with superpower blocs;
• total rejection of European imperialism.

Sukarno and Indonesian Syncretism

President Sukarno unites an archipelago where 700 distinct languages are spoken. Born in 1901, he forges a national identity by blending nationalism, Islam, and Marxism.

Sukarno introduces the Pancasila, combining religious belief, social justice, nationalism, and democracy. This ideology is embraced even by the Indonesian Communist Party as an objective social reality.

The Partai Komunis Indonesia grows into a massive political force by operating entirely within the legal democratic system. Led by D. N. Aidit, the party rejects armed struggle and builds a broad mass organization.

In the September 1955 parliamentary elections, the CIA spends 1 million dollars to back the Masjumi party. Despite this American covert interference, the PKI captures 17 percent of the vote to finish in fourth place.

Sakono Praptoyugono, a young villager in Central Java, joins study groups organized by the PKI and the peasant union BTI. He learns Marxist theory while participating in popular cultural programs and sports like soccer.

4. Modernization Theory and Subversion

Washington shifted strategy toward supporting military authoritarianism through modernization theory while attempting to destabilize independent governments.

Training Foreign Officers

US policymakers and social scientists concluded that traditional societies required technocratic, authoritarian military elites to force the transition to modernity. You can see how this perspective shifted strategy from supporting democracy to cultivating foreign military officers.

Indonesian officers were brought to study at the Fort Leavenworth Army base in Kansas. Their numbers increased dramatically:

• zero Indonesian officers training in the US in 1958;
• 41 Indonesian officers training in the US in 1959;
• more than 1,000 Indonesians studying at Fort Leavenworth by 1962.

Through this civic action program, the Pentagon built deep institutional ties with the officers who would later seize power.

Covert Operations Against Sukarno

The CIA attempted to destabilize Indonesia and overthrow President Sukarno by covertly funding and arming regional rebellions on the outer islands. Frank Wisner and the CIA provided 10 million dollars to back anti-government rebels in Sumatra. They deployed pilots to drop weapons and bomb infrastructure in an effort to break up the country using a divide et impera strategy.

CIA pilot Allen Lawrence Pope was shot down over Ambon on May 15, 1958, while bombing civilian and military shipping vessels. This disaster exposed direct US intervention and proved left-wing warnings correct, while Sukarno moved toward guided democracy.

The global anti-colonial project faced parallel threats elsewhere in the world. When Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba appealed to Moscow for help against Western-backed secessionists after receiving inadequate UN support, the CIA and White House ordered his assassination. After a failed attempt to poison him with substances prepared by CIA scientist Sidney Gottlieb, Lumumba was handed over to Katangan rebels, shot three times, and buried in a shallow well.

5. The 1964 Coup in Brazil

Fearing economic nationalism and grassroots reforms, the United States engineered a stealthy military coup in Brazil that inaugurated twenty-five years of dictatorship.

President João Goulart attempted to build political capital through grassroots reforms, alarming conservative elites and US officials who feared Brazil would become the next communist threat. You find that the Brazilian Communist Party had existed since 1922, but the real panic focused on Jango's contemporary policies. Facing a hostile congress and elite, Goulart championed the reformas da base. These reforms included land reform, extending voting rights to illiterate citizens, and permitting lower-ranking soldiers to vote. US Ambassador Lincoln Gordon warned that if Goulart was not stopped, Brazil would become the China of the 1960s.

US President John F. Kennedy met with Ambassador Lincoln Gordon in July 1962 to approve covert funding for anti-Goulart elections and prepare the ground for a military coup.

Jango Goulart and Reforms

The political landscape polarized rapidly around popular demands and elite panic. A minor, disorganized left-wing revolt in November 1935, known as the Intentona, became a foundational myth for the Brazilian military and a potent tool for anti-leftist crackdowns. The government and media had heavily exaggerated the Intentona Comunista into a narrative of treacherous subversion. The military institutionalized an annual commemoration of the event to justify perpetual repression. President Getúlio Vargas used the Intentona and later the fabricated Plano Cohen Jewish-communist plot to declare states of emergency and establish dictatorships.

