Colby, Gerard with Dennett, Charlotte. Thy Will Be Done -- The Conquest of
the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil. New York:
HarperCollins, 1995. 960 pages.
This book began when the authors traveled to the Amazon in 1976 to
gather material on the Summer Institute of Linguistics, also known as the
Wycliffe Bible Translators. SIL, founded in the 1930s by William Cameron
(Cam) Townsend, was known throughout the Cold War for its pioneering
linguistics and missionary work in remote places. Five years after their
trip, the authors decided to put Nelson Rockefeller in the book. Rocky was
involved with an Amazon development plan during World War II, when he was
Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. This position gave Rocky, with the
help of Hoover's FBI, jurisdiction over all U.S. intelligence in Latin
America. Rocky's spook credentials proved useful throughout his career.
The authors ended up with two books in one, as they weave between SIL
and Rocky, using this as a literary hook to describe how American religious
and economic imperialism conquered the Amazon. There are some loose funding
connections between SIL and Rocky, but the major link is their willingness
to encourage exploitive U.S. aid, including CIA covert actions, to keep the
world safe for Jesus and Big Oil. In addition to the Amazon (Peru, Ecuador,
Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia), some attention is paid to other
places where SIL was active, such as Guatemala, Mexico, and Southeast Asia.
ISBN 0-06-016764-5
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