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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, AND GQ“A radical new history of the United States abroad” (Wall Street Journal) which uncovers U.S. complicity in the mass-killings of left-wing activists in Indonesia, Latin America and around the world In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. 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. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful. 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. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.

Review

Vincent Bevins's The Jakarta Method is a book about a name. The name is "Jakarta," and the argument is that for two decades of Cold War terror across three continents, that word functioned as an operational shorthand — graffiti scrawled on walls in pre-coup Chile, a slogan circulating among Brazilian right-wing operatives, a phrase exchanged between Argentine and Guatemalan death-squad leaders meeting in Franco's Spain — for a specific kind of violence the United States had pioneered in Indonesia in 1965-66. Bevins's wager is that until you understand what was done in Indonesia, and that it was done as the climactic application of a doctrine Washington had been refining since the late 1940s, you cannot understand the Cold War, the present global order, or why a figure like Jair Bolsonaro could rise on the same anticommunist mythology a half-century later. That wager pays off. The book is the most powerful single-volume argument I have read for putting the largest anticommunist massacre of the twentieth century back at the center of the story we tell about how the modern world was made.

What Bevins does that historians of the Cold War have largely not done is hold two scales in the same hand. Macro chapters move through Washington policy memos, CIA leadership decisions, and the strategic logic of containment; micro chapters set them down in a Balinese village whose sand still surfaces the bones of the dead, or in an Indonesian widow's house in Solo where Magdalena lives on roughly fourteen dollars a month. The book's argumentative spine — that the 1965-66 killings were not a local spasm but the product of a deliberate, Washington-organized doctrine subsequently exported as Operação Jacarta, Plan Yakarta, and Yakarta Viene — is meant to be felt in the gap between those scales. The point is not just that the Cold War had victims; it is that the victims and the policy were intimately linked, and that the policy, executed across at least twenty-two countries, was central to the United States' victory.

The prologue arrives like a thesis statement. Right-wing operatives in Brazil pass around the slogan "Jakarta is coming" — a death threat addressed to leftists, journalists, union organizers, anyone who might be on the wrong side when the next anticommunist purge arrives. The reader who knows nothing of Indonesia is forced to ask why the name of a Southeast Asian capital had become a threat in Portuguese. The rest of the book is, in a way, the answer. Bevins backs up to the postwar moment, where the United States emerged as the dominant world power and built a binary Cold War framework that recast nationalist and leftist movements across the decolonizing world as Soviet threats. The Truman-Eisenhower turn to covert regime change — Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954 — established the template of removing elected or popular governments judged insufficiently anticommunist. By the time the narrative reaches Bandung, the reader has been given a structure in which a non-aligned conference of newly decolonized nations hosted by Sukarno is not a curiosity but the principal threat to the bipolar order Washington was constructing.

The Indonesian chapters are the book's center of gravity, and they are where Bevins is most generative. Sukarno's "guided democracy," the PKI's astonishing rise to mass membership as the world's largest non-ruling communist party with millions of affiliated members in labor and peasant organizations, and the three-way tension among the army, the communists, and the president are rendered with the texture of a country that the English-language press treated as exotic background. When Bevins gets to the events of September 30 and October 1, 1965 — six army generals killed by a group of officers in a confused episode that Suharto immediately recoded as a PKI coup attempt — the prior chapters have done the work to make what follows legible. The CIA had been cultivating anticommunist Indonesian officers for years, had backed the 1958 PRRI/Permesta regional rebellion, had grown impatient with Sukarno's neutralism; the U.S. embassy supplied name lists, weapons, communications equipment, and political cover; American corporations were in Geneva by 1967 with the Berkeley Mafia, marking the country "open for business." The killings — between five hundred thousand and one million dead, by Bevins's count and the standard historiography — were neither incidental nor spontaneous. Bevins's interview subjects are unsparing. When he asks Winarso, head of the Sekretariat Bersama '65, how the United States won the Cold War in Indonesia, Winarso answers: "You killed us."

From there the book follows the Method outward. This is where Bevins is doing the most original argumentative work, because the conventional Western Cold War narrative treats Latin America's death-squad regimes, Indonesia's massacres, and Central America's dirty wars as broadly similar but causally separate phenomena — analogous applications of "counterinsurgency" by anticommunist allies of Washington. Bevins's claim is stronger: that operatives literally borrowed from Indonesia, that "Jakarta" was a common operational vocabulary, and that the people moving between these theaters — figures like John P. Longan, who moved from CIA work in Bangkok to creating Guatemala's first death-squad disappearances in 1966 — were the conscious transmitters of a model. The graffiti is the smoking gun. A Chilean National Party congressman announces from Congress that the right will stay "until Jakarta is produced." Argentina's Triple A leader José López Rega tells his Guatemalan counterpart Máximo Zepeda, in Franco's Spain in the early 1970s, "We won't need to kill a million like in Indonesia," because "we can get it done with ten thousand." In 1975, General D'Avila Mello threatens an Operação Jacarta against two thousand São Paulo communists. The model is not metaphor; it is a working program.