• 200,000 people attended Jango's rally at Central do Brasil in March 1964.
• 500,000 people attended the conservative March of the Family with God and for Liberty in São Paulo.

The Overthrow of Democracy

The United States engineered a subtle destabilization campaign against Goulart by funding opposition politicians, supporting conservative military factions, and cutting off international credit. Unlike overt interventions in Iran or Guatemala, Washington avoided obvious fingerprints by funneling money through front groups, dispatching deep-cover agents like Tim Hogan, and coordinating with military attaché Vernon Walters. International creditors and US aid dried up to starve the government of funds while local elites organized mass protests. Carlos Lacerda gave an interview to Los Angeles Times correspondent Julian Hart in October 1963 accusing Jango of plotting a coup and openly asking Washington to intervene.

Motivated by fanatical anticommunism, General Olímpio Mourão Filho marched troops on Rio, prompting Goulart to flee to Uruguay. The military junta bypassed the constitution, purged left-wing politicians using an Institutional Act, and installed General Castelo Branco. Exactly 361 lawmakers voted to install General Castelo Branco as president. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon hailed the 1964 coup as the single most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century, beginning 25 years before Brazil held another democratic election.

6. The Road to Tragedy in Indonesia

The assassination of John F. Kennedy and the ascension of Lyndon Johnson marked the end of Washington's diplomatic engagement strategy in Indonesia and a shift toward backing the military. Unlike JFK, who favored continued diplomatic engagement with Sukarno through Ambassador Howard Jones, Lyndon Johnson refused to sign aid determinations and made a deal to support British objectives in Malaysia in exchange for support in Vietnam. Howard Jones retired after Johnson declined to sign economic aid packages, and Ambassador Marshall Green was sent to signal a shift toward regime change.

US and British intelligence agencies actively engaged in covert operations and psychological warfare to provoke a premature communist action that would trigger a military crackdown.

Both American and British officials believed an unsuccessful or premature coup attempt by the PKI would provide the ideal pretext for the Indonesian Army to seize power and reverse political trends. Ambassador Howard Jones told State Department officials behind closed doors that an unsuccessful PKI coup attempt would be the most effective development to reverse political trends.

The September 30th Movement

The September 30th Movement was launched by mid-level military officers to arrest allegedly plotting right-wing generals, but the operation resulted in the unexplained deaths of the captives. Led by figures like Lieutenant Colonel Untung and Colonel Abdul Latief, teams were sent to capture top generals in Jakarta. While General Nasution escaped, six captured generals were later found dead in a well near Halim Air Force Base, leading to immediate political chaos. During the raid on General Nasution's home, his five-year-old daughter was shot and killed, while the targeted generals were brought to Halim Air Force Base.

Suharto's Seizure of Power

General Suharto swiftly crushed the September 30th Movement, took control of the armed forces, and consolidated power by deploying fabricated atrocity propaganda against the left. Suharto bypassed proper command channels, shut down independent media, and propagated false stories alleging that the PKI and women's groups had brutally tortured and mutilated the captured generals during demonic rituals. Major General Suharto was 44 years old when he took command of KOSTRAD and initiated the operation. Suharto's regime printed gruesome photos and stories in the military paper Angkatan Bersendjata and later produced a three-hour propaganda film broadcast annually to cement the official narrative.

7. Operation Annihilation

The Indonesian military launched a structured campaign of mass extermination called Operasi Penumpasan, utilizing civilian paramilitary networks and explicit orders to destroy the Communist Party down to its roots.

Commanders trained at Fort Leavenworth issued directives to local populations instructing them to help eliminate communists or face punishment themselves. The military used paramilitary organizations previously built for the anti-Malaysia Konfrontasi campaign to implement martial law and repress leftists.

