Latin America

Latin America, in the vault, is first the Rockefeller hemisphere. Nelson Rockefeller, a director of Creole Petroleum in Venezuela from 1935, was named Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in 1940 to "remove German and British commercial and cultural influence from Latin America and replace it with American hegemony"; his office "became the first official US government propaganda operation, producing radio programs broadcast throughout Latin America, subsidizing 1,200 newspaper publishers dependent on CIAA-controlled newsprint shipments," and "displacing German airlines from Colombia, Bolivia, and Brazil." At Chapultepec in 1945 he "assembled his 'Latin American Junta': Galo Plaza of Ecuador, Alberto Lleras Camargo of Colombia, and Mexico's Ezequiel Padilla," and the Act of Chapultepec "killed 180 Latin American resolutions promoting industrialization and protective tariffs, replacing them with an open-door policy for American corporate investment"; at San Francisco Plaza and Lleras Camargo delivered "the votes of the Latin American bloc." Afterward he "created two private vehicles for Latin American penetration," IBEC and the AIA, and in 1969 his mission for Nixon, "Quality of Life in the Americas," "recommended reversing recent trends to reduce security assistance to Latin American military governments." His brother David Rockefeller "built Chase Manhattan Bank into the dominant US financial institution in Latin America," founded the Council of the Americas in 1963 and the Business Group for Latin America "at the express request of President Kennedy," on whose executive committee sat Donald Kendall of PepsiCo; John McCone staffed Johnson's Latin America apparatus with men "attuned to the prerogatives of American business," and Dean Rusk "handled the diplomacy of the Cold War interventions."¹

The Agencies

Adolf Berle, assistant secretary of state from 1938, "had charge of intelligence coordination for the State Department, working with the FBI in Latin America," whose Special Intelligence Service placed "over 340 undercover agents across the region" as legal attachés by 1942; the overthrow of Vargas in 1945 is "characterized in Brazilian historical scholarship as Latin America's first Cold War coup." J.C. King was "chief of clandestine activities for the Western Hemisphere at the Central Intelligence Agency from 1947 through 1964," arguing of Cuba that "a far-left dictatorship, which if allowed to remain will encourage similar actions against U.S. holdings in other Latin American countries"; Tom Clines served under Shackley in the division from 1972 to 1976, "involved in operations in Chile"; Bruce Berckmans of Wackenhut offered the agency "many useful contacts especially in Latin America." Paul Helliwell's Castle Bank "was the conduit for millions of dollars earmarked by the CIA for the funding of clandestine operations against Cuba and for other covert intelligence operations directed at countries in Latin America and the Far East." Sidney Gottlieb's searches ran "through the jungles of Latin America for toxic leaves and barks." Ambassador Edward Korry called Salvador Allende's copper policy "a conscious challenge to the tradition of US defense of its major business interests in Latin America," and Hal Hendrix and Robert Berrellez, ITT's public relations men for the region, were both former Latin America correspondents. Jimmy Carter's human rights policy "reportedly distanced the CIA under Stansfield Turner from any death-squad interdiction."²

Labor, Church and Money

Serafino Romualdi, "the AFL-CIO's Inter-American representative for over two decades," built the AIFLD "into the CIA's principal labor-movement instrument in Latin America," Philip Agee naming him "the principal CIA agent for labor operations in Latin America"; Andrew McLellan, its vice president, organized Brazilian labor operatives before the 1964 coup and travelled with Rockefeller's 1969 mission to "nineteen Latin American countries"; Berent Friele formed "the operational core of Rockefeller's wartime and postwar Latin American strategy." William Cameron Townsend's Summer Institute of Linguistics was helped into South America by Plaza and Lleras Camargo, and Pope John Paul II mounted "active resistance to liberation theology in Latin America." Amjad Awan was BCCI's "marketing manager for Latin America and the Caribbean" and Noriega's banker; Roberto Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano "had subsidiaries and affiliates across Latin America"; Jes Staley "spent the 1980s in the bank's Latin America division" at Morgan; Jim Himes studied Latin America at Oxford and worked it at Goldman Sachs. Thomas Dowling's Latin America Strategic Studies Institute was funded through the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America, "later described by congressional investigators as an illegal CIA-run domestic propaganda mill." Che Guevara concluded from his journeys "that the United States would never permit peaceful reformist change in Latin America that threatened American corporate or strategic interests"; Jonathan Kwitny argued from his reporting that "the logic of anti-Communist intervention had systematically damaged American interests." Angela Dellafiora was "a civilian analyst on Latin America at INSCOM" before joining the remote-viewing unit.³