Jakarta Is Coming

 

Some men just don’t know when to quit. You’ve met one. Maybe you are one.

Take Prabowo Subianto. He lost in 2009. He lost in 2014. He lost in 2019. Three times the voters looked him over and said no thanks, and three times he picked himself up, dusted off his knees, and went back to the well. In 2024 the well finally gave him what he wanted.

Now take Salvador Allende, who ran for the presidency of Chile in 1952 and lost. Ran in 1958 and lost. Ran in 1964 and lost. Three strikes, and any sensible man would have been out. But in 1970 he stood at the plate a fourth time, backed by the Popular Unity coalition, an alliance of left-wing parties that included the Socialists, the Communists, the Radicals, the Social Democrats, Independent Popular Action, and MAPU. And this time he connected.

That’s where the resemblance ends. Where it ends is the interesting part, and it’s a lot darker than a ballot box.

---

Allende was supposed to have red blood, as the phrase went. He was the first avowed Marxist to be elected president in a liberal democracy in South America. Prabowo carries the other kind, the blue-blooded, silver-spoon kind inherited from his late father, Soemitro Djojohadikusumo. And the Advanced Indonesia Coalition that carried the Prabowo-Gibran ticket? You’d be hard pressed to find a drop of Allende’s politics in that crowd.

So, different men, different blood, different coalitions. The biggest difference of all was how it ended.

Allende’s story ended with a body on a palace floor. Prabowo’s is still being written from a comfortable chair, in a comfortable house, with the fruits of all that patient campaigning laid out on the table in front of him.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to Santiago, back to 1970, when the people in Washington watched the Chilean election results come in and felt something cold crawl up the backs of their necks.

Chile was red. Too red. The people who ran America in those days had a bone-deep belief in the domino theory, the idea that when one country falls to communism, its neighbors go over next, tick, tick, tick. They believed it the way some folks believe in ghosts: not because they’d seen one, but because the idea of it kept them up nights.

When the coup finally came on September 11, 1973, the American hand in it was like thallium. Tasteless. Odorless. You’d never know it was in the glass. But even a little is enough to kill you.

---

The man who stepped into the presidency afterward was General Augusto Pinochet, commander-in-chief of the army, the beneficiary of American money and American goodwill. Allende himself was dead, and how he died is a thing people still argue about. The junta’s official version said he put a gun to himself. Argument over that has never entirely gone away.

What came after was worse. Tens of thousands of Allende’s supporters were killed or simply vanished. That’s the word they use, and it should make your skin crawl, because it means someone got up one morning, kissed their family goodbye, and never came home. Santiago’s stadium became a place of horror, a holding pen and then a graveyard. Thousands were herded in. By some accounts at least five thousand were rounded up and shot.

It was savage. If you know Indonesian history, it should have a terrible familiarity, because it rhymes with 1965.

And that, I think, is the thing the writer of this piece wants you to feel: it wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t new.

---

The CIA, the long arm of the American government, had done this kind of work before. In Indonesia it had its friends, a group of economists the historian Bradley Simpson wrote about in Economists with Guns (2008, p. 20) and called the Berkeley Mafia. They’d gotten their educations at the University of California through anti-communist brokers. When Soeharto took charge, they were handed official posts, like gifts under a Christmas tree.

Brazil had a version of the same story. In 1964 there was a coup in Brasília, and behind it stood a conspiracy that funded the Institute for Social Research and Studies, IPES, which went right on operating under the dictatorship until 1972. Its job was to produce anti-communist thinkers the way a factory produces widgets. The target was Juscelino Kubitschek, and the machine was built to unseat him.

Washington wanted the people of Latin America afraid. American philanthropic money paid for it. The enemy had a single name: communism.

And at the top of that pyramid sat Henry Kissinger, national security adviser to President Nixon. He approved $300,000 to be used against Allende. In a “Memorandum for the Record” dated Washington, June 27, 1970, he said this:

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

Read that again. Slowly. Think about the arrogance in it. The irresponsibility of its own people. These were people who had voted. That was their offense.

---

Tim Weiner, in Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2008, pp. 308–310), tells how Kissinger’s intelligence circle fed propaganda to prominent journalists. They even got a cover story into Time magazine, written in the thick smoke of communist menace. Anti-communism wasn’t a position in those days. It was the weather.

In Chile the CIA leaned hard on El Mercurio, a right-wing paper that took the agency’s money. It paid for posters, for pamphlets, for slogans painted on walls all over the city.

And still it wasn’t enough. Allende’s coalition won, if narrowly. Not long afterward El Mercurio ran a big special report on Brazil under a headline that sounds, at first blush, almost like a travel brochure:

“Brazil—Tomorrow Is Today.”

But read it again, the way you’d read a note slid under your door at 3 AM. It wasn’t about Brazil. It was a threat wearing a necktie. It cast Chilean communism as a ghost, a thing too terrifying to be allowed a future, and the optimism in it was the optimism of the hunter who has already picked out the spot on the wall where the head will hang. Today, capitalism wins. Tomorrow, Brazil is Chile.

