Michael’s Reviews > The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World > Status Update

"We won't need to kill a million like in Indonesia," López Rega reportedly said. "We can get it done with ten thousand," He guessed low. Anticommunists killed far more than that in Argentina.

In 1983, D'Aubuisson summed up the actually existing anticommunist ideology very well "You can be a Communist," he told reporter Laurie Beck- lund, even if you personally don't believe you are a Communist""

"On Bali, one group of prisoners would carefully collect and own feces to fertilize tiny bits of soil and row vegetables. They would pass the time by singing songs, either those from the days of Sukarno or based on their own experiences. The refrain to one of them, sung in Spanish, came from the title of Fidel Castro's 1953 speech-"La historia me absolverá"- history will absolve me."

"You're all indoctrinated!" he screamed. "And it's because of this indoctrination that were going to put into effect Operation Jakarta, and neutralize two thousand communists right here in São Paulo."
The general had gone off script. This was a dictatorship, however, and he had an easy way to make sure it stayed off the record. "If you publish a single line of what I just said, it will be 2,001!"

But when his superiors started talking about El Plan Yakarta in 1973, they were being very specific, and very serious. The plan was to kill around 10,000 people, the left and its core supporters, as a way of ensuring a transition to a right-wing government. "If we just put the Jakarta plan into place, kill ten or twenty thousand, then that's it," one officer said. "Then that's all the resistance and we win."

"[Medici] did not believe that the Soviets or the Chinese were interested in giving any assistance to these countries' communist movements..." The problem for both men, in other words, was not an international communist conspiracy. The problem was that they thought the Soviets and Chinese might be right. The impoverished people might choose "communism" all by themselves, and they had to be stopped."

"The chaos and violence in Chile was not caused by President Salvador Allende. US-backed right- wing terrorism began before he even took office.
Nixon ordered the head the CIA to find to stop Allende from taking over. Richard Helms emerged from the meeting with Nixon's orders written on a notepad:

1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!
$10000000 available, more if necessary
best men we have
make the economy scream"

"At least one million Indonesians were still in concentration camps, prising one of the largest populations of political detainees anywhere in the world. They were subject to starvation, forced labor, physical and psychological torture, and attempts at anticommunist re-education. The families of up to another million victims were reeling from the disappearance of their loved ones without explanation"

"Washington did not stop helping to carry out Operation Annihilation.
The US economic elite heard a very different message. Indonesia was open for business. In 1967, the first year of Suharto's fully consolidated rule, General Electric, American Express, Caterpillar, and Goodyear Tire all came to explore the new opportunities available them in Indonesia...Raytheon and Lockheed popped over, too."

"In December, when Mao learned of D. N. Aidit's death, he composed a poem:

Sparse branches stood in front of my windows in winter, smiling before hundreds of flowers
Regretfully those smiles withered when spring came
There is no need to grieve over the withered
To each flower there is a season to wither, as well a season to blossom
There will be more flowers in the coming year"

"In total, it is estimated that between five hundred thousand and one million people were slaughtered, and one million more were herded into concentration camps. Sarwo Edhie once bragged the military had killed 3 million people.
Around 15 percent of the prisoners taken were women. They were subjected to especially cruel, gendered violence, which sprung directly from the propaganda spread by Suharto with Western help.