Military commander Ishak Djuarsa toured Aceh and announced that communists were infidels who must be destroyed down to their roots, mobilizing crowds to chant for their destruction.

US officials actively assisted the Indonesian military by providing detailed lists of communists and suspected leftists to be tracked down and murdered. Embassy political officer Robert Martens, working with CIA analysts, compiled names of thousands of communists and handed them over to the Indonesian Army so individuals could be systematically eliminated and checked off the lists. This marked at least the third time US officials supplied kill lists to foreign allies, following Guatemala in 1954 and Iraq in 1963.

Robert Martens admitted to helping the army significantly, noting he likely had a lot of blood on his hands.

Proxies and Paramilitaries

While the military and police orchestrated the roundups, regular uniformed officers often did not pull the trigger, relying instead on civilian militias and religious youth wings. The country's largest Muslim organization utilized youth wings and armed wings, such as Ansor and Banser, to carry out murders in Central and East Java. In other areas, suspicious civilians were press-ganged by the military to commit the killings.

The founder of the Banser militia studied Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1964 to learn how to deal with communists and wanted the group's name to sound like Panzer tanks.

Gendered Terror and Propaganda

Women associated with leftist organizations faced extreme gendered violence and torture, directly fueled by state-propagated myths of sexual depravity. Propaganda claimed that members of the Gerwani women's movement danced naked, mutilated military commanders' genitals, and seduced soldiers. Upon arrest, female detainees were treated as subhuman witches, resulting in widespread rape, sexual slavery, and mutilation.

Seventeen-year-old Magdalena, a union worker in Jakarta, was falsely accused of being a Gerwani member, interrogated for days, and raped while in police custody. About 15 percent of the prisoners taken were women.

Between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered. One million more people were herded into concentration camps. The vast majority of those killed or imprisoned were entirely innocent of any crime, targeted solely for their political beliefs or false accusations. For over fifty years, the Indonesian government resisted recording or investigating the atrocities, achieving Washington's geopolitical goal of turning Indonesia into a compliant partner.

An International People's Tribunal in the Netherlands later found the Indonesian military guilty of crimes against humanity, noting the active assistance of the US, UK, and Australia.

8. Global Aftershocks and Regional Shifts

The destruction of the Indonesian left convinced regional revolutionaries to abandon peaceful democratic methods and catalyzed international anticommunist networks.

High-level U.S. officials like Robert McNamara concluded that the domino theory still operated, but the elimination of the world's third-largest communist party in Jakarta meant fewer dominoes remained to fall. This emboldened American policy despite eventual military defeat in Vietnam, where three million Vietnamese people were killed in that war, two million of them civilians. Robert McNamara looked back on his pro-war views and recognized that the defeat of Indonesian communists and China's internal chaos signaled that the regional trend favored the United States.

Studying the collapse of the PKI, leaders of radical Marxist factions concluded that trusting in democratic niceties and failing to arm the populace led directly to massacre. Pol Pot and his followers closely analyzed the downfall of the Indonesian left and resolved that their own movement would rely exclusively on armed struggle rather than mass democratic support.

Exporting Indonesian Methods

The extermination methods perfected in Indonesia were directly exported to Latin America, introducing forced disappearances as a state terror tactic in Guatemala. U.S. officials with experience in Indonesia transferred counterinsurgency experts like John P. Longan to Guatemala, where they established death squads and launched Operation Cleanup, which kidnapped, tortured, and permanently disappeared left-wing figures.

U.S. Ambassador John Gordon Mein requested John P. Longan, who had worked in the Bangkok office that supplied weapons to the Indonesian military, to organize death squads in Guatemala. These squads carried out thirty prominent left-wing figures kidnapped, tortured, and executed in March 1966 using the techniques of Operacion Limpieza and the White Hand.