---

Here is the part where the story gets a second set of eyes watching it from across the border.

Over the following months, Brazil’s generals started working out ways to contain socialism in Chile, what the Chileans called la vía chilena, “the Chilean road.” At times they seemed to hate it even more than the Americans did.

Vincent Bevins writes in The Jakarta Method (2020, p. 177) that Brazil pushed Washington to get more involved in South American affairs. Brazil wanted Chile to “align the same way” it had. Médici, the Brazilian dictator, had by then done plenty of work in neighboring countries to prop up right-wing strongmen. Bevins puts it plainly:

“Médici’s dictatorship also helped overthrow the government in Bolivia and install the right-wing General Hugo Banzer as dictator. Evidence shows that both Brasília and Washington provided funds and assistance for that August coup.”

Uruguay got the same treatment. When it looked as though the leftist Frente Amplio might win, Brazilian intelligence operatives quietly drifted to the border and quietly disrupted the process, and the right-wing Colorado Party kept its seat.

Meanwhile, in Washington, a president sat down after Allende’s victory and wrote a note to his CIA director, Richard Helms. You can find it quoted in The Pinochet File (2003, p. 36):

“Probably only 1 chance in 10, but save Chile!… $10,000,000 available, more if necessary… [find] the best men we have… make the economy scream.”

Make the economy scream. I’ve read a lot of horror in my time. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a sentence that cold.

---

Weiner says (p. 310) that the Americans went after Allende on two tracks.

The first track was the quiet one. Political warfare. Economic pressure. Propaganda. Diplomatic maneuvering. CIA men bribed Chilean politicians and spread fear among ordinary people like a fine mist. And if all that failed, they would drive the country into the ditch of extreme poverty and let hunger do the rest.

The second track was the loud one: a military coup. The agency started whispering with right-wing officers and funding radical groups, among them the one that would become Pátria y Libertad, an anti-communist terrorist outfit with a geometric spider for a logo. Look at that spider. A thing like that doesn’t pick its symbol by accident.

Nixon was pleased with Médici. Near the end of 1971, the Brazilian dictator sat down with him and reported that his regime stood ready to work toward Allende’s overthrow. Tanya Harmer cites Médici in “Brazil’s Cold War in the Southern Cone, 1970–1975” (2012, p. 660): “We must not be complacent about the situation in Latin America, which could explode at any moment.”

At his farewell banquet he raised a glass of wine and said the rest: “Wherever Brazil goes, Latin America will follow.”

You can almost hear the glass clink.

---

Now. Let’s talk about the word.

For years the official line in Indonesia was that the events of September 30, 1965 (G30S, or Gestok) were a coup attempt by civilians in the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party. Victor Fic’s The Coup of October 1, 1965: A Study in Conspiracy (2005) is the sort of book that leans on that word, conspiracy, as if it were a load-bearing wall.

Then there’s Jess Melvin, who wrote “G30S/Military: How Soeharto Orchestrated the 1965 Massacres.” Her argument is something different and bolder. The masterminds, she says, were the military, and above all Soeharto. Her work isn’t a defense of anyone. It’s a counter-story to the New Order’s long insistence on the label “G30S/PKI.”

It wasn’t a one-off. If you step back and look at the pattern, the 1964 coup in Brasília, the 1965 events in Jakarta, you begin to see that what happened in Indonesia was not the first of its kind, and it would not be the last. The winner every time was the same: the military.

And somewhere along the way, in the hands of the Brazilian generals and their friends, the name of a city became something else.

---

Operação Jacarta. Operation Jakarta.

According to Brazil’s Truth Commission, it was a secret project with plans for extermination in it. In the commission’s telling, the dictatorship played a part in campaigns of disappearance and mass killing aimed at people accused of being communists. The 1975 murder of the journalist Vladimir Herzog is said to have prevented the plan from being fully carried out. The link between the two emerged when the claim of an Operação Jacarta surfaced in testimony before the São Paulo State Legislative Assembly.

Here’s the catch, and I want to be honest about it because the honest part matters. To this day, nobody has proved that the Brazilian military ever used that term internally. The reports come to us only as testimony, public vocabulary passed from mouth to mouth. In a court of law, the generals can’t yet be called guilty of that.

But think about what’s left standing when you subtract the proof. The word was out there. It was in the air, like the smell of smoke that tells you something’s burning somewhere you can’t see.

Consider Ing Giok Tan. In May 1962 she was a young woman from Jakarta who boarded an old ship with her parents and sailed for Brazil. Indonesia was sinking into the Cold War, caught between capitalism and communism, and her parents were frightened. Brazil offered them “freedom, opportunity, and escape from conflict.”

You can guess what comes next. You’ve read this kind of story before.

Two years later, in 1964, the generals took Brasília. President João Goulart was gone. A year after that came the events in Jakarta, back in the country the Tans had run from. They had crossed an ocean to escape the monster, and the monster had simply beaten them there. In both capitals, anti-communism became the sacred text of the new bosses, and with American backing it would justify the same thing again and again across the continent.

