Where the American policy of backing violent insurgents started

The Cold War was a sprawling, decades-long global imperial campaign advancing American-style capitalism. It worked, at least for those who orchestrated it. Anywhere any unaligned effort, and certainly any movement connected toward the Soviet communistic system, faced direct or indirect American military and special forces. 

Little known strategies from Indonesia and Brazil in the 1960s, as poorly known as they are, became models exported worldwide. That’s from The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, a 2020 book by American journalist Vincent Bevins.

As he writes: “I am not saying that the United States won the Cold War because of mass murder. The Cold War ended mostly because of the internal contradiction of Soviet communism, and the fact that its leaders in Russia accidentally destroyed their own state. I do want to claim that this loose network of extermination programs, organized, and justified by anti-communist principles, was such an important part of the US victory that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today.”

Below I share notes from the book for my future reference.

My notes:

• The book argues the American model was developed most prominently in Brazil and Indonesia in the mid 1960s.
• The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) are acclaimed companion documentaries directed by Joshua Oppenheimer exploring the 1965–66 Indonesian genocide. The Act of Killing features unrepentant perpetrators reenacting their crimes, while The Look of Silence follows a survivor confronting his brother’s killers.
• 50-70m Native Americans died or were killed (as documented elsewhere), enough that it changed the temperature of the planet
• Truman used Greece to launch the anti-communist Cold War, tied to a belief that communist revolutionaries anywhere would agitate for revolution under Soviet leadership wherever they were
• Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848) introduced a theory: capitalism overthrew feudalism and then working class would overthrow capitalists
• Voice of America: Sinatra and others pressure Western Europe to vote against communists
• Historian Odd Arne Westad characterizes the early “Jakarta axiom” as a brief U.S. approach in the late 1940s and early 1950s of accepting non-aligned, independent, and sometimes socialist-leaning, Third World nations. This approach aimed to engage countries that viewed Washington as aligned with European colonial powers, while these nations cautiously engaged the Soviet Union to secure alternatives for development and protection
• The term “Third World” was coined by French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952, originally referencing the “Third Estate” of the French Revolution to denote a “third and final act” of development, not third-rate. It described nations that were non-aligned duri ng the Cold War and aimed for a new revolutionary path, rather than merely indicating economic backwardness.
• From its founding the CIA has two divisions: intelligence gathering (like private news service for the president), and covert action 
• Revolutions were exposed to ideas in the west that were not allowed in the colonies: Ho Chi Minh in Paris, Indonesia independence sparked in holland
• CIA action in Iran, Guatemala and notably Congo , Cuba — JFK ordered South Vietnam President assassination — Cambodia and Chile and Thailand 
• 1955 Bandung third world conference: The 1955 Bandung Conference, held April 18–24 in Indonesia, was a landmark summit of 29 Asian and African nations aiming to promote Afro-Asian economic/cultural cooperation and oppose colonialism. Co-sponsored by Burma, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ceylon, it pioneered the Non-Aligned Movement and the “Third World” concept.
• Sukarno (Indonesia), Jawaharlal Nehru (India), and Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt), alongside Josip Broz Tito (Yugoslavia) and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), were the key founding leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Established formally in 1961, this alliance aimed to provide a neutral path for newly independent nations, avoiding alignment with either the USA or the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
• Richard Wright found a 1949 Indonesian language instruction book for colonial officials that had no questions or discussions, just phrases of command and accusation (“gardener, sweep the garden”)
• CIA distributed books to Indonesia (An extension of the CIA Book Club)
• The CIA filmed a porno to discredit Sukarno, by pretending the Soviets had done so
• Brazil also default open to the U.S. but regularly clashed, including the U.S. insistence that American oil companies have access — another  hypocrisy of a kind of empire
• JFK quieter tactics led to more anonymous Brazil assassination (after his own)
• The British decolonization of Malaya (1945–1963) involved complex political restructuring, often characterized as a “divide and rule” strategy, that managed ethnic tensions and aimed to counter communist influence. While the British did not fracture the Malay people into multiple countries, they separated Singapore from the mainland and later created the Malaysia federation (1963) by incorporating distinct, geographically separate territories (Sabah, Sarawak) to manage ethnic and political demographics
• The collapse of Howard P. Jones’s diplomacy in Indonesia (1958–1965) marked the failure of a long-term, personal approach to keeping Indonesia aligned with the West, ending in a dramatic deterioration of U.S.-Indonesian relations. Despite Jones developing a close personal friendship with President Sukarno, his policies could not overcome Indonesia’s increasing alignment with Communist powers and, specifically, its aggressive Konfrontasi (Confrontation) against Malaysia.
• Gulf of Tonkin and then former ally Sukarno sides with Vietnam “a year of living dangerously”
• The September 30 Movement (G30S) in 1965 was a failed coup against Indonesian President Sukarno, orchestrated by left-wing officers and the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). It saw six senior generals killed, but Suharto, then a major general, escaped, crushed the coup, and used the chaos to purge the PKI, shift power to the army, and eventually oust Sukarno, ushering in his 32-year authoritarian “New Order” regime