The Collapse of the Third World Movement

The destruction of the Indonesian left crippled the broader Third World movement, leaving conservative military regimes and reactionary social classes in ascendancy. With progressive leaders deposed, assassinated, or sidelined across Asia and Africa, the Bandung spirit dissolved, allowing perpetrators of state violence to assume prominent international diplomatic roles. Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in a Western-backed military coup, forcing him to conclude that protracted guerrilla warfare was the only remaining path to revolution. By 1971 a murderer like Adam Malik could become President of the UN General Assembly.

The anticommunist victory in Asia catalyzed the creation of formal global networks linking authoritarian states and extremist groups for intelligence and security exchange. Dictatorships and right-wing organizations established permanent international leagues to coordinate counterinsurgency strategies, recruit military cadres, and share operational methods throughout the Cold War. Taiwan and South Korea joined forces to found the World Anti-Communist League, or WACL, bringing together moderate conservatives and former fascist actors to hold annual global conferences.

9. Jakarta Comes to Latin America

South American dictatorships adopted the Indonesian model of mass murder, forming Operation Condor to hunt down political opponents across national borders.

The Destabilization of Chile

Salvador Allende attempted a peaceful, democratic la vía Chilena to socialism. The US government and domestic right-wing forces immediately conspired to sabotage his economy and destabilize his government.

Following Allende's narrow electoral victory, President Richard Nixon made $10,000,000 available to stop Allende and ordered the CIA to make the economy scream. The CIA operated on two tracks, utilizing political warfare and funding right-wing terrorists.

René Schneider, the commander in chief of Chile's Armed Forces who adhered to the constitutionalist Schneider Doctrine that the military should stay out of politics, was murdered in a botched CIA-backed kidnapping attempt meant to trigger a coup.

Right-wing extremists in Chile adopted the Indonesian massacres as an explicit terror tactic and death threat against the left. You could see walls plastered and postcards mailed warning that Yakarta viene or Jakarta is coming.

The term Jakarta was transformed from a symbol of Third World independent development into a synonym for state-organized mass murder. Lawyer Carmen Hertz and her husband Carlos Berger received threatening postcards featuring the Pátria y Libertad spider logo that read Jakarta is Coming before Carlos was ultimately murdered following the 1973 coup. Leaked sailor testimonies revealed that a Chilean Jakarta Plan planned for ten thousand people to be killed. Pinochet's regime eventually killed three thousand people, mostly in the early days.

Operation Condor Network

US-backed South American dictatorships formed an international extermination network known as Operation Condor to hunt down and assassinate political opponents across national borders. Initiated in November 1975 at a meeting hosted by Chile's secret police, the alliance linked intelligence agencies from Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay to coordinate the elimination of dissidents worldwide.

Pinochet's secret police, known as DINA, utilized the network to murder former Chilean army chief Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires in September 1974. The military dictatorships in Brazil and Indonesia served as a successful model for Washington's foreign interventions by integrating into the Western capitalist system while utilizing violent anticommunist dissent.

Both regimes experienced GDP growth that benefited a tiny elite, while stable local rulers provided legitimacy without looking like direct US impositions. In Indonesia, economic advisers were known as the Berkeley Mafia, whereas in Brazil, the coup was aided by the US-funded Research and Social Studies Institute, known as IPES, under Modernization Theory. Young Barack Obama's stepfather, Lolo, experienced the harsh realities of the Indonesian crony capitalist system, noting that survival required attaching oneself to a corrupt apparatus or falling into poverty.

10. Scorched Earth and Genocide

The Jakarta playbook was applied in East Timor and Central America, resulting in genocidal campaigns against indigenous populations under the guise of counterinsurgency.

Invasion of East Timor

Suharto applied his domestic anticommunist playbook to annex East Timor, leading to massive civilian casualties with US backing. When East Timor declared independence with a left-leaning national liberation movement called FRETILIN, Indonesia invaded under the pretext of stopping communism on its borders. Washington provided tacit approval, and Indonesian forces slaughtered a massive portion of the population.

