In 1965, Indonesia's military, backed by Washington, killed roughly a million people to crush the country's Communist Party. Journalist Vincent Bevins traces how this same anti-communist violence spread from Jakarta to Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Central America, reshaping the twentieth century's Cold War order.
A foreign power can enable mass killing without firing a shot by supplying names of suspected opponents and weapons to the local military. Decentralized killers then work through the lists, sweeping in anyone seen as left-leaning and many who had nothing to do with it.
After a shocking act of violence with unclear culprits, a rising strongman can purge independent media and spread invented tales of enemy depravity. The fabricated horror justifies far greater real violence and cements his power, and the resulting fear can make a whole political idea taboo for decades.
Killing people quietly, taking them away at night rather than executing them in public, lets a government kill on a vast scale while leaving little record. Combined with decades of official refusal to investigate and outside indifference, a slaughter of up to a million people can remain barely known even inside the country.
When an extermination campaign succeeds in wiping out a movement, it stops being a one-off event and becomes a method others copy. Right-wing forces in other countries, with outside backing, adopted the same approach of eliminating leftists, and the original site became a rallying cry and even a threat. A single success can spread a technique of violence across a network of countries.
A massacre teaches its targets as well as its imitators. Leftists around the world watched what happened to a huge, effective, unarmed party and drew conclusions about what it meant to stay unarmed. The violence reshaped the strategy of opponents far from where it happened.