The Central American chapters apply the framework to the indigenous genocide in Guatemala under Efraín Ríos Montt, the El Mozote massacre and the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero in El Salvador, and the long counterinsurgency campaigns whose human cost Bevins lets survivors articulate. Ríos Montt's strategy of draining the indigenous "sea" so the guerrilla "fish" cannot swim — "The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea… If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea" — is rendered not as the eccentric brutality of a single evangelical dictator but as a coherent counterinsurgency philosophy that found its place in the Method's catalog. Roberto D'Aubuisson, the U.S.-trained Salvadoran death-squad leader who ordered Romero's killing, gives Bevins one of the book's most chilling formulations of the underlying logic: he tells the reporter Laurie Becklund that "you can be a Communist… even if you personally don't believe you are a Communist." The Guatemalan union organizer Miguel Ángel Albizures describes life under the late-1970s dictatorship as constant flight and unending fear, never sleeping in the same place for too long, knowing that bodies were appearing in the streets around him. These passages are not atmospheric color. They are evidence that the doctrine Washington had refined in Jakarta was working as designed: not to defeat an enemy but to terrorize, demobilize, and demographically reorder whole societies.

By the time Bevins reaches Operation Condor — the institutionalized transnational repression apparatus of the Southern Cone — he has earned the right to treat it not as a discrete South American anomaly but as the regional bureaucratization of a method whose authorship lay elsewhere. Patrice McSherry's work on Condor is invoked in support; the connection is offered as fact, not speculation. The same arc takes in Benny Widyono's lonely fight inside the United Nations against Washington's policy of recognizing the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia's legitimate government. The point lands: even after Pol Pot's crimes were known, Washington's anticommunism remained a higher priority than opposing genocide. That episode is also one of the book's quiet repudiations of the moral framework in which the United States is the regrettable enabler of allied excesses rather than the principal beneficiary and architect of them.

The penultimate chapter, "We Are the Champions," is the book's analytical synthesis and its boldest piece of argument. Drawing on the economist Branko Milanovic's work on postcommunist outcomes and on appendices Bevins compiles from World Bank and Penn World Tables data, the chapter advances a five-part ledger of how the anticommunist crusade shaped the present: unresolved trauma in the victim nations; the destruction of Third World developmental alternatives such as the Bandung project; the entrenchment of crony-capitalist political economies under the oligarchies the dictatorships installed; the deformation of the global left, which was pushed toward armed militancy because the peaceful democratic socialists had been annihilated; and the persistence of a fanatical anticommunism that resurges in figures like Bolsonaro because the social order it was built to defend was never dismantled. The framing leans on Odd Arne Westad, whom Bevins quotes directly:

"In an historical sense — and especially as seen from the South — the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means. The new and rampant interventionism we have seen after the Islamist attacks on America in September 2001 is not an aberration but a continuation — in a slightly more extreme form — of US policy during the Cold War."

That five-part ledger is where Bevins is most ambitious and where the book is most arguable. The third and fourth claims in particular — that anticommunist mass murder structurally produced crony capitalism, and that it deformed the global left into Khmer-Rouge-style paranoia by killing off the peaceful alternatives — are the load-bearing causal arguments of the synthesis. The first is on solid ground: Indonesia pivoting directly from Sukarno's non-aligned guided democracy to Suharto's Berkeley Mafia at the 1967 Geneva investment conference, Chile becoming the world's neoliberal laboratory only after Allende's overthrow, the destruction of Bali's communal land base to enable the tourism economy — these are not coincidences. The second claim is harder. Bevins's own framing concedes the difficulty. Pol Pot's reading of the PKI's collapse, MIR cadres in Chile invoking 1965 against the Communist Party's electoral road, Nkrumah in exile after the 1966 coup concluding only protracted guerrilla war was viable — these are persuasive vignettes, but the inference that the militarization of the global left was caused by the Method, rather than overdetermined by the same Cold War conditions, requires more careful counterfactual work than a journalistic synthesis can provide. Bevins is honest about the tension; he laments, rather than celebrates, the conclusion that the hardliners "had been right." The reader should hold this argument as a hypothesis the book has made plausible, not as a proven causal chain.