Suharto launched Operation Lotus or Operasi Seroja in December 1975. This military action resulted in the annihilation of up to a third of East Timor's population while Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were in the White House.

From 1975 to 1979, up to three hundred thousand people were killed by the Indonesian Armed Forces in East Timor.

The Guatemalan Genocide

The Guatemalan military executed a genocidal campaign against Mayan communities under the strategic doctrine of draining the sea to catch the fish. Under generals like Efraín Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan army implemented scorched-earth tactics, burning villages and forcing survivors into model villages or military militias. These actions were justified through religious zeal that equated communism with atheism and demonic forces.

In the remote village of Ilom, soldiers forced residents into the town square in March 1982. They systematically executed men in front of the schoolhouse and burned homes.

General Efraín Ríos Montt took power in a military coup on March 23, 1982. From 1978 to 1983, the Guatemalan military killed two hundred thousand people.

Historical analysis shows that the human cost of US-backed violence in Latin America vastly exceeded that of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Using data from Freedom House, historians concluded that state-sponsored and allied repression across Latin America during the Cold War produced a massive cumulative death toll.

Historian John Coatsworth compiled figures showing that victims of US-backed violence in Latin America from 1960 to 1990 vastly surpassed those killed in the Soviet bloc over the same period.

11. The Legacy of the Anticommunist Crusade

11. The Legacy of the Anticommunist Crusade

The Cold War ended with the total victory of First World capitalism over the Third World, leaving global economic inequality as cavernous as it was in 1955.

While technological advances improved absolute material conditions, the structural gap between wealthy former imperial powers and developing nations remained virtually unchanged. Decades of US interventions reinforced this persistent divide. Winarso, head of the Indonesian survivor group Sekretariat Bersama '65, noted that US-led capitalism won globally because Washington and its allies physically eliminated the left. The US economy grew to be twenty times larger than Indonesia's. Brazil's gross domestic product per capita sat at less than one-sixth of the US number.

Washington's anticommunist crusade shaped the modern world in five major ways.

• Unresolved national trauma
• Destruction of peaceful political alternatives
• Deformed political regimes under crony capitalism
• A brutalized global socialist movement
• Persistent fanatical anticommunism

Left-wing groups globally abandoned peaceful democratic approaches after observing the total annihilation of unarmed mass parties like Indonesia's PKI without consequences for the murderers.

The Global Extermination Network

US-backed anticommunist mass extermination programs operated across at least twenty-two countries, serving as an interconnected engine for the consolidation of global American power.

Though lacking a single master control room, regimes learned torture and elimination methods from one another. The Indonesian model frequently served as a template and metaphor. Vincent Bevins documents how local militaries carried out purposeful executions of dissidents and civilians in twenty-two countries, including Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, and Guatemala. Eleven countries were linked indirectly to the metaphor "Jakarta" for mass killing, while Operação Jacarta inspired specific operations abroad.

12. Surviving and Remembering

Survivors of the massacres endure lifelong stigma and institutional denial while contemporary political figures channel the violent ghosts of military dictatorships.

Lifelong Stigma and Tourism Erasure

You find that the physical spaces of mass murder often become sanitized foundations for modern consumption. The lucrative tourism industry in Bali was built directly upon the erasure of the 1965 mass murder of local communists. Communal land was expropriated and cleared of its population through mass slaughter. This enabled foreign investors to build luxury resorts over the killing sites while keeping tourists completely ignorant. Ngurah Termana, a founding member of the 1965 Garden collective, explained that the violent purge of communists was a prerequisite for foreign capital and tourism development in Bali.

Survivors of the 1965 Indonesian massacres remain marked for life as evil. They endure profound social isolation, poverty, and institutional denial. Accusations of communism functioned as a permanent hereditary stain, stripping victims of community ties, state pensions, and basic human dignity. Magdalena, an elderly survivor living in Solo, Central Java, survives in extreme poverty on a tiny monthly allowance and rice rations from a church. Her community ties were permanently severed by her imprisonment. She lives on two hundred thousand Indonesian rupiah per month, equal to about fourteen US dollars.

