Knowingo
The cover of The Jakarta Method

The Jakarta Method

Vincent Bevins, 2020

How Indonesia's anticommunist massacres of 1965 and 1966, backed by Washington, became a model for mass killing from Brazil and Chile to Guatemala, and shaped today's world.

Get the app Read on the web

13 parts, about 28 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Reconstructs the Indonesian army's mass killing of suspected communists and the role US officials played, from propaganda to kill lists
  • Follows the Jakarta pattern to Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Guatemala, and argues anticommunist killing programs helped shape today's world
  • Lets survivors speak, including a union worker, a librarian and a peasant's son, and records what they lost

Who it is for

  • Cold War readers who want the view from the countries involved
  • Readers trying to understand Brazil, Indonesia and Latin America's dictatorships
  • Readers who weigh how governments remember and deny state violence

What the summary covers

  1. Introduction2 min
  2. A New American Age2 min
  3. Independent Indonesia2 min
  4. Feet to the Fire, Pope in the Sky2 min
  5. An Alliance for Progress2 min
  6. To Brazil and Back2 min
  7. The September 30th Movement3 min
  8. Extermination3 min
  9. Around the World2 min
  10. Jakarta Is Coming3 min
  11. Back Up North2 min
  12. We Are the Champions2 min
  13. Where Are They Now? And Where Are We?1 min

Recommended by

  • Paulo CoelhoBrazilian novelist
    Tragically, that which everyone believed we had left in the past has returned to spread throughout Latin America once more. The Jakarta Method allows us to understand the moment that Brazil is now living through, and its connection to a much larger, global scheme.
  • Glenn GreenwaldAmerican journalist
    One of the best, most informative and most illuminating histories yet of [the CIA] and the way it has shaped the actual, rather than the propagandistic, U.S. role in the world.
  • Joshua OppenheimerFilm director
    Essential and devastating.
  • Jon Lee AndersonStaff writer at The New Yorker
    In The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins argues persuasively that during the Cold War, the U.S. approved of mass murder campaigns to roll back communism in the Third World. This is a provocative, necessary book, an essential guide to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of our imperfect world. Highly recommended.
  • Baskara T. WardayaHistorian at Sanata Dharma University
    Bevins is a brilliant and compassionate writer, and The Jakarta Method is eye-opening. I really hope the world pays attention to this book.
  • Stephen KinzerAmerican author and historian
    This fascinating book is a meticulous and shocking analysis of a little-known and horrifically bloody battle of the Cold War, but it is also something more. It places the Indonesia massacre of 1965 in its global context, showing how the United States both supported it and used it as a model for repression in other countries.
  • Greg GrandinProfessor of history at Yale University
    A full tally of the body count of the transnational counterinsurgency Washington has been waging since the early 1960s is impossible. But Bevins’ excellent book offers a different kind of reckoning, of moral costs and ongoing political consequences.
  • Branko MilanovicEconomist and research professor at the CUNY Graduate Center
    This is an indispensable book for all those interested in the Third World during the era of the Cold War, and in the links between various operations of ‘the Anti-Communist International’, a subject whose importance will I think only increase.
  • Robert ScheerAmerican journalist and professor
    This, for my money, may be the must-read book about the Cold War.

About the author

  • Vincent BevinsAmerican journalist and writer
    • Bevins was born and raised in California and went to the University of California, Berkeley.
    • He earned a BA in Political Economy of Industrial Societies and Rhetoric at Berkeley, and an MSc in International Political Economy at the London School of Economics.
    • He reported for the Financial Times in London and São Paulo from 2009 to 2011.
    • He was the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Brazil from 2011 to 2016.
    • In 2012 he published an investigation of modern slavery in the Amazon, and later that year pig iron companies in Maranhão agreed not to source charcoal made with slave labor.
    • From 2017 to 2018 he covered Southeast Asia for the Washington Post.
    • He works in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Indonesian, and also German.
    • His second book, If We Burn, came out in October 2023.

More books like this