---

Brazilians began hearing “Operação Jacarta” widely about three years after the 1964 coup. But in Chile, the word Jakarta was never whispered. It was out in the open, as casual as a stop sign.

Walk through Santiago in those days, especially the eastern part of the city, where the bourgeoisie lived behind their tidy fences. Someone had been busy at night. On the walls, on the fences, on the sides of buildings, the messages appeared in irregular murals and rough graffiti you could still read if you stopped and looked.

Yakarta viene.

Jakarta se acerca.

Jakarta is coming. Jakarta is getting closer.

Say it out loud in the dark, to yourself. It sounds like the beginning of a ghost story. In a way it was. It matched the tone of that El Mercurio cover, short and blunt, a promise made by people who had already decided how it would go: Prepare yourselves for a military coup.

---

The campaign had a face, or at least a few of them. Juraj Domic Kuscenic was a Croatian anti-communist who wrote for El Mercurio and had close ties to Pátria y Libertad from 1970 on. He’d been invoking “Yakarta viene” since the 1960s. You can find his early writing on Indonesia in Fundamentos de la Praxis Marxista-Leninista en Chile (1977), published by Editorial Vaitea. On page 33 he reviews a 1969 article that blamed the destruction of the PKI on the grave the communists had dug for themselves.

Then there was Manuel Fuentes Wendling, a leading figure in Pátria y Libertad, who joined forces with Domic to escalate the vandalism of the city’s walls. They planned to blanket Chile with five hundred thousand graffiti pieces, starting in 1970, with the immediate goal of supporting the presidential candidate Jorge Alessandri. Wendling tells the story himself in his memoir, Memorias Secretas de Patria y Libertad (1999), on pages 61–76 and again on 320–325.

Half a million. Think of that. Not a prank, but an industry.

In February 1972, a second piece on the subject appeared, this one in Ramona, a magazine affiliated with the Communist Party. It was titled “La conspiración derechista está tomando vuelo,” and it accused right-wing groups of adopting something called “Plan Djakarta,” which the article said had been devised by David Rockefeller or by Agustín Edwards, the owner of El Mercurio. It claimed the two used Ralston Purina, a pet-food company in Chile that they owned, as cover. (Yes. Pet food. Sometimes the real world is stranger than anything I could make up.)

The article was blunt about what it feared:

“The Chilean extreme right wants to repeat that massacre. What does that mean in concrete terms? The terrorists have a plan that includes the murder of every member of the Communist Party Central Committee, the leaders of the Socialist Party, the national directors of the CUT, the leaders of social movements, and all prominent figures on the Left.”

It was signed by Carlos Berger, a Communist Party member who had once argued furiously with a fellow student at the University of Chile named Carmen Hertz about left-wing tactics and what the Indonesian massacres meant. Funny how things turn out. After all those arguments, the two of them married.

---

And the strategy worked. That’s the ugly truth of it. Chileans got scared. It was like looking down the barrel of a gun that had been lovingly loaded, over many years, by the compradors of the anti-communist cause.

Both sides painted, of course. The left had its own volunteer muralists, working in the tradition of Diego Rivera, who covered walls with complicated, beautiful landscapes drawn from the culture of the Mapuche, Chile’s indigenous people. The right had money. Funds from Washington flowed into the pockets of professional painters who were, by all accounts, less gifted, being more used to doing advertising slogans than art. They worked hard, though. They worked fast.

Patricio “Pato” Madera, one of the founders of the Ramona Parra Brigade, the Ramona mural collective, took one look at the “Jakarta” graffiti and recognized the hands behind it. The same hired crews, he said, who had been painting right-wing slogans in terror campaigns since 1964.

The paint wasn’t the only thing that came for the Communists. There were postcards, too. Threatening messages arrived in the mail at the homes of party officials. In 1972, Berger and Hertz got one headed Yakarta se acerca, and at the bottom, there it was, the geometric spider of Pátria y Libertad, looking up out of the card like it had been waiting for them.

Imagine opening that at your kitchen table.

After that, the couple could never feel safe in their own neighborhood. They lived like fugitives, sometimes sleeping at work, only occasionally going home, and never for more than a night or two at a time. You learn to listen for footsteps. You learn which stairs creak.

By then, even saying the word “Jakarta” aloud felt like breaking a taboo. It carried dark and grim memories with it, and you didn’t have to be told why.

---

Time has put a little distance between us and all that. In 2017, Loreto Garín Guzmán and Federico Zukerfeld of the Etcétera group in Buenos Aires staged an installation called Yakarta Viene, “Jakarta Is Coming,” to remember the victims of the terror, the mass slaughter, and the brutality of Pinochet. They also made a collective video, “Matices Tonos y Semitonos de una orquestación terrorífica.” In the exhibition, Etcétera showed four works drawn from artistic research into history, offered as a counter-narrative to the military’s version of events, the one Pinochet’s men wanted told.

That’s how it goes with ghosts. You can paint over them, and burn the postcards, and tell yourself the war’s long over. But the walls remember. Somewhere in the city, under a coat of whitewash, a few faded letters still say what they’ve always said.

Jakarta is coming.