Amazon Crude THY WILL BE DONE: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, By Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett (HarperCollins: $35; 794 pp.) Home Edition

• Published in: The Los Angeles times
• Main Author: Stewart, Frank
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, Calif Los Angeles Times Communications LLC 14.05.1995
• ISSN: 0458-3035

Just as the current situation in Guatemala is multidimensional, this 900-page book comprises numerous intertwined narratives. One is the political and financial life of Nelson Rockefeller, from his late boyhood in the 1920s to his death in 1979. Throughout his life, Rockefeller's personal financial interests, like those of his family's major holding, Standard Oil, were wedded to the economic development of Latin America. Rockefeller's love affair with the Amazon began in 1937 when, as a young man, he cruised Venezuela's Orinoco river on Standard Oil's 90-foot yacht, acquiring native crafts for his mother's New York Museum of Modern Art and inspecting his father's vast oil interests in Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil. Subsequently, Rockefeller became President Franklin Roosevelt's assistant secretary of state for Latin America and the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. He was President Eisenhower's personal liaison to the CIA as special assistant for Cold War strategy and psychological warfare. Later, notwithstanding his family's multimillion dollar financial matrix in the region and personal holdings that included a 1,030,000-acre ranch in Brazil, along with partnerships in vast processing plants, commercial banks, factories and mines, Rockefeller was Latin American adviser to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Another layer within "Thy Will Be Done" is the life of William Cameron Townsend, founder of the fundamentalist Wycliffe Bible Translators and leader of the group's field organization, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Starting with the peasants of Mexico and Central America, Townsend's lifelong mission was to bring the Bible to all the Bibleless peoples of the world, in their own languages, no matter how isolated, and to reach especially the supposed thousands of indigenous tribes of the Amazon jungle. Early on, Townsend realized that access to these tribes required that he court authoritarian regimes in South America along with those political and multinational corporations in the U.S. that supported the predominantly right-wing juntas in the region. He readily accepted large cash donations from individuals and agencies inside and outside the federal government, for whom Christianity, capitalism and anti-communism were identical battlefields. Other gifts to SIL included surplus U.S. aircraft, illegally transferred to the missionaries by the military to help the SIL penetrate the deepest parts of the jungle.