• The anti-communist massacres in Bali, part of the broader Indonesian killings of 1965–66, intensified significantly in early January 1966 following the arrival of Java-based army units. While massacres started in October 1965 elsewhere, the violence in Bali escalated intensely through the spring of 1966, leading to the deaths of roughly 80,000 people, about 5% of the island’s population
• “Run amok” comes from Malay and was used by western press reporting military line of violent communist outburst being put down by Suharto
• Between 1965 and 1966, the Indonesian military and local militias killed an estimated 500,000 to over 1 million people in a state-sanctioned anti-communist purge, with significant logistical and intelligence support from the U.S. government, CIA, and allies.
• “The annihilation of the world’s third-largest communist party, the fall of the founder of the Third World movement, and the rise of a fanatically anticommunist military dictatorship violently rocked Indonesia, setting off a tsunami that reached almost every corner of the globe.”
• Indonesia became a “quiet compliant partner” for the U.S., which as the biggest domino in Southeast Asia meant Vietnam war was lower stakes
• As an example of perceived hypocrisy, in post-war Germany, the US government wiped out all public and private debt as they created the new Deutschmark. How would anti-American or communist leaders in the third world be considered if they tried the same thing after a war of independence?
• “ Brazil slid towards state terror slowly”
• Paulo Coelho, the renowned Brazilian author of The Alchemist, was arrested and tortured in 1974 by the Brazilian military dictatorship. He was targeted for his work as a songwriter and his perceived involvement in subversive activities against the regime, spending time in a detention center where he faced physical abuse and threats
• In 1970, U.S. officials, including President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, orchestrated a CIA-backed plot to prevent socialist Salvador Allende’s inauguration. Chilean Army Chief General René Schneider, who upheld constitutional doctrine to allow the inauguration, was targeted for kidnapping and fatally shot on October 22, 1970. This failed coup attempt caused severe political backlash, but ultimately paved the way for Pinochet’s later military dictatorship.
• Communist party of Sudan was next to be annihilated after Indonesia and Iraq
• Castro’s 1953 speech la historia me absolvera: History Will Absolve Me is the title of a two-hour speech made by Fidel Castro on 16 October 1953. Castro made the speech in his own defense in court against the charges brought against him after he led an attack on the Moncada Barracks in Cuba. The speech later became the manifesto of his 26th of July Movement
• Operation Jakarta in Brazil
• On January 7, 1979, Vietnamese forces and Cambodian defectors captured Phnom Penh, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge regime. This ended Pol Pot’s brutal four-year rule, which caused over 1.7 million deaths. The victory installed a pro-Vietnamese government, while the Khmer Rouge retreated to the Thai border to launch a prolonged, decade-long resistance.
• The Watergate scandal (1972–1974) and the Church Committee investigations (1975–1976) directly shaped the political landscape that Jimmy Carter inherited, acting as a significant brake on executive power and fundamentally altering how his administration approached intelligence and government oversight. The deep distrust of government spawned by these investigations, which revealed illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens and assassination plots, compelled the Carter administration to adopt a more restricted, transparent, and ethically focused approach.
• Washington Post and New York Times brought important light on the “furnace massacre”: The 1978 Panzós massacre was a mass killing of Q’eqchi’ Maya peasants by the Guatemalan army on May 29, 1978, in Panzós, Alta Verapaz. Roughly 34 to over 100 people were killed—including women and children—when soldiers opened fire on a peaceful protest over land rights and intimidation.
• The clash had a song cheering the Sandinistas
• The Reagan administration, in the 1980s, did indeed provide training, funds, and weapons to the Contras, a collection of right-wing rebel groups attempting to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. This action was a key component of the “Reagan Doctrine,” which aimed to counter Soviet influence and support anti-communist insurgents around the world
• Guatemala anti communist genocide: 200k from 1978-1983
• General Efraín Ríos Montt, who served as the military dictator of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983: “the guerilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.”
• Did China grow economically because it accepted capitalism or because it remained more independent than others? It is still average income GDP per head but others in the third world have stagnated. The gap is similar between rich and poor as at Bandung conference
• “I am not saying that the United States won the Cold War because of mass murder. The Cold War ended mostly because of the internal contradiction of Soviet communism, and the fact that its leaders in Russia accidentally destroyed their own state. I do want to claim that this loose network of extermination programs, organized, and justified by anti-communist principles, was such an important part of the US victory that the violence profoundly shaped the world we live in today.”
• Odd Arne Westad: the Cold War was a global circumstance In which the vast majority of the worlds countries moved beyond direct colonial rule
• Chile and Argentina did some reconciliation, Brazil did less and Indonesia did none
• South Koreans and Taiwan the only third world to first world transition and mostly for cold world strategy
• After the Cold War, two paths emerged: American style advanced capitalist countries or resource exporting crony capitalist shaped by anti communism 
• “The major losers of the 20th century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence of a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported, what the rich country said rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.” Of the balance between armed and nonviolent movements in Guatemala, Indonesia and Chile 
• Unlike the Killing Fields Museum of Cambodia, “few people who come to Bali are aware that a huge part of the local population was slaughtered right underneath their beach chairs.”