After that, the new Indonesian immigrants in Brazil received messages from home describing the most shocking scenes imaginable, an explosion of violence so terrifying that even discussing what happened would make people break down, questioning their own sanity. Two years after they arrived, the military overthrew Brazil’s young democracy and established a violent dictatorship.

If they thought they could escape the violence of the Cold War, they were tragically mistaken. Suffering through anxiety and seasickness for forty-five days, they made their way past Singapore, across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, down past Mozambique, around South Africa, and then all the way across the Atlantic to São Paulo, the largest city in South America. Brazil was just an idea for them, and it was very far away. They set sail for Brazil, having heard from other Indonesians who had already made the journey that this place offered freedom, opportunity, and respite from conflict. Her country, one of the largest in the world, had been pulled into the global battle between capitalism and communism, and her parents decided to flee the terrible consequences that conflict had wrought for families like hers. I N M AY 1962, A YOUNG girl named Ing Giok Tan got on a rusty old boat in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington’s final triumph in the Cold War. For decades, it’s been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA’s secret interventions were so successful. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians.

Vincent bevins the jakarta method