The closing chapter, "Where Are They Now? And Where Are We?", returns the book to the human scale where it began. Wayan Badra, a Hindu priest in Seminyak, performs proper burial rites for the bones the sand still gives up — bones the Ku De Ta beach club, ironically named after the Indonesian phrase for "coup d'état," sits on top of. Benny Widyono dies in Connecticut before the book is finished. Ing Giok Tan, in São Paulo, organizes against Bolsonaro's 2018 election. Nury Hanafi, daughter of Sukarno's ambassador to Cuba, runs an Indonesian restaurant in Paris and tells Bevins that younger Indonesians "don't even know the truth of what our country used to be — our struggle for independence, and the values we held." Magdalena, in Solo, survives on fourteen dollars a month. Ngurah Termana, a founding member of the Bali reconciliation collective Taman 65, tells Bevins that tourists see only the famous Balinese smile, with "no idea the darkness and fire that lurks underneath." Each portrait is its own indictment of the official settlement. Bevins is too good a journalist to let the reader take refuge in the abstraction of policy when the policy's outcome is a specific old woman in a specific Javanese house.

Methodologically, this is where the book earns its argumentative reach. Bevins's organizing question — what world did you believe you were building in the early 1960s, and is that the world you live in now? — is asked of survivors in Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador. The oral-history spine is paired with declassified U.S. State Department and CIA documents, Indonesian military materials where they are accessible, and engagement with serious academic historiography and economics. Bevins is self-aware about his positionality as a U.S.-born journalist whose passport and funding made the project possible in ways his subjects could not have managed for themselves. That self-awareness is not throat-clearing; it is part of the book's argument that the historiography of Cold War atrocity is itself stratified by the same hierarchies the atrocities reinforced — that the burial of the Indonesian story in the English-language record is itself a Cold War victory for Washington, and that journalists writing from inside the United States have particular obligations because of, not despite, that asymmetry.

The book's place within its tradition is anti-imperialist and decolonial in temperament, materialist in its sense that the violence is a political-economic precondition for the integration of these societies into Americanized capitalism rather than an ideological excess, and journalistic in its method. The decision to follow Westad in calling the post-1965 world order "Americanization" rather than "globalization" is a small lexical move with large argumentative consequences: it refuses the depoliticized abstraction of "global integration" and names a specific national agent that organized, financed, and benefited from the violence. The cross-references the book threads — Westad's broader historiography, Patrice McSherry on Condor, Milanovic on postcommunist outcomes, Tom Burgis's The Looting Machine, even the Clash's "Washington Bullets" as a moment when this history surfaced in pop culture — are deployed sparingly and to effect. The Iran 1953 and Guatemala 1954 coups are not invoked to fill out a list of grievances but to establish the operational continuity of the doctrine Indonesia would later climax. The book sits comfortably within the tradition of investigative anti-imperialist historiography that takes the perspective of the South as analytically primary, and it adds to that tradition the specific intervention of naming the Jakarta Method as a coherent transnational program rather than as scattered episodes of allied excess.

It is worth being clear about what the book is not. It is not a comprehensive academic history of the Indonesian killings; the standard scholarly accounts go deeper into archival detail than Bevins attempts, and his synthetic claims about the Method as a single exported doctrine will need to be tested against country-specific historiography that has its own causal structures. The Central American chapters in particular sometimes read as compressions of work others have done in greater depth, with Bevins's contribution being the comparative re-framing rather than new archival material. The "deformed left" argument, as noted, is the most fragile load-bearing claim and depends on a chain of inferences from a handful of striking vignettes. And Bevins's organizing image — the Jakarta Method as a single template — has the virtues and risks of all unifying metaphors: it makes a previously dispersed pattern legible, but it can also homogenize national experiences whose specific dictatorships and resistances had their own internal logics. The book is best read alongside, not in place of, the country-level historiography it depends on.

