Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil

Reading this now, as with Mumford and Rifkin's work expect a lengthy excerpt soon to follow.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. 


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Amazon.com Review
This extraordinary saga moves from the Oval Office to the Amazon rain forests to show how Cold War intrigue linked a powerful American family, the U.S. government, and a missionary organization in a forty-year campaign to conquer the Amazon. At the heart of this story are two intensely ambitious men: Nelson Rockefeller, scion of the liberal and immensely wealthy Standard Oil family, and William Cameron Townsend, founder of the ultraconservative Wycliffe Bible Translators. Although leaders of opposing camps, they found common cause in the struggle against fascism and then communism, with the result that hundreds of thousands of Amazonian tribespeople died or were displaced. The systematic campaign of colonization fathered by Rockefeller and Townsend was a chilling foreshadowing of American intervention in the Third World to secure valuable natural resources in the name of democracy.

From Publishers Weekly
Nelson Rockefeller, who died in 1979, owned vast Latin American real estate and cattle ranching, mining, industrial and financial interests centered in Brazil. To protect his empire and secure Third World assets for exploitation by U.S. capitalism, Rockefeller-a top Latin American adviser to presidents from FDR to Nixon, and Ford's vice-president-played a dominant role in shaping the U.S.'s interventionist policy in Latin America, according to this blistering expose based on 18 years of research. Rockefeller, as President Eisenhower's special assistant for Cold War strategy, oversaw the CIA's covert operations abroad and was privy to assassination plots and mind-control experiments, the authors maintain. Colby (DuPont: Behind the Nylon Curtain) and his wife, Dennett, a freelance journalist, charge that Rockefeller, his banks and their allies, working with the CIA, bolstered repressive regimes in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay. Forcible dislocation of native peoples, hunger, disease, genocide and the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rain forest are the legacy of these policies, in the authors' analysis. Another key player in this massive narrative is ultraconservative William Cameron Townsend (1896-1982), founder of the Protestant missionary organization Wycliffe Bible Translators, which worked in concert with Rockefeller and which the authors accuse of destroying indigenous peoples' cultural values to abet penetration by U.S. businesses. Illustrations not seen by PW.