American Amnesia

The rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil represents the direct political resurgence of the ultra-right military faction that institutionalized torture and mass violence in the 1970s. Bolsonaro openly praised notorious military torturers like Brilhante Ustra and channeled the violent anticommunist paranoia of Operação Jacarta. He once suggested that thirty thousand people should be killed in a civil war to change Brazil. Ing Giok Tan, an Indonesian-born activist in São Paulo, actively marched against Bolsonaro in 2018 while fighting to preserve democracy against the return of dictatorship-era ideology.

United States foreign policy elites exhibit a deep historical amnesia regarding the destructive global consequences of their past interventions. While citizens in victimized nations are forced to live with the daily consequences of US covert actions, American officials often dismiss or fail to remember their role in generating global turmoil. Frank Wisner Jr., a retired US ambassador and son of a key CIA official, acknowledged in an interview with the author that the United States is the land of the great amnesiac with a record of indifference to the world.

Conclusion

You now understand that the modern global order was built on a foundation of hidden mass violence. The United States and its domestic allies systematically destroyed democratic alternatives across the Global South to secure economic dominance and geopolitical control. When you look at the extreme inequality of the world today, you are seeing the direct structural result of the Jakarta method. Millions of lives and countless democratic experiments were sacrificed to ensure that capital could flow freely without interference from the left.

To confront this legacy honestly, you must adopt several practical rules for interpreting modern history and international politics:

1. Reject the official narrative that the Cold War was a peaceful contest of ideas where the United States simply defended freedom.
2. Recognize that mass violence and state terror were frequently deployed as rational policy choices to crush popular democratic movements.
3. Trace contemporary inequalities, militarized police forces, and authoritarian regimes back to their mid-century counterinsurgency blueprints.
4. Listen to the survivors and local historians who keep the memory of state-sponsored atrocities alive against institutional denial.
5. Question the neutrality of economic development theories that prioritize corporate integration over human welfare and popular sovereignty.

The Cold War is often remembered in the West as a time of peaceful triumph and inevitable progress. In the Global South, it was experienced as an era of terror, localized genocides, and stolen futures. By confronting the full reality of Operation Jakarta and Operation Condor, you strip away the comforting myths of empire. You see the true cost of global hegemony and understand why so many societies remain fractured by historical trauma. Only by remembering these hidden crimes can you begin to imagine a genuinely democratic future free from the shadow of Cold War violence.

10 Key Ideas

1. The peaceful First World order rested on a hidden history of systematic violence and state-sponsored terror inflicted across the Global South.
2. The CIA established early operational blueprints in Iran and Guatemala by engineering regime changes to protect corporate interests and eliminate economic nationalism.
3. Washington shifted strategy toward supporting military authoritarianism through modernization theory to cultivate foreign officers and destabilize independent governments.
4. The United States engineered a stealthy military coup in Brazil in 1964 to overthrow President João Goulart and inaugurate twenty-five years of dictatorship.
5. US and British intelligence agencies provoked a premature communist action in Indonesia that enabled General Suharto to seize power and launch a mass extermination program.
6. The Indonesian military utilized civilian paramilitary networks and explicit kill lists provided by US officials to slaughter up to one million people.
7. The total destruction of the Indonesian left convinced regional revolutionaries to abandon peaceful democratic methods in favor of armed struggle.
8. South American dictatorships adopted the Indonesian model of mass murder by forming Operation Condor to coordinate cross-border assassinations and political disappearances.
9. The Guatemalan military executed a genocidal campaign of scorched-earth tactics against Mayan communities under the strategic guise of counterinsurgency.
10. The Cold War ended with the total victory of First World capitalism over the Third World, leaving global economic inequality as cavernous as it was in 1955.