What the book does, and does better than anyone else has done in a single volume, is force the reader to take seriously the proposition that the United States' Cold War victory was won through anticommunist mass murder, that this victory shaped the present global order, and that the silence around it is itself a political fact and not an accident of historiography. The argument's emotional center is the gap between the world Sukarno's Indonesia or Allende's Chile thought it was building and the world that exists. The Suharto-era Sacred Pancasila Monument and Museum of Communist Betrayal recoded the killings as a patriotic rescue; Western histories laundered that recoding by simply omitting the story; the result is that the world's largest Cold War anticommunist massacre has only the most marginal presence in the popular Western mental map of the period, while Pol Pot and the Cuban Missile Crisis are universal cultural references. Bevins's case is that this asymmetry is not a quirk of historical attention; it is a tribute to how complete the operation was. The book leans hard on Milanovic's data to argue that the gap between First and Third World has barely closed since Bandung — that South Korea and Taiwan, given strategic Cold War exemptions, are the only large escapees from a hierarchy the killings helped lock in — and on the post-2016 evidence (Bolsonaro saluting his torturer Brilhante Ustra at Rousseff's impeachment, Islamist-anticommunist mobs surrounding academic conferences in Jakarta in 2017) to argue that the political force the killings were meant to defend is still active and structurally available.

This is a book for the reader who already suspects that the standard duel-of-superpowers narrative misses what the Cold War actually was for most of humanity, and who wants the case made with the specificity of named survivors and declassified cables rather than at the level of theoretical assertion. It is also a book for the reader who knows about Pinochet and Guatemala and Iran but has never had Indonesia placed at the center of the picture, because once Indonesia is there, the rest of the geography rearranges itself. It gets right that the Cold War in the Third World was a continuation of colonialism, that anticommunist mass murder was constitutive of the American-led order rather than incidental to it, and that the present persistence of fanatical anticommunism in figures like Bolsonaro is the predictable consequence of transitions designed to preserve, not dismantle, the social structures the dictatorships were built to defend. It gets wrong, or at least argues too quickly, the strong causal claim that the global left was militarized by the Method rather than alongside it. But the book's central wager — that you cannot understand how we got here without understanding what was done in Jakarta in 1965-66 — is the kind of argument that, once made, changes what the rest of the Cold War looks like. After reading it, the graffiti in pre-coup Chile reads differently. So does the absence of any comparable graffiti in the histories Americans have written about themselves.

Notable Quotes

What happened in Brazil in 1964 and Indonesia in 1965 may have been the most important victories of the Cold War for the side that ultimately won—that is, the United States and the global economic system now in operation.

Introduction, framing the central thesis of the book — Cold War, US foreign policy, global order

I fear that the truth of what happened contradicts so forcefully our idea of what the Cold War was, of what it means to be an American, or how globalization has taken place, that it has simply been easier to ignore it.

Bevins explaining why the Indonesian massacre has been forgotten despite its world-historical significance — collective memory, American identity, historical erasure

In history, every religion has greatly honored those members who destroyed the enemy. The Koran, Greek mythology, the Old Testament. Groton boys were taught that. Doing in the enemy is the right thing to do. Of course, there are some restraints on ends and means... But there are no limits to what you can do to a Persian. He's a Barbarian.

Paul Nitze describing the upper-class imperial values instilled at the Groton School, which produced many early CIA officers — imperialism, CIA culture, elite ideology, dehumanization

We are gathered here today as a result of sacrifices. Sacrifices made by our forefathers and by the people of our own and younger generations. For me, this hall is filled not only by the leaders of the nations of Asia and Africa; it also contains within its walls the undying, the indomitable, the invincible spirit of those who went before us.

Sukarno's opening speech at the 1955 Bandung Conference, the founding moment of the Third World movement — Third World movement, anticolonialism, Bandung Conference

Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily.

Sukarno at Bandung, defining neocolonialism for the assembled leaders of Asia and Africa — neocolonialism, imperialism, Third World solidarity

Washington policymakers had not been privy to all the facts nor really grasped the inwardness of the situation, but had proceeded on the assumption that Communism was the main issue. This was the all too common weakness of Americans—to view conflict in black and white terms, a heritage, no doubt, from our Puritan ancestors.

Ambassador Howard Jones reflecting on the disastrous 1958 CIA operation to break up Indonesia — US foreign policy failure, anticommunist ideology, cultural blindness

I think one of our important jobs is to strengthen the spine of the military. To make it clear, discreetly, that we are not necessarily hostile to any kind of military action whatsoever if it's clear that the military action is—Against the left.

Ambassador Lincoln Gordon and President Kennedy on tape, discussing preparations for a coup against Brazilian President Goulart in 1962 — US intervention in Brazil, Kennedy administration, military coups

From our viewpoint, of course, an unsuccessful coup attempt by the PKI might be the most effective development to start a reversal of political trends in Indonesia.

