The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”

legless lepers strapped into wooden boxes on wheels, rolling along the streets of Jakarta; men and women bathing in slime-green canals while, next to them, others defecated; a human cadaver abandoned on a garbage heap, swarming with maggots and flies; and children who slept in cardboard boxes, vying with roaming packs of dogs for scraps of rubbish.

My business school professors had taught that financing infrastructure projects through mountains of World Bank debt would pull economically developing nations out of poverty and save them from the clutches of communism.

Eventually I realized that the ricos were part of a strategy, a system that had subjugated Andean peoples through fear since the Spanish conquest. I saw that by commiserating, I was enabling the community to do nothing. They needed to learn to face their fears; they needed to admit to the anger they had suppressed; they needed to take offense at the injustices they had suffered; they needed to stop looking to me to set things right. They needed to stand up to the ricos.

Cuban plot to turn Ecuador Communist (Che Guevara had been executed by a CIA operation in Bolivia less than three years earlier).

Let’s just say that governments that don’t cooperate are seen as Soviet puppets. They threaten American interests and democracy. The CIA doesn’t like that.

You do. Or your daddy does. The American taxpayer. The money flows through USAID, the World Bank, CIA, and the Pentagon, but everyone here” — he swept his arm toward the window and the city below — “knows it’s all about Texaco. Remember, countries like this have long histories of coups. If you take a good look, you’ll see that most of them happen when the leaders of the country don’t play our game.

Oh my God, you do have a lot to learn, don’t you?” He raised his martini toward the city. “To begin with, we control the military. We pay their salaries and buy them their equipment. They protect us from the Indians who don’t want oil rigs on their lands. In Latin America, he who controls the army controls the president and the courts. We get to write the laws — set fines for oil spills, labor rates, all the laws that matter to us.

a vast sea of oil beneath the jungle.” This report, he said, would be used to justify huge World Bank loans to the country and to persuade Wall Street to invest in Texaco and other businesses that would benefit from the oil boom.

Texaco had discovered vast oil deposits, not far from where we’d be stationed in the rain forest. We were assured that oil would transform Ecuador from one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere to one of the richest.