Ambassador Howard Jones himself acknowledged the strategic value of a 'premature PKI coup' at a State Department meeting — provocation strategy, CIA operations, Indonesia

Spread the story of PKI's guilt, treachery and brutality (this priority effort is perhaps most needed immediate assistance we can give army if we can find way to do it without identifying it as solely or largely US effort).

Ambassador Marshall Green's cable to the State Department on October 5, 1965, laying out US strategy after the September 30th Movement — propaganda warfare, US complicity, Indonesian massacre

It really was a big help to the army. I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad.

Robert Martens, the US embassy political officer who compiled kill lists of communists and handed them to the Indonesian military — kill lists, US complicity, moral indifference

After asking them quietly to give way, and firing into air, para-comandos were 'forced by their intransigence to terminate breathing of these nine GERWANI witches.'

A US embassy cable reporting casually on the murder of nine women from the Indonesian Women's Movement by paracommandos — dehumanization of women, state violence, diplomatic complicity

No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered.

Howard Federspiel of the State Department, summarizing the Western response to the Indonesian massacres — moral indifference, dehumanization, Cold War priorities

Almost overnight the Indonesian government went from being a fierce voice for cold war neutrality and anti-imperialism to a quiet, compliant partner of the US world order.

Historian John Roosa's summary of the consequences of the 1965-66 massacres — regime change, Cold War victory, suppression of independence

I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.

Henry Kissinger on Chile's election of Salvador Allende, approving hundreds of thousands in CIA funding to prevent it — US arrogance, Chile, contempt for democracy

Jakarta is Coming.

Graffiti appearing across Santiago in the early 1970s, a mass death threat against the Chilean left invoking the Indonesian massacre — Jakarta method, state terror, Chile, anticommunist violence

If we just put the Jakarta plan into place, kill ten or twenty thousand, then that's it. Then that's all the resistance and we win.

A Chilean naval officer discussing Plan Yakarta, overheard by constitucionalista sailor Pedro Blaset — extermination planning, Chile, Jakarta method

You're all indoctrinated! And it's because of this indoctrination that we're going to put into effect Operation Jakarta, and neutralize two thousand communists right here in São Paulo.

Brazilian General D'Avila Mello losing his temper during a press interview and revealing the existence of Operação Jacarta — Brazil, Jakarta method, state terror, extermination plans

Surely, this will be my last opportunity to speak to you. The Air Force is now already bombing the antennas... I will pay with my life for my loyalty to the people. And I tell you all that I am certain that the seed we have planted in the conscience in thousands and thousands of Chileans cannot be held back forever.

Salvador Allende's final radio address as the Chilean Air Force bombed the presidential palace on September 11, 1973 — democratic socialism, Chile coup, martyrdom, resistance

The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.

Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt explaining his genocidal strategy against the indigenous Mayan population — genocide, Guatemala, counterinsurgency, state terror

The United States won. Here in Indonesia, you got what you wanted, and around the world, you got what you wanted. The Cold War was a conflict between socialism and capitalism, and capitalism won.

Winarso, head of a survivors' organization in Solo, Indonesia, answering the author's question about who won the Cold War — Cold War victory, global capitalism, survivors' perspective

You killed us.

Winarso's answer to the author asking how the United States won the Cold War — anticommunist violence, moral reckoning, US responsibility

I guess it's funny—well, maybe 'funny' isn't the word—but we know who is responsible for the violence that destroyed this place. We know it was the United States that was behind it. But we keep sending our kids there, because they have nowhere else to go.

Antonio Caba Caba of Ilom, Guatemala, where the military massacred most of the village's men, now sending youth to the US for work — migration, Guatemala, historical irony, US responsibility

For the first time in my life, I became aware that I didn't actually come from an uncultured or backwards people, and the other peoples of Africa and Asia weren't backwards either. I had always been told, and even thought, that we were very stupid Indonesians who didn't know what we were doing, trying to build a country without any education or resources.

Francisca describing her experience at the 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces in Jakarta — Third World solidarity, decolonization, cultural awakening

That's usually enough. Men take advantage of weakness in other men. They're just like countries in that way. The strong man takes the weak man's land. He makes the weak man work in his fields. If the weak man's woman is pretty, the strong man will take her.

Lolo Soetoro, Barack Obama's Indonesian stepfather, explaining to the young boy why a man was killed — power, imperialism, violence, Indonesia under Suharto

In an historical sense—and especially as seen from the South—the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means.

Historian Odd Arne Westad's formulation, which Bevins invokes to reframe the Cold War as a global process of decolonization violently shaped by superpower intervention — Cold War reinterpretation, colonialism, global South perspective